Let me get the following out of the way first: I find Peter Martens’ American Testimony infuriating, for a variety of reasons, some having to do with what is shown in the frames, some with how it is shown. I felt I needed to get this off my chest so it wouldn’t just sit there, like a tightly wound coil, waiting to release its energy. The photographs in the book were taken between roughly 1970 and 1990, mostly in New York, by Martens who died in 1992. The photographer had been working on compiling the book (plus another one, Few Loving Voices) up until his death.
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A few years ago, Rimaldas Viksraitis won the Discovery Award at the Arles photography festival for his work in the Lithuanian countryside, depictions of scenes that for many critics and viewers brought to mind photographers like Boris Mikhailov or Richard Billingham. With work like Viksraitis’ the topic of photography and exploitation is never that far. It’s not clear to me how useful such discussions really are, especially since they usually omit the topic whether the photographer himself is not being exploited by the larger photography art world that discovered him and then parades him and his images around. I should also add that the photo art world might want to re-visit the topic of exploitation in light of the kinds of images people - willingly - put up online. (more)
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It appears that about every ten years (give or take a few) a photobook manages to capture the imagination of large numbers of photographers, resulting in an unavoidable flurry to emulate if not imitate. Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi provided this “gold standard” of photobooks until Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood came around (pardon the hyperbole, you can use the term “marker” instead).
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The release of smaller, purely photo-centric books, has been a part of The Sochi Project for the past years now. The beauty of these smaller books is that they allow for a bit more playfulness in an otherwise often very heavy series of publications. The latest addition, Kiev, is no exception. Rob Hornstra was given a Kiev 6C medium-format SLR camera, a veritable beast of a camera, which, as it happens, I owned once myself. When they work, which often means if they work, these cameras are pretty amazing. You’ll grow a muscle or two (they’re huge and heavy), and you’ll smell Soviet industrial smells you had no idea they even existed. (more)
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Photography is such a peculiar form of art. It’s instantaneous in ways that other art forms are not. You see a photograph, and it’s right there, impressing itself immediately into your brain, into the unconscious parts first and then, after a little delay, into the conscious areas. As a result, it operates in very different ways than, say, music or video, photography’s closest cousin. Photography’s immediacy naturally leads to all kinds of assumptions about its power, many (most?) of which turn out to be wrong.
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Julia Borissova’s The Farther Shore is a recent addition to the growing number of photobooks looking at traces of the past by using archival materials (photographs and other ephemera) and original photography. As much as this has become a trend, one that I suspect we all will become a bit tired of in not too much time, in this particular case, the result is engaging and very interesting. (more)
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“More film has probably been exposed on naked and semi-naked women than on any other subject in photography’s history.” write Gerry Badger and Martin Parr in The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 (p. 226). As a matter of fact, there is a whole meta-book dedicated specifically to such photobooks, Alessandro Bertolotti’s Books of Nudes, which offers a very unique and interesting view of not just photography of the nude itself, but also - and especially - the societies it is embedded in (allowing the reader to, for example, connect the mass movements around public nudity prevalent in 1920s Germany with, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s imagery of Olympic athletes - and much more). Nadav Kander’s Bodies: 6 Women, 1 Man probably is not the latest addition to this type of photobook (there must be countless appearing every week), but a very recent one.
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At the time of this writing, a major Harry Callahan retrospective is taking place at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen. In conjunction with the show, there is a catalog, Harry Callahan. If your birthday is coming up, here is something to hint your friends or family about. Everybody else might want to take note for this year’s Christmas, or just buy the book.
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The makers of FOAM Magazine decided they would dedicate a whole issue to photobook dummies. When you buy it you don’t get a simple bound magazine. Instead, you get a folder filled with reproductions of the actual dummies, plus the magazine itself: What can I say? It’s brilliant. If you’re into photobooks you might want to order yourself a copy.
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At first, it might appear odd for me to claim that this review of Daido Moriyama’s Tales of Tono should be read alongside the one I wrote about Antonio M. Xoubanova’s Casa de Campo. Tales of Tono is vintage Moriyama - heavy black and while, Provoke style - seemingly everything that Casa de Campo is not. But I want to claim that these two bodies of work were made from if not the same then a very, very similar mental spot. If that is not obvious from the work, then it might become quite a bit clearer when the long and incredibly insightful essay is considered that Moriyama wrote for the book.
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It’s easy to forget this, but ours is a world of fairy and folk tales. We are surrounded by mysterious creatures and habits, some dating back thousands of years, others maybe ten or twenty. Christianity itself, for example, has adopted a great many of them. Easter, for example, is celebrated by colouring hard-boiled eggs, there is a bunny involved (does it lay the eggs? I was never able to figure that one out), and the Saviour has risen - not necessarily in that order, but you get the idea. That’s two out of three strange fairy/folk right there.
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You photograph what is, and when you look at photograph you see what was. There’s a dissonance right there, which can become a symbol for the abyss of time just as much as a reminder of what we humans have done to turn what was into what is. Reading the press release for Rena Effendi’s Liquid Land I failed to realize that the book would be centered on precisely that. In fact, I only figured it out going through the book.
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Our world divides into places that are public and that are private. The former includes a few that are both at the same time - they are public places, yet they’re closed off. These are the forbidden zones, areas the public - who might, on the surface, actually own them - are not allowed to enter. The term “closed city” originated in the Soviet Union (see this page), and it is still in use there, in slightly different form. Closed cities exist all over the world, places that require special permission to enter. Access can be restricted for military and/or security reasons, the latter connected to industrial activities, to the presence of refugees, or simply to the presence of people wealthy enough to be able to afford having a whole area of their own. (more)
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Mention the company name Pirelli in the context of photography, and most people (especially men) will probably think of the calendar right away. (Given this is the early 21st century, every time a new calendar is released I’m wondering what happened to the idea of the sexes being equal.) In 1989, the company hired Chris Killip to photograph, no, not naked “supermodels,” but workers in a factory. The resulting body of work was published as Pirelli Work a few years ago, one of those (many) books that I simply missed. I found it the other day, literally found it - a pile of books at a book shop.
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“In the late eighties, Dutch artist Hans Citroen meets Barbara Starzyńska, a Polish architect, and ends up visiting [her] relatives in Oświęcim, the city where his grandfather survived KZ Auschwitz.” (source) It’s coincidences like this one that often make life feel a little strange. And they certainly did get strange and then stranger when Citroen and Starzyńska started to look into the relationship between Oświęcim and Auschwitz, the latter presumably just the infamous concentration camp outside the city. (more)
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A little while ago, I asked Richard Renaldi and Seth Boyd of Charles Lane Press what it was that made some photobooks more precious than others. “Good pictures.” Boyd replied, “Just good pictures. That sounds ludicrously simplistic, but that’s all I want when I look at a book: to see amazing images.” To which Renaldi added “I also think that restraint can make a book very good as well. If someone uses restraint when editing and sequencing, I think that makes a better book.” It’s very worthwhile to keep these very important points in mind when looking at photobooks. I had to think of them while looking at Nelli Palomäki’s Breathing the Same Air.
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If you’re a conceptual photographer, chances are you’ll be either ignored or misunderstood (or both) by large segments of photoland. Take Dutch photography duo WassinkLundren (Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren). It’s probably fair to say that some reactions to their piece Empty Bottles were, well, a bit unhinged, especially given the book won an award. If you’re curious about how the work was discussed this blog post provides a good, honest starting point. If you want to see some of the less productive reactions, you’ll have to Google them yourself. (more)
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When I first heard of Tony Fouhse photographing drug addicts in the street, I thought of all the other photographers who had done that before. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with that kind of work. It’s an old discussion, which I’m very unlikely to resolve in any which way, but I’ll have a go at it anyway.
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Newspapers, the actual objects, are strange things: Just like fashion, they can be tremendously important today. And just like fashion, today’s news will be discarded tomorrow, to be replaced with something new. Something newer. Unlike fashion, however, the news actually matter, so the comparison ends right there. (more)
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One of the defining features of the North Caucasus is the bewildering number of ethnic groups living and often fighting there (see this map of ethnolinguistic groups). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the pressure cooker’s lid has finally completely come off, with new nations and/or territories emerging, some of them internationally recognized, many others not. As a matter of fact, the sheer number of wars and mini-wars that have engulfed parts of the North Caucasus over the past twenty years make the Balkan look tame in comparison. Imagine something like the Kosovo conflict in more than one place, with new mini-states immediately fracturing up into multiple parts, and you get an idea of the problem.
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“Holding on so tightly to what I believed was sanity while consumed by fear of depression and schizophrenia prevented me from being fully present to her reality.” writes Joshua Lutz in the introduction of Hesitating Beauty, a book in which the artist comes to terms with his mother’s mental illness. Mental illness is the final frontier that cannot be crossed willingly. Comprehension is not to be had, as hard as one might try. There literally is nothing there to understand. The rules that govern our lives cease to exist, or at least are bent so much out of shape that they don’t make sense any longer, at least in our world.
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“The notions of body, space and landscape have had a large influence on Brazilian popular culture and artistic production since the last century.” writes Benoit Sindt, a French architect, in the short essay in the back of Luís Díaz Díaz’s A casa do Oscar. Oscar as in Oscar Niemeyer, the famed Brazilian architect who died a short while ago. The book connects these aspects using two sets of photographs, black-and-white images taken on a beach and color photographs of one of Niemeyer’s buildings. The architectural images can be found inside gatefolds. In that way, the pictures are being kept apart - look casually, and the book appears only to contain the beach photographs; yet they are clearly part of the same book, different angles of looking at the idea of “body, space and landscape” in Brazil. With the beach imagery being the stereotypical idea of Brazil, “hiding away” the architectural photographs mimics how the country’s cultural treasures are equally hidden away underneath the surface of bikini bodies on the beaches. (more)
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There is no shortage of books about photobooks, with new new additions appearing regularly. In a sense, these books have become real-world versions of Tumblr pages, where you can find collections of things under some a sometimes broad, sometimes specific headline. The collector side of me enjoys seeing all these books (I own a fair number of them), but in reality I don’t really look at most of those books all that much. I might pull one out to look something up for teaching. Just to make this clear, I don’t mean to make it sound as if I minded having those books. Quite on the contrary.
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In 2008, photographer Walter Niedermayr was invited by two wealthy art patrons to Aspen, a commission to produce work for the Little Nell Hotel. In an obvious way the ski resort in Colorado and the artist seemed like the perfect match, and they were. Niedermayr had previously photographed mountains and snow, with skiers added. The commission expanded into a series, and it has now become available as a photobook, The Aspen Series.
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When I heard about Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room I had high(ish) hopes. The idea that a writer like Dyer would explore the zone, the idea of the zone, appealed to me. It was not to be had, though, at least not in the form I had hoped for. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the lives of books (meaning: of writers) are independent of our will. As is the zone itself, which, by the way, we must not think of as the zone you can be in (as in the expression “to be in the zone”).
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There is a TV show called America’s Test Kitchen, which I like to think of as a cooking show done by minor bureaucrats. Cooking, the preparation of dishes, usually involves an element of chance, a “splash of salt,” possibly, and something cooking for, let’s say, ten to fifteen minutes. America’s Test Kitchen are having none of that. Everything is supposed to be the absolute best (even in the face of shortcuts that would leave many other serious chefs aghast), with rules being followed extremely strictly and equally joylessly. Cooking a meal is treated like the equivalent of filing a convoluted tax return. I can’t pretend to be a food connoisseur, but I’m fairly confident I’d turn down the chance to sample any of the stuff prepared on that show: Food, after all, is not just a collection of calories that goes into my body. It is much more. If the preparation of food is so joyless, how can the resulting food be any good?
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Every four years, the not-so-fortunate-ones appear in the media, as the Democratic candidate for the US presidency tries to rally supporters. The not-so-fortunate-ones are supposed to vote Democratic, and often they do. Last time around, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a quintessential plutocrat if there ever was one, was revealed as describing the not-so-fortunate-ones voting Democratic as moochers, lazy people who love to live from government handouts.
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Now that Academic Photography (“New Formalism”) - photography obsessed with its own navel, investigating its own process - has become so popular, seemingly, at least for some critics, pointing the way towards the medium’s future, we could have a nice re-iteration of the debate about beauty and photography. I have a hunch: This type of photography is here to stay, given it’s so appealing to academics. But for the rest of us it might soon evoke the same reactions we have when seeing, for example, wallpaper from the 1970s: Kind of cool, yet also very clearly dated and passe. There we’re right in the messiness of talking about beauty today, in this still early 21st Century, because we’ve seen it all, and we’re all so ironic. In a nutshell, we’re more concerned about saying the right, proper things than addressing the issue(s).
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Photobooks are typically produced in very small numbers, hundreds, maybe thousands. There are kinds of reasons behind this, catering to a small group of insider collectors usually not being one (This is just one of the various photoland conspiracy theories). Successful (“critically acclaimed”) and/or influential photobooks usually end up being sold out. As a consequence, these books are not easily available to someone interested in seeing one - unless there’s access to a library (private or public) that carries a copy. Just as an example, Cristina De Middel’s Afronauts, which ended up on a large number of “best of 2012” lists, was sold out before those lists were even published.
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Last year, I taught an undergraduate-level history at photography class. Having never done that before, the first challenge was to pick a book to work off. As far as I could tell, there were two books most commonly used at US art schools and universities. I owned an older version of one, which I wasn’t so excited about. So when someone loaned me the updated version of the other one I had a peek and thought it looked a bit better. That was a big mistake.
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It would be so easy to make fun of the architectural idea of brutalism, the idea that creating mostly fortress-like buildings out of massive amounts of uncovered concrete is a good idea. It’s clearly not. Even ignoring the fact that the buildings are at best eye sores, they also crush the spirits of those who for whatever reason have to dwell inside them. Brutalism derives from the French term béton brut, or “raw concrete” (Le Corbusier), but most people seem to think it is derived from “brutal.” Find yourself in front of, say, Boston’s city hall, and you know what I mean1.
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“The pictures from Ahrenshoop,” writes Thomas Sandberg, “show a place that no longer exists. At the same time the pictures […] encapsulate memories of my childhood and youth in East Germany.” Compiled into the self-published Erinnerung an Ahrenshoop (“Memories of Ahrenshoop” - the book is bilingual German/English; order via the photographer’s website), the photographs give a sense of a certain time and space that ends up embedded into that vastly larger time and space, where what we see is just fleeting, not to be held onto (not even with pictures, try as we might) - a meditation on longing. At the same time, the book can serve as a reminder that East Germany was something else - not that horrible communist dictatorship and also not that paradise where things would get taken care of. Places last forever, our ideas of them don’t. Photographs, when done well, manage to show a bit of both. (more)
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There is the idea of the unspeakable, the idea that “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence” (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Photographers usually are particularly interested in the idea of that, which we cannot speak of1. Whether it actually exists - Wittgenstein’s dictum notwithstanding - is questionable. But the idea that photography can somehow (magically?) express things that language is unable to offers solace to those struggling with words (most photographers actually).
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Having previously tackled the topic of “city” before, members of German photography agency Ostkreuz decided to turn their attention to borders, literal and metaphorical ones: Über Grenzen/On Borders. Seventeen photographers went out to explore the concept, ranging from the very personal to what one might consider the standard photodocumentarian approach. Border are what separate us, borders are what we can consider transcending (the German “über Grenzen” actually has two meanings: “on borders” and “across borders”). Consider. (more)
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A married businessman has an affair with a married woman, his secretary. She is in her early twenties, he is approaching forty. In principle, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about this. As it turns out, things appear to be a ménage à quatre with two non-participating partners, since the man’s wife knows of the affair (he has to make his wife apologize to his lover, who had been called a floozy and now threatens to withhold further sex), and the woman’s husband might or might not be aware of what’s going on. We know all of this because the man decides to document their affair, taking photographs and collecting material, such as restaurant menus, train tickets, hotel bills, some of her hair (pubic and otherwise), some of her nail clippings, even a scab from her wrist. On top of that, the man writes a diary, using a typewriter, chronicling events: When and where they go and/or meet, the various photographs taken, their love making, and more. Decades later, the material is found in a black suitcase, sold at an estate sale, somewhere in Cologne (Germany).
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It’s the end of another year, one that - at least for me - by far surpassed the previous one in terms of photobook making. This year, I found it much easier to pick my favourite photobooks. In fact I picked so many that it’s anything but a “top ten”. In alphabetical order, here they are.
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Helena Schätzle has made the book that previous generations of German photographers were unwilling or unable to deal with: Confronting the country’s past, Nazi Germany’s genocidal war. Of course, there is no way a single book, by a single artist, could possibly deal with the every facet of the horror World War 2 inflicted upon Europe, and especially upon, to use a term coined by historian Timothy Snyder, the Bloodlands. But 9645 Kilometer Erinnerung covers a whole lot (the German title notwithstanding, the book contains text both in German and English; you can order the book via your friendly online retailer - Americans might have to use the .co.uk variant).
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What is there left to say about film photography? I suppose nothing really. At the time of this writing, it is not quite dead, yet, and it might never fully die. But with consumers having abandoned film for the convenience of digital photography, film photography has become a small niche, and that’s just the way it is. The only real question might be whether colour film will survive or not (black and white appears safe in the hands of a small number of very dedicated producers), and that’s mostly a question for that small number of photographers who still use it (me included). (more)
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Winter is upon us, yet again, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. This means “the holidays” (incl. Listmas, if you spend too much time online), and then the long wait for spring, as if winter itself had nothing to offer. It would seem it doesn’t. People would rather pretend they’re enjoying themselves in sweltering summer heat instead of going for a walk in the winter. I don’t know why that is. I will admit that I enjoy the seasons, and I am actually fairly suspicious of places where there are none. The seasons are life, or maybe more accurately the circle of life we’re all subject to - whether we like it or not. Dismissing or rejecting the seasons means dismissing or rejecting life, and clinging to a surreal fantasy (it’s no coincidence Hollywood is in a place that doesn’t know actual seasons). After all, winter, our winter, is going to get us all, eventually.
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“In preparing the work,” writes Mikhael Subotzky at the beginning of Retinal Shift1, “I went through every photograph I had ever taken, and chose those where the process of looking, or being looked back at, was resonant.” Added to those were then scanned portraits from Who’s Who of Southern Africa, stills (plus text) from various videos, plus images taken from the photographer’s home, shot through the window with the camera’s shutter button depressed as long as the machine would take photographs. The resulting collection of images makes for a compelling, yet maybe slightly lengthy experience. (more)
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I got a book in the mail, a brick of a book really, which says “Deutschland / Gerry Johansson” on the spine, and it has two images on its cover, front and back1. The photograph on the cover, which you can see above, features a rather nondescript house that has what looks like a large cross lying on its side attached to it. When I’m writing that the cross is lying on its side, which in actuality it isn’t - it’s just as straight as the house, I’m referencing the Christian tradition of seeing a cross as something where the supporting beam is longer and the cross beam. Does this matter? I’m not sure. The photograph on the back features another house, just as nondescript as the one on the front, with one of those little electrical compartments so frequently found in Germany to the right of its entrance2. Just above said electrical compartment3 a large pretzel was painted, indicating a bakery might be nearby4.
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What do we know about people? Not much. We might go to the post office, say, but we might never know (and how could we?) that the friendly clerk behind the counter is a barely functioning individual who lives in a cluttered, small room in his parents’ house, leaving it only to go to work. That friendly, slightly nosy man next door might be a tyrant at home, caught up in a decade-long power struggle with his passive-aggressive wife. Family secrets are family secrets, and what happens behind the closed doors of people’s homes usually stays there (even the stuff people post on Facebook usually has not much, if anything, to do with their actual lives).
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One of the best things about photography is that 99.99% of all photographers refuse to understand what photo theorists (and that remaining 0.01%: professional photographers) tell them. Photography is supposed to be dead or over, in any case in a bad state, and nobody believes photographs any longer. We all mistrust images. The only problem is that the 99.99% have somehow not received the memo yet: They continue taking photographs as if there were no problem, as if photography worked just fine, did its purpose just fine! How is this possible?
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It is no secret that vernacular photography has moved center stage. To a large extent, this is probably due to simple nostalgia, the longing for the better times in the past that, in reality, never existed that way (a similar argument can be made to in part account for the popularity of Instagram filters, which now have even crept into photojournalism). But beyond that, there is the fact that vernacular photography shows you a world you did not have access to: The private lives of ordinary people (if I ran for office in the US I’d use “regular folks”). This is most interesting. While vernacular snapshots are becoming ever more popular, on Facebook people are now willingly sharing their formerly private photographs. To be more precise: A usually sometimes more, sometimes less carefully edited selection of those photographs. The age of narcissism has spawned the parallel age of voyeurism.
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One of my favourite Neil Young albums is the 1975 Zuma, which features, amongst other gems, a song entitled Lookin’ For A Love. It’s a quintessential Neil Young song if there ever was one: Who else could possibly get away with writing something that’s so far north of being sappy, without being offensive to one’s sensibilities? This might be a hard concept to grasp for today’s younger generation, who are so used to everything being ironic (or fake ironic) that the idea of something being sappy without the escape mechanism added must seem… I don’t know. How do you react to the world if all you know (and cling to) is irony?
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AM Projects is a fairly new multi-national group of photographers, comprising members Aaron McElroy, Daisuke Yokota, Ester Vonplon, Gert Jochems, Olivier Pin-Fat and Tiane Doan Na Champassak. Set up as a “likeminded group,” one of the goals is to produce jointly curated publication. When I first heard about this I was intrigued and, I admit, somewhat skeptical. How do you go about producing a group publication that not is just that, a mishmash of stuff, but instead something that holds together as a whole? The (first) answer was just provided in the form of Nocturnes.
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Paul Bogaers’ Upset Down might well be one of the most unusual photobooks I own. The book doesn’t really have a front and back. Or rather you can look at it from whatever you take as your front to the back, and then you can turn it over and look at it, again, from the new front to the back. The way this works, as you can imagine, is simple: Each spread shows two images. The one on the right-hand side has the ‘correct’ orientation, the one on the other side is upside down. Needless to say, constructing a photobook that way would be an entirely pointless exercise if one were required to only look at the right-hand side. One isn’t. Instead, each spread (the vast majority of them anyway) works on its own, regardless whether you look at it… well, what is the correct up and down here?
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In 1975, Rag Theater (The 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue) by Nacio Jan Brown was published. On the website, people who were present on the scene forty years ago are invited to post their recollection. In a letter accompanying the book the photographer wrote “The scene reminds me of the first lines of Dickens’ ‘Tales of Two Cities’: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’. The posts reflect this.” For those interested in the book, copies are newly available (contact the photographer) - it’s not a reprint, it’s the original edition (many copies of the books have been safely stored for decades). (more)
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At some stage over the past two years or so, something happened to photobook making. Things seem to have become considerably more complex, resulting in a flurry of books that have moved way beyond the simple gallery-show-on-paper format. Photographers started to mix colour with black and white, say, or combined seemingly different types of images; images started to move across the spreads - and nobody felt compelled to talk about it. Instead, the medium itself (meaning its makers and viewers) seems to have just leapt to a more complex level, with seemingly endless possibilities opening up. Another case in point is provided by Patrick Hogan’s (self-published) Still (which you can order directly from the artist).
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Vernacular photography has firmly established itself as a part of our photographic world. Artists, collectors, and curators (myself included) have been combing flea markets or Ebay for such photographs. Vernacular photographs are everywhere, albeit for the most part in a completely unorganized state, an album here, a stack of photographs there - unless they have become part of a collection. Melissa Catanese was given access to such a collection, thousands of photographs amassed by Peter Cohen (depending on the source, there are 20,000+ or 35,000 images in Cohen’s collection), resulting in Dive Dark Dream Slow.
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