A good photobook acts very much like a vortex. It sucks you in, twirling you around, mis- and then re-orienting you, leaving you dizzy, a bit bewildered, and excited (A bad photobook just sucks). Richard Rothman’s Redwood Saw is such a vortex. (more)
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South Africa’s recent history is one of those wonderful stories. Apartheid was finally dismantled in the 1990s, and a new country, with everybody having the same rights and the same freedom, was born. At least on paper. The reality is not quite as rosy. Here is the OECD reporting on the situation: “South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racial groups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African and Coloured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements in non-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over the entire post-Apartheid period up to 2008.” There’s more: “In the third quarter of 2010, 29.80% of blacks were officially unemployed, compared with 22.30% of coloureds, 8.60 of Asians and 5.10% of whites.” (source, with further reference therein) (more)
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New photobook presentations from the past two weeks: Houseplants (Better Homes & Gardens 1959), The Works of Nobuyoshi Araki 6 - Tokyo Novel, Der Rote Bulli, Safety First by The Sochi Project.
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In case you’re getting snowed in (like yours truly) or even if not: Matt Johnston from the Photo Book Club talks about this book project, as well as tackling the question: ‘What is to become of books?’.
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There’s something toxic about television once you want to write about it. It’s almost as if the medium’s shallowness immediately rubs off. You start writing about it, and you almost inevitably produce trite stereotypes or cliches, mirroring most of what you see on TV (pointing that out of course is a stereotype!). I’ve had Simone Lueck’s Cuba TV in my “to review” pile of books for months now, and every time I wanted to get to it the thought of writing about TV gave me the chills. Oh and Cuba, that photographic stereotype of a place. How do you even write about that? Escapes me! (more)
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New photobook presentations done over the past two weeks: Meat Cook Book (Home and Garden, 1959 and 1969 editions), A Head With Wings by Anouk Kruithof, Mona Lisas of the Suburbs by Ute & Werner Mahler.
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We have become more aware of what we eat, as knowledge of the consequences of a bad diet (heart problems, diabetes, etc.) has become more widely known. Knowing what to eat - and what to avoid - often goes hand in hand with trying to find out where and how what we eat (or use to prepare our food) is being produced. Amazingly enough, I only know of very little photography about this aspect of our lives. Obesity and/or consumption are obvious targets for photographers, but many (most?) other aspects of our food chain are not very often to be found in photographs. (more)
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It’s an old question: How do images work with text? According to what we could call photobook orthodoxy, interestingly enough established after photobooks had been very lively affairs (see Parr/Badger - The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1), there has got to be no text alongside photographs other than a page number and (maybe) the title. When well done, such books work well, but it is also rather obvious that it is pressing many photographic bodies into a formalistic straight jacket that ultimately diminishes what could be had. (more)
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“The roots of Hallowe’en,” the historical note at the end of Haunted Air informs us, “lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, or ‘Summer’s End’, a feast to mark the gathering of the harvest, the death of the old year and the birth of the new. Ancestors were remembered, cattle, sheep and pigs were slaughtered and the carcasses burned on huge hillside bonfires (‘bone fires’) in rites of purification and appeasement.” That sounds like a jolly good time, but there was more: “It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. […] Spells of binding and protection were chanted, grotesque skull-faces were carved into turnips, lit with embers or candles and hung from trees or nailed over doorways to ward off malicious revenants.” (more)
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Rob Haggart published a post today with the question Why Does Everyone Think They Need a Photo Book? Since I have been dealing with photobooks in all kinds of capacities (I review photobooks on this website, publish them, teaching classes about them, even remix them, collect them [of course!], etc.) I thought I’d offer my two cents. (more)
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My friend Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann has a new book out, entitled Zapallal | Yurinaki (in North America it’s being sold via photo-eye, in Europe it is being distributed by Kominek). Photographed and produced in Peru, Zapallal | Yurinaki centers on two communities in the country that are struggling with poverty. If you want to see more of the book check out my photobook presentation.
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Given I published posts on What makes a great portrait? (part 2) and What makes a great photo? the next logical step would be to ask “What makes a great artist?” Maybe I’ll simply kick this off by giving my own answer. When I think about photographers (often when being prodded to name photographers I admire) I tend to come back to those who are less defined by that one masterly body of work and more by a living, complex set of bodies of work. This is not because I dislike great, masterly bodies of work - quite on the contrary. There are all kinds of problems associated with that: How do you follow up on something like that? And, inevitably, there’s always the comparison with that one famous book (let’s assume there’s a book), which, I assume, must be just crippling for an artist: How do you deal with that? (I’ve always wanted to ask that question, but I’ve always been too afraid of poking at exactly the sorest possible spot). But for me, there’s even more to the great artist than just that. (more)
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New photobook presentations produced over the past couple of weeks: Zapallal | Yurinaki by Andres Marroquin Winkelmann, Hans-Christian Schink, Tokyo Portraits by Hiroh Kikai, and Alles in Ordnung by Andreas Meichsner. Enjoy!
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It doesn’t happen very often that the first and only thing that really bothers me about a photobook is its cover. But that’s the case with Riley and His Story: Me and My Outrage, You and Us by Monica Haller. You can visit the dedicated microsite and see/decide for yourself. It’s not even that I mind text on the cover. But not this text, on the cover of this book. It’s too bad since the rest of the book is so amazing. In fact, it’s a book that deserves to be seen more widely. (more)
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For those who haven’t seen them, here are the photobook presentations I produced these past two weeks: Landschaft, Waffenruhe, Selbst, Menschenbilder by Michael Schmidt, Joachim Schmid Photoworks 1982-2007, Picture Cook Book (1958) (yes, that is an old cookbook, but you really want to look at it), and three independently produced photobooks, the latter two a first, trying to break out of only presenting books by dedicated/mainstream photobook publishers.
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Hardly a day goes by without the concern being voiced that there are too many photographs in the world. Earlier this year, I wrote about 60 billion photos on Facebook alone (it must be more by now, but does the number really matter any longer?). I personally don’t think there are too many photos in the world. This is probably because I don’t even know what my benchmark would be. I know what happens when I drink too much coffee or alcohol or eat too much candy, but I yet have to notice any problems when looking at large numbers of photographs. But still. If we get back to the complaint about all those photographs, the first thing we might want to realize is that Joachim Schmid talked about too many photographs in the world before Facebook was born. In 1989, he said “No new photographs until the old ones have been used up!” (quoted from the book I’m going to review here) (more)
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Lots of independently produced books/zines waiting to be bought - definitely worth checking out!
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These are the photobook presentations I produced over the past couple of weeks: Photo Opportunities by Corinne Vionnet, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mother by Katharina Bosse, Berlin by Mitch Epstein, and Baghdad Calling by Geert van Kesteren.
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I’m happy to announce a new book by Meier & Müller, the photobook publishing house I’m part of: Monalisen der Vorstädte (“Mona Lisas of the Suburbs”), a project by Ute and Werner Mahler. It’s their first collaborative project and a gem of a book for anyone interested in portraiture. The book is now on sale in Europe, at the time of this writing the copies for the US market are in transit (US sales should start at the end of this month - I’ll make an announcement).
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I have long been thinking about the art of the remix and about seeing it applied to photography. But how would remixing a photobook actually work? I had to figure it out this Summer when a friend of mine, Bruce Haley, sent me his latest book, Sunder, to have it remixed. Find the details here.
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Many (most?) touristic activities are cultural compulsions. You do certain thing because that’s what one does when going to wherever it might be you went, not necessarily because you want to. Or maybe you think you want to. After all, wouldn’t it be great to go to New York City and see Times Square? Actually, can you even go to New York and not go to Times Square? What will your friends and neighbours say if you tell them you didn’t go? Everybody goes to Times Square! Of course, part of the ritual is to take a photograph. After all, you need proof that you were there. Or maybe proof isn’t the right word. In any case, the activity of going to Time Square inevitably involves taking a photo - and the same is true for all other such locations, whether it’s the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin or whatever else. (more)
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If you have ever been to Berlin you know about the city’s strange allure: It is inevitable that you know many things about it, things that you wouldn’t know about any other city. So you travel there filled with excitement and some apprehension maybe. Once you’re there the contemporary city, a charming mix of buildings and people, seemingly thrown together at random, with no real planning behind it, will overwhelm your senses. (more)
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There are different approaches to Roman Bezjak’s Socialist Modernism. One can focus on the truly outrageous (here is an example) and then come to all kinds of conclusions about Socialism. Or one can focus on that which looks not quite so different from what you might find next door (many West German cities did - and still do - in fact look like this, and this building immediately reminded me a little bit of Boston City Hall) and wonder what is to be learned from that. (more)
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This week’s photobook presentations: Hiroshima by Ishiuchi Miyako, Riley and His Story by Monica Haller, Photographs by Fred Herzog, South Central by Mark Steinmetz, and Surfaces, Depths by Thomas Ruff.
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What is the appeal of the Polaroid photograph? The more you think about it, the more it becomes obvious that its appeal derives from what you could call its aura: We treasure these photographs not for what they are, but for what we make of them. Polaroid photographs are one-of-a-kind (let’s ignore those processes where there is a negative), and they typically are not very good photographs in a strictly technical sense: The colours tend to be off, they’re often slightly hazy, and many of them suffer from the various artifacts that can happen when the image doesn’t develop properly. But all of these properties, which most of us would happily reject for other types of photography (excluding, perhaps, those few artists who work with artifacts), for a Polaroid are taken as genuine strengths. (more)
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It’s my last week of teaching, next week this blog will resume its regular programming with articles and book reviews. Meanwhile, there are new photobook presentations for you to watch (if you haven’t seen them already), they are: Photobook Award 2011 (the Kassel catalogue), Naked City by Weegee, Good Luck by Christine Otten and Erik Kessels, One to Nothing by Irina Rozovsky, and Nothing Personal by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. Note these links all go to my Google+ page, but you don’t have to have a Google+ account to watch. If you want to stay away from Google+, everything is also easily accessible via my YouTube channel.
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Since I’m busy teaching this (and next) week, there’ll be no photobook review. However, there are some new photobook presentations to watch (if you haven’t seen them already). They are: Sweet Nothings by Vanessa Winship, Models by Michael Schäfer, and Come Bury Me by Andrej Krementschouk.
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There is an amusement park in Iraq called Dream City. There also is one in Rwanda, Bambino Super City. Turkmenistan has one, too: Turkmenbashi’s World of Fairy Tales. This is where being a photographer is considerably simpler than being a writer, because how do you, can you possibly react to all that in a world that loves nothing more than an unbiased view that, ideally, allows all possible readings? Well, good writers (not that I’m one) know what to do: They just ignore what people want and give their view no matter what. That is, after all, good writing. Bad writing, however, is starting a review of a book featuring amusement/theme parks all over the world by talking about good writing. So let’s talk about good photography instead, which, as it turns out, is easy since there’s quite a bit in Dream City by Anoek Steketee and Eefje Blankevoort (text). (more)
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Just like last week, I added photobook presentations to my Google+ account (as part of my ongoing experiment whether actual contents and social networking can be made to work together well or not - the jury is still out). They are: Another Africa by Robert Lyons, Wolfram Hahn - C/O Talents series, Philosophers (the 1995 book) by Steve Pyke, Beyond the Forest by Clare Richardson, The Last Days of Shishmaref by Dana Lixenberg, and The Map by Kikuji Kawada. If you don’t want to deal with Google+ you can watch all of these also on my YouTube channel. Enjoy!
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Maybe I haven’t looked at enough of them, but photobooks that present a collection often are tedious (and, let’s face it, gratuitous) affairs. Someone or some group owns all these photographs, and that might or might not tell us something about the world of photography or about the ideas behind the collection. Much to my surprise - and delight - Street Life and Home Stories: Photographs from the Goetz Collection clearly sets itself apart from those kinds of books. (more)
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This week, I produced more photobook presentations and added them to my Google+ account. They are: Please Buy My New Song by Jindrich Marco, Jugend by Albrecht Tübke, I Protest! by David Douglas Duncan, and Man and Woman by Eikoh Hosoe. You do not need a Google+ account to be able to watch them, to contribute to the discussion, however, you’d need one. Update: Just added Moll 31 by Wiebke Loeper
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How do you portray places that you have no access to because they will not allow you in? When thinking about such places, most people would probably think of, let’s say, power plants or military installations. But there are other such places. I’m thinking of cafes or clubs for men only. I once came across one in Italy. I had heard of such cafes before, but I had never seen them in Germany. Actually, I thought they didn’t exist in Germany, but they do, in areas with, for example, a large Turkish population. Berlin features a lot of them, right in the neighbourhood Loredana Nemes lives in. Asks Nemes “Why did the men hide behind opaque glass or curtains, and who are they hiding from? And where were their wives?” Her solution to find out was simple: Get a large-format camera out and set it up right outside. Then see what happens. (more)
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You’ve probably heard, now there’s Google+ (G+), yet another addition to the growing number of social-networking sites. I am under the impression that a lot of people like G+ because they dislike Facebook so much. That aside, for me as the person behind Conscientious those sites are only interesting if there is a good way to integrate the social-networking bits with providing actual contents. So I just started a little experiment over at G+, which you can access here (watch it in HD). I’ve done videos like this one before, and I’ll probably continue doing them.
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It is no secret that I am very interested in artists who expand the medium “the photobook.” There is a lot of talk about “ebooks” now, but it seems way too early to tell where this is going. We’ve just made it past the wave of the first ephotobooks, and I’m not sure whether what we’re offered right now is what the ephotobook will eventually gel into. In retrospect, the video-game “Pong” offered a lot of promise, but I think we can all agree that while it’s still very cool to see, it doesn’t really tell us all that much where the genre “video game” went (it’s a curious - and sad - path from the geeky primitive paddle game to today’s ultra-violent “ego shooter” games). What is more, while I do appreciate the push towards the “e,” I do think that the photobook itself still can be developed further in all kinds of interesting ways. We’ve witnessed a lot of those over the past few years, as, to give just one obvious example, designers in the Netherlands have shown the world that a photobook can be quite a bit more than just a bunch of photos on paper. (more)
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I’m sometimes glad that I don’t have to make certain decisions. Jörn Vanhöfen’s Aftermath is a good example: Which image to put on the cover? Deciding about the cover image is always tricky, but I think it’s especially tricky in this case. The title is Aftermath, there are piles of old tires and a broken down truck on the cover - it’s gotta be, well, “ruin porn,” right? Wrong. (more)
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When I was seventeen years old, during my penultimate year of high school, I had to decide about which of the two trips organized by the school I wanted to pick. The tradition had been to offer either London or Paris. Much to my chagrin, when it was my turn - finally a chance to go abroad! - that tradition had been discontinued. Instead, I had the option to either go to Nuremberg or to Potsdam/Dresden. Nuremberg, I reckoned, would basically amount to a week of heavy drinking (the teacher in charge had a certain reputation). It’s not that I minded having a good time. But Potsdam/Dresden - that was basically abroad. Really abroad. OK, people there spoke the same language (give or take a few incredibly weird dialects), but it was beyond what people called the Iron Curtain. As a child, I had seen it with my own eyes: It didn’t look much like a curtain, but there certainly was a lot of iron - and explosives - involved. Potsdam/Dresden it was. (more)
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There is the official story of German photography, which comprises the usual suspects (Sander, the Bechers, Gursky, …). No need to repeat it here. There are a few things that are very interesting about that story. First of all, it’s woefully incomplete. But that’s not so interesting (it’s actually more propaganda than anything). But second, there is the fact that most of those usual suspects might be German photographers, but their work is not necessarily quintessentially German. Maybe their approach to work is (here we are again in the not-so-interesting territory), but the work itself isn’t. Andreas Gursky basically has become the inofficial photographer of globalization (sans its ugly underbelly). The Bechers documented industrial structures in many different countries. August Sander aimed at producing a truthful portraits of the Germans. But I’m happy to argue that the reason why so many people love that work is because it actually is more about the human condition than anything. And as I’ve argued before, most German photographers after the war (excluding the younger generation which has not yet been canonized) have been extremely careful to avoid dealing with German history. Which brings me to Michael Schmidt (also see this page). (more)
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There other day, there was an article over at La Pura Vida about All the Photobooks I’ll Never See. Writes Bryan: “It’s really amazing that so many people can produce them these days, but who the hell is actually looking at all of them? And is it possible to create a distribution system that enables more people to see more photobooks?” This had me thinking. What if the distribution wasn’t really a problem if you wanted to see photobooks? (more)
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How many collaborations between a photography and a painter do you know? These days, it’s much easier to think of a painter and a photographer meeting in court, over some copyright infringement. But a photographer taking a painter’s work as inspiration, and the same painter taking the photographer’s work as inspiration - there’s not so much of that, sadly. But there is at least one such collaboration, between Joachim Brohm and Heribert Ottersbach. (more)
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How does one go about photographing, portraying a city? How does one go about photographing, portraying the city one was born in? How does one go about photographing, portraying the city one was born in but hasn’t lived in recently? With each new layer, things get more complex - as if photography wasn’t difficult enough! In the case of Dana Lixenberg, that city is Amsterdam, and we certainly know a thing or two about that place, don’t we? The canals, the red-light district, the relatively relaxed attitude about recreational drugs… In a nutshell, our view of Amsterdam is the postcard view. But what is the non-postcard view? (more)
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Twenty-five years ago, in what was then the Soviet Union (now: Ukraine) the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing massive amounts of radiation into the environment and leaving large areas contaminated. At first, the news leaked rather slowly to the West where the nuclear industry, along with politicians, were quick to point out that an accident like that could not happen with their reactors. Earlier this year, as a consequence of a massive earthquake and the resulting tsunami, four Japanese power plants suffered from a catastrophic core meltdown. The full extent of the damage at the Japanese plants is still unknown. But the daily news updates indicate rather serious problems at at least one of the reactors whose containment vessel (which is intended to keep the highly radioactive material away from the environment) seems have ruptured. There are three chilling similarities between Chernobyl and Fukushima: First, the operators of the plants have been very unwilling to inform the public about the extent of the damage. Second, in both cases a large area of land now seems heavily contaminated with radioactivity. Third, the nuclear industry’s mantra is “It can’t happen here.” I’m writing this review less than forty miles (downstream) from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, a reactor whose design matches the Fukushima ones. (more)
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Once you’ve left you can never go home again. Going back you’ll realize that what you think should feel like home doesn’t. What you think you should be familiar with feels vague, if not outright strange. Inevitably, once enough time has passed, there will be a new home, a new sense of familiarity, even though it might never match what you had, or rather: what you think you had. Which, if you’re honest, really means: What you wish you had. Because maybe what you see when you go to the place you used to call home is what was always there, as disappointing as it might be. (more)
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There’s an ongoing debate about how much text you need alongside photography, with the spectrum ranging from those who say that photography should speak for itself, whereas others prefer to see a statement. This is not necessarily the most exciting debate to begin with (it’s rather old, too - even though the age of a debate does not say anything per se about its actual merit). Occasionally I find myself asking that question when I find some work without any text, and I wish there was some. As far as I can tell, whether or not some photography needs text or not does not depend on one’s preferences, but for the most part on the photography itself. In the case of photobooks, there typically is less of a debate, since most photobooks come with the obligatory essay (which people then might or might not read). (more)
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Very crudely speaking, the zine often lives at the intersection of artist books and photobooks produced by commercial publishers: From the former the zine takes the fact that it’s put together by one person, the artist, from the latter it takes the mass production. There is one aspect that makes most zines differ from artist books or commercial photobooks: Zines tend to be lo-fi affairs in terms of their production. To produce a zine you care about the making in ways that, at least superficially, is the opposite of what you’d expect from artist or commercial books. Of course, this description is rather simplistic, but you get the idea. If you’ve ever visited The Independent Photobook Blog you will be familiar with photozines - those tend to be flying underneath the radar of the photobook publishing world. (more)
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Why would anyone walk around and take photographs in the streets of Vancouver? Here is Fred Herzog’s answer: “After about a year of shooting I increasingly felt, ‘somebody has to do this.’ Because otherwise people in the future would only be able to go to People magazine or Look or Time or Life or any of those to see how people looked at the time.” This is a remarkable statement, placing the photographer and his work into the documentary realm. What I most like about the statement is the photographer’s ambition, however. I personally don’t care so much whether I’m looking at street photography or documentary photography in Herzog’s images. What I do care about is the quality of the work and the ambition that shines through. (more)
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I was out of town for almost two weeks, and I just got through the list of new books/zines to add to The Independent Photobooks Blog - have a peek!
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The things you see when traveling abroad can be rather strange, and often it takes a visitor (or a child) to point a finger and something to make us look. It’s also strange how sometimes things we take for granted, things we’d never expect to change, implode, collapse or disappear. Occasionally, all of this is even connected, as was the case when the last financial bubble burst, to destroy both companies such as Lehman Brothers as well as the homes of many who had financed them in ways that simply didn’t make any sense. The consequences of the implosion of the US housing market are still with us, years later, and one would imagine that such a huge event - just short of another Great Depression - would result in some changes. It has not. The financial sector has got away with proverbially burning down the house and literally getting thousands and thousands of people evicted out of their homes. Many houses are now empty, either never sold, or because their owners lost them. (more)
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What do you call a book filled with photographs? If you were to ask someone unaffiliated with the world of photography, the answer probably would not be “a photobook”. In all likelihood, it would be “a photo album”. Remember those? Photo albums? If you have a Facebook account, you’ll know that your photos are organized in albums. But if you’ve ever held an actual photo album, you probably know that it’s quite a different beast: The difference is not that it’s an object - versus a label for a way to organize digital images. The difference is that an album can be customized in any which way. You could just stick your prints into the folders, but you could also do all kinds of additional things. So many photo albums ended up being little pieces of art, mirroring their makers ideas and idiosyncrasies. That, in part, is why so many photography fans collect them, buying them up on flea markets or on Ebay. (more)
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Andreas Gefeller has been well known for meticulously constructed images of the surfaces we walk on. For each of those images, he walks around with a digital cameras elevated with some contraption, taking the many source images that are then assembled on a computer. The results, visual surveys of small pieces of our world, often are startling and strange (see my review of a book filled with such images). Of course, I’ve been wondering where he would go from there, hoping he wouldn’t turn what has been very successful into something that would merely become a shtick (as the person not producing those images, of course, it’s easy for me to say that). (more)
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Our sheltered and rather comfortable Western life styles come at a price: We are stressed, overworked and - except for the lucky few - underpaid. And now we also have to worry about all those illegal immigrants who want to come and take our jobs. OK, I am not worried about that, but in this society a great many people are. In fact, people are so worried that they built a fence, hundreds of miles of it, along the Mexican border. Everybody is welcome to admire us for our freedoms and our life style, but please do not come and try to join us. (more)
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