We want our landscapes to be sublime. We want to be overwhelmed, lacking words. We want to be in awe, getting reminded of our own smallness and mortality. Unfortunately, most landscapes don’t work that way. Most landscapes do not overwhelm the senses. Mind you, there is beauty all around us, but to see that beauty we need to make a bit of a mental effort. Being Swiss, Yann Mingard might have simply aimed his camera at the Swiss Alps. But he chose not to do so. Instead, he aimed it at what places where most people wouldn’t even bother looking twice - the kind of nature that surrounds so many of us. Repaires, the book containing the results of this endeavour, shows what is to be gained from doing that. (more)
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Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood (also see the publisher’s website and my review) made it onto so many “best of 2011” lists that it was by far the most popular book last year. A body of amazing depth and sophistication, it is a shining example of what the contemporary photobook can do. There now is a second edition, and I used the occasion to talk with Christian about the book. Find the full piece here.
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It’s road-trip time yet again, this time involving photographer Rafal Milach and writer Huldar Breiðfjörð. Using Route 1, they traveled around Iceland in ten days. A photographer and a writer, a local and a guest - maybe the ideal mix for such a trip? In the Car With R, published a little while ago, contains the results of the trip. (more)
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You’ve probably noticed that the production of photobook presentations has slowed down a little bit. This is due to me being busy teaching. There’ll be more time to produce presentations once this semester is over (first week of May). My most recent videos: In This Dark Wood by Elisabeth Tonnard, Nox by Anne Carson, Cindy Sherman (Flammarion, 2006), The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey by Yaakov Israel, and The Altogether by Chris Coekin.
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The Sochi Project - makers of Sochi Singers, Safety First, and Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land - just released statistics of their first three years of crowdfunding. The findings might surprise some people - they did surprise me to some extent. (more)
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There’s a blog post by German photography magazine Photonews that I’ve meant to link to and talk about for a few weeks now. Unfortunately, there only appears to be a German language version. Photonews spoke with photobook publishers and artists about whether and/or how to make, and especially to finance a photobook. (more)
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I’m a bit over the idea of the road trip. You’re driving around, taking photographs. I get it. Not that there’s anything with a road trip per se. But to think you do a road trip to do a photo project - that’s just, let’s face it, cliche. Having said that, this doesn’t mean you can’t get something interesting out of a road trip. A good example is provided by Roberto Schena’s SP 67. It’s an unusual road trip: 13km of road, less than ten miles - how can you get something, well anything out of that? (more)
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I wrote an article on the role design plays for five recent photobooks for the British Journal of Photography, which can now be read online. Check it out!
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My headline is slight disingenuous: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making. If you asked ten people about how to make a photobook, you’d probably end up with ten different answers. That said, from what I can tell, most photobook makers seem to agree on quite a few things. So I thought I’d throw my own thoughts into the mix. I hope that some people might find them useful. Find the rest of the piece here.
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Power is an abstract term that is hard to understand outside the world of physics. Why or how do some people have power, whereas others are powerless? And who really has power? When thinking of power, the first thing that comes to mind is the government. But in this day and age, the government appears to have much less power than we think - in part as a consequence of our demands. In contrast, corporations have managed to accumulate more and more power - power that feels even more abstract than our governments’. (more)
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When making a photobook, editing and sequencing are probably the hardest tasks. How do you go about it? Here are Harvey Benge’s fundamentals. Seeing people talk about doing things on a computer in the comments - I personally advise against that. Or if you must do it on the computer, there’s the stage where you have to print things out, make your physical dummy and see. There’s a world of a difference between seeing images floating on “pages” on a computer screen and actually looking through a physical object. It’s like the difference between writing down a recipe for a cake and actually making one.
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Documenting domestic life has been a staple of contemporary photography for quite some time now. Often, but not always, the artist is related to, if not part, of the social group portrayed. A wonderful new addition to this genre is Eriko Koga’s Asakusa Zenzai. The book follows an elderly couple in their 80s, Hirata Hana and Nakamura Yoshiro, over the course of six years and portrays their daily life, a daily life where nothing much seems to happen. Life, in other words, as most people live it. (more)
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Witho Worms’ Cette Montagne C’est Moi is centered on carbon, in more ways than one. Photographing slag/coal heaps in various European countries, the photographer took actual material from each heap. He then converted what he took into his photographic materials to print the heap’s image on: “For this project I developed a variation on the carbon printing process, a photographic printing technique from the 19th century. I took a bit of coal from every mountain I photographed. I then ground this coal into a pigment that I used to make photographic paper. I used this paper to make a print of a mountain with the coal originating from that mountain. In other words, the object of the photo, the mountain, has become one with the subject of the photo, the print itself.” (quoted from the technical note of the book). How do you turn such photography into a book? (more)
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New photobook presentation from the past weeks: Asakusa Zenzai by Eriko Koga, The Table of Power 2 by Jacqueline Hassink, and The Book of Destruction by Kai Wiedenhöfer. If you want to watch them right when they appear simply subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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“Working alongside John [Gossage] was stressful, but it was also life changing. After learning so much from this master of the medium (and friend), I began the process of dismantling my career.” write Alec Soth about his contribution to The Auckland Project. The book, or rather set of books, was “a trip of departures. Gossage has been working in black and white for over 40 years, and this trip yielded one of the first bodies of work he had ever produced in color.” (quoted from the press blurb) Soth, in turn, left behind his 8x10 camera, to bring a digital one. Since I have been ignoring discussions of cameras on this blog for years now, I’ll continue doing that for this review. Instead, I want to talk about the two photographers’ approach to photography - I do believe the books offer an opportunity to do that. (more)
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The history of colour photography in the art world is very well-known. There is no need repeating it here. But history is only useful if we treat it as living, evolving history - which means we have to re-evaluate it time and time again. And occasionally, new insights, new discoveries (or re-discoveries) might force us to re-consider history. A good case in point is provided by Saul Leiter’s photographs, in particular the colour work. These photographs have slowly made their way into the public’s consciousness, and a major retrospective in Hamburg (Germany) is now forcefully making the case for a re-write of the history of colour photography in the art world. For those who cannot travel to Hamburg, there is Saul Leiter, the book produced at the occasion of the exhibition. (In the following, I am going to differentiate between the book and the photographer through the use of italics for the book title) (more)
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Jeroen Hofman must feel like one of the luckiest photographers. Much like Gregory Crewdson, for Playground he got to photograph elaborately staged sets, with many actors, situations clearly out of this world and very much part of this world - and all he had to do was to point his camera (elevated high up on a crane). The staging, the production were taken care off by other people. Not for the purpose of the pictures, but still. You get firefighters scrambling to put out fires, people in hazmat suits looking for dubious substances, soldiers invading homes for whatever reason… It’s a different dystopia than Crewdson’s, the psychological suburban discomfort replaced with a much more threatening urbanized real violence. (more)
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There’s something quintessentially American about the road trip, and about a photographer doing one, but of course you don’t actually have to be an American to do it. Add to the growing canon of road-trip photobooks Venetia Dearden’s Eight Days (there is a micro site, which is really quite micro: all you can do is order the book). The first thing I want to note about the book is that what I’ve seen online doesn’t do it any justice. Of course, that’s a big problem for photobooks in general. The actual object often is much more impressive than what you see online. You might get a good idea of this book by watching my video presentation. (more)
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New photobook presentations from the past two weeks: Being Dutch by Koos Breukel , Things Here And Things Still To Come by Jose Pedro Cortes, A New Kind of Beauty by Phillip Toledano, Cette Montagne C’est Moi by Witho Worms, and Eight Days by Venetia Dearden. The easiest and most convenient way to browse through all the videos I’ve done so far is to go to my YouTube channel. Enjoy!
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There’s a wonderful article about Japanese photobook designer Kohei Sugiura over at the ICP Library blog, talking, amongst others, about my favourite photobook The Map (Chizu) by Kikuji Kawada (my vdeo presentation is here).
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New video photobook presentations (now only YouTube links): Notes from a Quiet Life by Robert Benjamin, In The Car With R by Rafal Milach (order here - you don’t want to miss this one!), The Uncanny Familiar - Images of Terror by C|O Berlin, and Pau Wau Publications Vol. 1.
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In Sochi, every “self-respecting restaurant has a singer,” The Sochi Project’s Sochi Singers notes (I’ll try to limit the use of the word “Sochi” in the following sentences, I promise; this and all following quotes are taken from their website). The city is a tourist resort (“The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air.”), and of course restaurants have to be competitive. The level of cheerfulness that is - presumably - the intended result of the singing escapes me: “Chansons are Russian ballads, but the comparison with French chansons is only partial. The songs have their origins in the age-old Russian tradition of labour camps and prisons.” And: “nowadays the term ‘chanson’ more often refers to the saccharine genre of Russian-language dance music. It is usually accompanied by a heavy disco beat and occasionally even a dash of techno.” Labour camps to a disco beat: I don’t want to know what that sounds like. (more)
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Well, well, well. A Swedish photographer, Gerry Johansson, might have made the most poignant book about the economic distress many American cities (and regions) find themselves in: Pontiac. The book operates in the same way the setting of the movie Ghost Dog works: It looks like an American city, but it could be almost any American city. Of course, Pontiac is a real town in Michigan. You get all the vital statistics right after the book’s title page. But Johansson photographs it so that it becomes any of those American cities whose unemployment rate has quadrupled from 2000 to 2010, any of those American cities that have about a quarter of their families living below poverty level. (more)
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A fair amount of photography from what one could think of as archives is now being released. Some of that work saw the light in a different - or even the same - form before. Some has never been published. Those books always raise certain questions for me. After all, I want to be looking at photobooks for the photographs and the stories they might tell me. (more)
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Here are the photobooks I have presented in video form of so far this year: Then Again by Shirana Shahbazi, 7 Rooms by Rafal Milach, The Raw And The Cooked by Peter Bialobrzeski, Pontiac by Gerry Johansson, Guantanamo - When the Light Goes Out by Edmund Clark, Berlin nach 45 by Michael Schmidt, and Mossless Vol. 1. Remember, you only need a Google+ account to leave comments and/or discuss the books…
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The other day, I published some thoughts on photobooks, talking about numbers. Photobook publishing is a tough business because not many people buy photobooks. Or more precisely, the books we are happy to call photobooks. While editions of most photobooks tend to be small, some photobooks sell very large numbers of copies. (more)
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How do you write about a book like Dirk Braeckman? Ideally, I’d simply show you the book, in person (doing it online has its limits, after all; you can also go to the artist’s website). That’s how I came across this book. It was a recommendation by a friend, who happened to bring the book to a class we taught together. I was instantly hooked. The problem is going to be to explain why I was - and still am - hooked. (more)
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You might have noticed the flood of “best photobooks of 2011” lists last month. I’m guilty as charged, having made my own one. Marc Feustel then compiled a best of the best ranking, tallying up 50+ individual lists. While I do mind that the whole month of December is now devoted to “best of” lists I don’t mind seeing those lists at all. For me, they are a great way to see some books that I haven’t seen before. Plus, I always find it interesting to see what other people like and why. It doesn’t validate my own taste (I’m not interested in that), but it often allows me to approach something from a different angle. (more)
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For those interested in photobooks produced in Japan, Marc Feustel asked several experts to name their favourite Japanese photobooks in 2011. Check ‘em out! Speaking of Japanese photobooks, there’s a wonderful post about Ed van der Elsken and Eikoh Hosoe at the ICP Library Blog.
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Peter Bialobrzeski has been traveling across Asia (and some other countries) for many years now, taking photographs of countries in transition. The first well-known book to emerge from these travels was Neon Tigers. This new book, The Raw and the Cooked is a follow-up of sorts, another book dealing with, in the photographer’s words, “today’s rapidly burgeoning, constantly changing cities” (quoted from the book’s epilogue). (more)
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The Photobook Review, published and produced by Aperture, is the latest addition to the world of photobooks. There’s a real object - done in newsprint, and there is an electronic version for all those who don’t have access to a place carrying The Photobook Review. A photobook publisher producing a magazine about photobooks sounds like a conflict of interest. But that problem was solved easily and simply: There is a guest editor, here Jeffrey Ladd, who is in charge of each issue. The first issue of The Photobook Review is filled to the brim with great content, so if you’re interested in photobooks, here’s something you definitely want to get. Btw, Colin Pantall has some thoughts on photobooks, triggered by The Photobook Review - well worth the read.
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There’s a wonderful, sad story in the essay that comes with 7 Rooms by Rafal Milach (you can see many of the images from the book here). A couple visits Moscow, at some early stage after the end of Communism. On Arbat Street, people are selling painted nesting dolls, samovars, and old icons, but they’re also selling Komsomol membership cards, war medals, and red banners. The wife, incredulous, calls a policeman over who “explains to us bumpkins: ‘Objects from the era of totalitarianism… may be sold… We only make arrests for narcotics and pornography…’” How do you react to that, as a bumpkin? Here’s how the wife reacts to it: “What? A Party membership card for five dollars? Isn’t that pornography?” Only about one page into this essay, I was already scrambling to find where that essay was from, given I had seen a reference in the book to something else. Written (compiled) by Svetlana Alexievich, it is from Zacharovannye smertiu (Enchanted with Death), published in Moscow in 1994, which hasn’t been translated into English (there’s a German translation entitled Im Banne des Tode). (more)
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The pleasure of a truly great photobook is not limited to seeing a set of photographs put together in a way that make the medium shine, that show how so many of the usual debates about photography and its supposed shortcomings are flawed. You also get a perceptive essay or two, to go along the photography. Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood comes with writing by Karen Irvine and Luc Sante. Sante’s essay had me dread writing a review of the book, given it so wonderfully talks about the book. What is there left to say? (more)
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Concluding my photobook presentations this year: Stone By Stone by Taj Forer, Dies Lunae XI Julius MMXI by Jonathan Saunders, Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson, A Hunter by Daido Moriyama (2011 re-release), and C.E.N.S.U.R.A. by Julian Baron.
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If you really want to see more “best of 2011 photobooks,” have a look at Photo-Eye’s selection and Time Magazine’s The Photobooks We Loved. Marc Feustel updated his tallying of the lists (he went through 50+ lists!). Seeing, yet again, that there appears to be very little consensus on the books seems to point to a simple fact: The photobook market is heavily fragmented, and for many people, a lot of books are literally out of reach. It’s an interesting exercise to speculate what the “best of” lists would look like if each of the people producing one had had access to each of the books included in any list (not to mention all the books that didn’t even make it on any list).
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Marc Feustel has sifted through 17 “best of” lists to compile a unified list of the best photobooks this year. Two books were on seven of these 17 lists: Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson and A Criminal Investigation by Yukichi Watabe. So there you have them. Unless you look at sales, in which case the “best” photobook this year is Simply Beautiful Photographs National Geographic. Kudos to Marc for producing the list!
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What is there still left to say about consumerism? We all seem to agree that it is bad, that reckless consumption is the direct cause of many of our current problems, but we’re still very much engaged in it. Consumerism is what drives large parts of our economy: We don’t make things any longer, we buy them, ideally for very cheap. As such, consumerism is very abstract, though. We know what it feels like to consume, but we don’t really know what it looks like. And the images of some of the consequences of our consumerism - toxic wastelands here, or vast landfills there - are hard to connect with the shiny big-box stores where we buy our stuff. Brian Ulrich’s photographs, now published in Is This Place Great Or What, avoid tackling this gap. Instead, for the most part they focus on us, on people caught up in the act of consumption. (more)
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I already mentioned in the list of my favourite photobooks this year that I found several over the past few weeks. But for the first time I received books in the mail that I feel need to be included after the list was published. I suppose next year, I’ll wait until the end of December with my list. To fix things this year, I updated the list and added four books (adding three books I just received and one I had actually forgotten).
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Here are some other “best photobooks of 2011” lists: Claxton Projects, Sean O’Hagan (The Guardian), Alec Soth, and Marc Feustel (which has the best categories).
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We live in what feels like the golden age of the photobook. There currently is enormous interest in the medium, and one can hope there will be for a long time. At the same time, the photobook has produced another industry: Books about photobooks. Things started off slowly, with The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 deservedly becoming seminal books. Much could be said about these books - the writing is superb, while one wishes there were better spreads of the books, say. There simply is no way anyone interested in photobooks can be without owning a copy each. A few years after their publication, many other such books have now been published, typically with a geographical focus. Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present is, as far as I can tell, the latest addition to the growing canon. (more)
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Recent photobook presentations: Let’s Sit Down Before We Go by Bertien van Manen, Södrakull Frösakull by Mikael Olsson, and Dirk Braeckman (one of my favourite photobooks this year).
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Back in July I spent a brief moment thinking about the photobooks the year had produced up until that moment. I remember I was dreading the prospect of putting together a “best of” list. Somehow, it seemed the year had been off to a rather sluggish start. Regardless, the year has eleven months, with December being the “best of” month. I’m glad that I usually wait until at least the middle of December to compile my list: Many of my favourite books this year I found/discovered/bought/got over the course of the past three weeks. (more)
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If you’ve been following this website, you’re probably aware of the announcement of the first Photobook Meetup New York, an event organized by Bryan Formhals, Noah Kalina, and myself. Last Friday, the event took place. It really doesn’t take more than some enthusiasts, each bringing a book, plus some beer to have a few hours of discussions about photobooks. Given the success of the meetup, it’s certainly not going to be the last of its kind in New York.
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Much could be said about contemporary nude photography, provided we properly defined it first. The contemporary nude seems to be that sliver of work between soft- (or hard-) core pornography and whatever the kind of photography is called where a photographer (often, but not always a male) takes photographs of a naked person (a young woman) to explore the usual cliches of the nude. This is probably the lousiest definition of “contemporary nude photography” you might have come by in quite some time, but let it be good enough. Instead of worrying about definitions, it might simply be much more productive to talk about a specific artist. Let’s take Malerie Marder. (more)
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The latest photobook presentations: The Lost Album by Basil Hyman, Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar, “Na, was glaubst du denn, wohin wir marschieren?” by Jakob Gleisberg, and Watch the Weather Change by Marco van Duyvendijk.
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Sometimes, it’s good to go back to the classics to get reminded of how things can be done differently, and well. There is no shortage of contemporary photography of what we do with the land, to the land, much of it done pleasantly and occasionally decoratively. There’s nothing wrong with decorative (it helps selling prints). But of course there is the debate about whether or not we want to see ravaged landscapes photographed beautifully. We don’t (since it feels wrong, and we want the photographs to illustrate our opinions), and we do (since we love looking at beautiful landscapes). I’m tired of that debate, since however you look at it, it’s never about photography, but instead about what we expect to see: as I said, an illustration of our opinions. So it’s good to go back to the classics, and here I mean the more recent classics. (more)
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This past June, Bryan Formhals of LPV Magazine fame wrote an article about All the Photobooks I’ll Never See, which lead to an interesting Twitter conversation with me about photobook meetups. A few weeks ago, I emailed Bryan about organizing one. Since we both love the idea, we emailed ideas back and forth, and we ended up approaching Noah Kalina about hosting it at his studio. Noah agreed to doing it, so it’s on. Find all the details below. (more)
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We don’t take photography by tourists seriously, because they’re not serious about photography. We don’t take photography by tourist information centers seriously, because they’re too serious about the photography looking a certain way. In other words, tourism and photography just don’t gel. Or so the story goes. But maybe that’s wrong. How would we find out? Well, we could simply look at a lot of tourist photographs and brochures produced for tourists. Or we could grab a bunch of serious (aka non-tourist) photographers and tell them to go to the same place to take photographs. The former is simple (and not all that original any longer), the latter is more fun. In a nutshell, that is the idea behind Sight-_Seeing, for which there also is a microsite. (more)
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It’s the photographer’s nightmare: You have your luggage run through one of the x-ray security scanners at an airport, and your film gets damaged. Of course, you can always try to get your film hand inspected - provided you’re using a US airport, say, but things aren’t as easy to control when you’re in parts of the world where x-ray scanners are everywhere, and where x-ray machines might or might not date from ye olden days. This is the situation Rob Hornstra of The Sochi Project found himself in in Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya: “In the Chechen capital, these scanners are not only placed at the entrance to the airport or government buildings, but also to shops, gyms, restaurants and outside on squares.” (more)
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These are the most recent additions to my growing archive of video photobook presentations: Redwood Saw by Richard Rothman, Finders, Keepers by Rosamond Wolff Purcell & Stephen Jay Gould, The Chinese by Liu Zheng, Dream City by Anoek Steketee and Eefje Blankevoort. Needless to say, the only real experience of a photobook is to be had holding it, and going through it. If you like what you see in a video go and get the book - there is much more to explore than what you see in those five, ten minutes.
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