If you’re looking for actual photobook shops, the folks at Photo Book Club have been compiling a Google map with locations of photobook stores. If there’s anything missing send them an email and they’ll add it. A great resource!
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Paul Kooiker is on a mission. I don’t know what kind of mission it is, but if you look at the books he has produced you realize he’s on a mission alright. After Crush or Room Service, there now is Sunday, a book of nudes, or maybe more accurately photographs of a nude woman, balancing precariously on a wooden table in a rather unattractive backyard of sorts. (more)
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Bruce Haley spent a few years (1994-2002) wandering around some of the backwaters of the former Soviet Union to take photographs. The Soviet Union is “long” gone. It is mostly remembered as a prop, as a cypher, as a stand-in for the other side in debates that rarely involve any actual information about what really happened. In that sense, talking about the Soviet Union is pointless. I don’t see Sunder, the newly released book that shows Haley’s work, as centering on the Soviet Union. Instead, it’s a book about us, about our human follies and dreams. (more)
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Aperture has long been a - maybe the - beacon of American photobook publishing. It’s pretty much impossible to talk about photobooks without at some stage running into a book that was done by Aperture. Lesley Martin, Publisher of the Aperture Book Program, has worked on a huge number of those books, often pushing the envelope in unexpected directions. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Lesley to talk about Aperture and about the history and future of photobooks. Find the piece here.
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Over the past decade, we have witnessed considerable (and still growing) interest in found or vernacular photographs. The reasons for that seem complex. Some of those photographs are incredibly charming, while others are outright strange if not simply weird. Collecting such images is one thing, but making a good photobook out of them is quite a different story. The easiest solution, of course, is to produce a simple album or collection. But it’s easy to see why this idea, as tempting as it might be, has its shortcomings: There is only so much that one can get out of charm or weirdness (or charming weirdness or weird charm). To get beyond that requires a gifted editor, an artist who can make a selection and then create a story around the images, in whatever way. Of course, Erik Kessels immediately comes to mind here. The latest photobook produced out of found images (maybe more accurately an archive of images) was just released by Little Brown Mushroom: Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar. (more)
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It’s widely known that when Garry Winogrand died, he left behind hundreds of thousands of unedited images and more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. What is less widely known, at least until now, is the plan by a consortium of some of the biggest photobook publishers to publish each and every photo ever taken by Garry Winogrand. Work on this project has so far been incredibly secretive, but first details have now leaked out. The Complete Winogrand will be a set of 75 books, each with around 1,000 pages and multiple images per page, with a grand total of around 300,000 images. The books will not be released all at the same time, instead there will be a subscription. The first book comes with a custom-made steel shelf designed to hold all 75 books (each book will weigh approximately 8 pounds, so the full set of books will be 600 pounds). There will only be a limited number of subscriptions available, so if you want to own a set, or if you are interested in more details check out the website for The Complete Winogrand.
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If you want to get your own photobook printed, one of the biggest questions usually is who can/will/might print it for you. This is where this huge list of printer resources might come in handy (via).
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There’s a curious photograph in Charles Brittin: West and South. It shows a dilapidated shack, with a sign next to the entrance that says “Exhibition Charles Brittin”. The index identifies it as a photograph of a “one-day exhibition at Wallace Berman’s Semina Gallery, Larkspur, 1961.” Photographers don’t show their work in semi-destroyed wooden shacks any longer. Pretty much everything depicted in the book, photography covering the period from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, has changed, too. Brittin died earlier this year, and from the essay he contributed to the book, I am not so sure what he made of our world now, a world that looks and feels to different from the one depicted in the book. (more)
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Contemporary photography often offers very little obvious solace. It is cold and unforgiving, at least at first sight. If there is beauty it has to be discovered. If there is a message or even some form of truth, it has to be found, discovered. Contemporary photography is thus a child of its, our, time. It reflects the world we’ve built for ourselves, whether we like it or not. (more)
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Here we are, in 2011, and most of the photography in 60 Fotos by László Moholy-Nagy will strike us as incredibly old-fashioned and/or dated. Over the course of the 80 years since the book’s original publication, photography has evolved a lot (our thinking about it a bit less so, of course). But there is something, actually a lot to be gained from going back to the book and from looking at photography with the eyes of and guided by this well-known Bauhaus artist. (more)
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Over at Here’s blog (I know this looks like a typo, but it isn’t), there are a few short interviews with independent photobook makers: Fw:, Lasermagazin, and Böhm/Kobayashi.
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On March 27th, Annalisa Durante, a fourteen year old teenager, was shot in the head during a Camorra related shoot-out. Two days later, she died from her wounds. Depending on where we live, we are used to these kinds of news. Murder just keeps happening. It becomes background noise, and it takes more than just some news report to alert us to what is going on. Putting a name and face to a death might help, but often, even that is not enough. In the media, there typically are two kinds of responses: The first focuses exclusively on the victim, while ignoring everything about the environment. The other response only focuses on the environment, treating victims in a statistical fashion. (more)
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The history of the photobook is filled with many absolutely amazing examples, many of which remain only known to experts - or those fortunate enough to have the means to acquire them. The main reason for this is mundane: It’s not because some elitists pick books and decide they are great. It’s because most of those books were printed once and then sold over the course of a few years. To make matters worse, there’s the Velvet-Underground effect: Many of those books didn’t even sell well, while inspiring what ultimately became a real movement. In fact, some books are so hard to get because they sold just a few copies, and the rest were then literally destroyed. The case of Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet is particularly heart-wrenching: According to the main essay in this reprint, the original print run was five hundred copies, which were not sold through any major bookstores. In 1956, a fire at the artist’s farmhouse destroyed the majority of the negatives, along with most of his library, plus a collection of signed lithographs by Picasso and Matisse. There was another fire, in the next home, too. (more)
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Part of my work on writing the review of Zdenek Tmej’s The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness involved reading the essay, because ideally, I’d like to know what I’m actually talking about. There was a reference to photographer Jindrich Marco who, I learned, had taken photographs all across Europe and Israel in the years immediately after the war. These photographs, I read, had been published in 1967 as Please Buy My New Song. I figured I might as well see whether I can find that book. (more)
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Everything you want to know about Errata Editions
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It is an interesting exercise to take the work of British artist John Stezaker out of its usual context and to place it in the context within which pretty much all the images discussed on this blog live. In particular, I’d like to point out that what Stezaker is doing, namely taking two, occasionally just one, sometimes three, images and superimposing or combining them in ways that, superficially, look as if he hasn’t even done anything is certain to have the copyright police up in arms. The horror! The horror! But Stezaker’s case is a very good example of why simplistic thinking about copyright - all the talk of “stolen” images - has serious repercussions for artists. If you look at the collages, the artist is not just taking images and putting them together somehow (even though superficially, that’s exactly what he is doing). He is combining images in ways that most people would have never thought of, with the results in most cases being astounding. Minimalist as they might be, the transformations are huge. (more)
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At the time of this writing, the official unemployment rate in the US is 9%. This number excludes a large variety of people, incl., for example, those who gave up looking for work or those who’d prefer a full-time job over a part-time one. It’s a bit harder to come by the actual unemployment rate, in part because it depends on how you define it. If we take the US government’s U-6 rate, we get 16%. Very much related to this, the number of photographers, graphic designers and writers I have talked to recently who told me about severe problems getting jobs is mind-blowing. I am not active in the field of commercial or editorial photography, but from what I hear there is some severe howling and gnashing of the teeth going on. So even though it might just be a coincidence, it still seems entirely appropriate that Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring was just re-published by Errata Editions. (more)
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When I wrote my post about the unwillingness of post-war German photographers to confront their country’s most recent past (find the posts here and here) one of the books I had to think of was Zdenek Tmej’s The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness, published in 1946 in what was then Czechoslovakia. During World War II, Tmej had been one of the many forced foreign laborers in Nazi Germany, and he had documented part of his life with a camera. The original book is hard to come by, but luckily, there now is an Errata Editions version. (more)
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If one wants to think of photobook making as a spectrum, at one end, there are commercial publishers. At the other end, there are artists literally making their own books: Printing the pages, binding them etc. Raymond Meeks has produced a variety of such artist books, and I approached him to talk about those. Find the conversation here.
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One of the endearing properties of good photobooks is that they don’t get stale. You can pull an older photobook from your shelf, and it will have lost none of its original power. Geert van Kesteren’s Baghdad Calling: Reports from Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Iraq was published two and a half years ago, but I still want to review it here (there exists a microsite for the book). It has not lost its relevance, both in terms of what it deals with and in terms of how it deals with it. (more)
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The cheap stuff we love to buy has to be made somewhere. Cheap stuff means little costs, so its production has been on a tour around the world over the past decades. We like to think of this as “globalisation,” because that just sounds better; and we usually don’t have a problem with it - as long as we can be sure there are no sweat shops involved (we might be cheap, but we have noble principles!). You can trace the evolution of this movement if you go to a thrift shop and look at where the things from the different periods of time were made. While China of course is the most well-known production site for our cheap (and plenty of our not-so cheap) stuff, there are other countries, too, Vietnam being one of them. Tessa Bunney’s Home Work explores a particular aspect of that country’s production system, the small villages around and suburbs of Hanoi. (more)
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When I first saw How to Hunt by Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt, on the walls of their gallery in New York, I wasn’t very impressed at all. The fact that I have no respect whatsoever for hunters and their activities aside, I thought the prints were way too big. Of course, the standard narrative behind big prints is that there is a big negative, so you need a big print to showcase all the details. I don’t subscribe to that point of view. It creates a mindless fetish out of a big print, and it completely ignores the fact that some images don’t work when printed too big (all the details won’t save your photo in that case). (more)
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Designer Hans Gremmen is actively involved in creating some of the most cutting-edge Dutch photobooks. I wanted to find out what it is they put into the water that makes those books so different, so I approached him to ask him a few questions about photobook making in The Netherlands. Find the piece here.
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Late last year, I had the opportunity to teach a class on the contemporary photobook with Alice Rose George, as part of the Hartford Art School Photography MFA Program. Even outside the classroom, Alice and I spent a lot of time talking about photobooks, where things were, where they are now, and where they’re going. As an independent photography editor and curator, who has worked extensively with private and corporate collections, book publishers and magazines, Alice’s knowledge of the photobook publishing world is almost limitless. Among the publications she worked on/was involved in are Hope Photographs, 25 and Under (whose exhibition she also curated), Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled, Adam Bartos’ Yard Sale Photographs, and many more. As one of the four founders of Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, she has helped to create one of the most remarkable tributes to the people and events of September 11, 2001. Alice also served as the Director of Magnum New York and the Publisher of Granta in England. Find the conversation I had with her about Here Is New York, photobooks in general, and ebooks here.
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A little while ago, I read an article about Germany’s postwar reconstruction. I learned that the ruins of what had been the Third Reich had been literally piled up in many cities, to form artificial hills. Given the amount of destruction, many of them are impressive affairs: “In West Germany alone, some 400 million cubic meters (14 billion cubic feet) of rubble was piled up after the war.” (quoted from the article; just as an aside, it was up to German women to clean up the mess after the war, don’t miss this gallery of Trümmerfrauen) Only a few days later, I came across Teufelsberg by Marie Sommer, a book about one such hill in Berlin, called - you guessed it - Teufelsberg (devil’s mountain). (more)
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Occasionally, someone will ask me how I would define what makes a good portrait, and of course there is no good answers for that. But there’s one thing that helps: An interesting face. Needless to say, and interesting face will no guarantee a good portrait, but it really helps. This might sound slightly flippant, but once you look at all the portraits done by photographer X or by photographer Y you realize that X and Y pick a certain “kind” of people. It’s hard to say what it is, but typically, you will easily be able to say that some portrait looks like it was taken by X and not by Y, in part of because of the subject her/himself. Many portrait photographers are drawn towards certain types of characters, and often it does have something to do with the face. You could use Koos Breukel’s Fair Face as a good example (not because it has the word “face” in its title, though). (more)
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If you truly can’t get enough of “best of 2010” lists, here is what you could call the mother of all best photobooks 2010 lists, featuring book selected by 27 different contributors, an impressively diverse group featuring photographers, writers, bloggers, publishers. It’s interesting to see that the books most frequently selected were in fact picked by a rather small fraction of people. The book topping the list, Broken Manual by Alec Soth, was picked by 6 contributors (or 22%). (more)
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The story of oil (and gas) in Nigeria is long, ugly and relatively well ignored in the West. Just to give you an idea of what’s going on there, look at this article describing the fall-out from the recent Wikileaks release for oil company Shell. And there is more, much more in fact. This is the story told in Tropical Gift: The Business of Oil and Gas in Nigeria by Christian Lutz, a bold and masterful achievement. (more)
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I agree, reviewing my favourite photobook this year on the very last day, two weeks after listing it in the best of 2010 list - that’s somewhat odd. But sometimes, that’s how things go. I bought the book four weeks ago, was too busy to review it, but not busy enough to add it to my list, right on top. And photobooks aren’t like bread. They don’t go stale after a few days. They’re more like wine: They tend to get better with age. In the case of Quatorze Juillet by Johan van der Keuken the book is new, the photography is not. The images in the book were taken on 14 July, 1958, and apart from a single one, they have not been published before. (more)
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“Following on from Wayne Ford’s list of ‘Photography and Narrative’ books to explore, we contacted some of the worlds most inspirational photographic practitioners, thinkers, authors and publishers and asked them for a book nomination that is notable/ inspiring/ seminal/ provocative.” Find the list here.
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This past year really has been the year of the photobook for me. I cannot remember another year where I looked at so many photobooks, bought so many of them, got so many in the mail; and what truly amazes me is how all of this resulted from me actually being not so happy about the boring conservative format that so many books employ. In the end, I decided not to leave it at that, but instead to look for what else there was to get, and to put my money where my mouth is. In parallel to all of that, I ended up going to less and less gallery shows, something I realized just a couple of weeks ago. (more)
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If you happen to come across a photobook showing you images of chicken filets and images from furniture ads, it’s like you’re looking at one of Erik Kessels’ products. Apart from owning and operating an ad agency (make sure to reload that site several times) and various other activities, Erik runs KesselsKramer Publishing, which is responsible for gems such as the In Almost Every Picture or Useful Photography series. To find out more about the ideas behind the work, I sat down with Erik on a sunny late-November morning in Amsterdam to ask some questions. Find the piece here.
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Earlier this year, Photo-Eye asked me for my favourite ten photobooks this year. Compiling such lists at the end of a year is always fun and dreadful at the same time. There was a deadline, long expired at the time of this writing, and I sent in a selection. Needless to say, the year has twelve months, and I ended up finding more books, some of which I added to my list. Plus, I picked my favourite photobooks this year. At some stage, you just have commit to something. Find the list and all the details below. (more)
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What do we know about Iran? Not much probably, apart from those stories about the current president and the country’s quest for nuclear weapons. How many people know that the country’s history dates back thousands of years? How many people know what the country really looks like? I’ll be honest, I know a little bit about the history, but I know more or less nothing else. Thankfully, there now is Recollection by Walter Niedermayr. (more)
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I’m starting a new series of conversations, focusing on photobooks and their makers. In the first one, I’m talking with photographers Richard Renaldi and Seth Boyd of Charles Lane Press about what photobooks mean to them and about their experiences with their publishing company.
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You’re probably aware of the fact that if you skip the essay(s) in most photobooks, you’re not missing much (if anything). In the case of Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land by photographer Rob Hornstra and writer Arnold van Bruggen (see their joint site The Sochi Project), you would miss at least half of what makes this book what it is. This points to the fact that while you could treat Empty land as a photobook, in reality it’s something different. In a nutshell, it’s a documentary, transformed into book form. (more)
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I suppose strictly speaking John Stezaker’s Fumetti is not a photobook. It does contains photos, though. But the artist didn’t take them. It’s a book of collages. But purists might find reason to scoff at that, too, given that many of these collages were made from only two images, and there are some made from, well, one. But before we throw our arms up in despair, trying to find just the right box for the book, we might as well realize how little is to be gained from categorizing - especially since so much is to be gained from looking at the book. (more)
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I’m just back from visiting the New York Art Book Fair, and I’ve been thinking about what I like about photobooks so much. Individual books might appeal to me for particular reasons, but as a whole, as a species, photobooks have become incredibly dear to me. Why do I spend so much time looking at them, thinking about them, even making them (Meier & Müller’s forthcoming books are currently being conceived)? Find my reflections on the topic here.
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This being the time of the internet and of quick, dismissive remarks, I should probably write that Sechsundzwanzig Wiener Tankstellen [Twenty Six Viennese Gas Stations] by Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Stefan Oláh is just a shameless rip off of Ed Ruscha’s famous work and be done with it. But I won’t, since such a verdict would not only be simplistic, it would be ill-informed and thus ultimately stupid. Art itself does not exist in a vacuum, and some art might inform and/or spawn some other art. In the case of Sechsundzwanzig Wiener Tankstellen (which I’ll abbreviate as SWT from now on), Ruscha’s famous work - the booklet etc. - served not only just as inspiration. The book is a commentary of sorts, or maybe an extension of the American artist’s body of work: This is what gas stations look like here in Vienna, and here is why this is interesting. (more)
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“How has the Ruhr district changed over the years? How do artists see the Ruhr Metropolis now?” asks the introductory page of the Ruhr Views exhibitions. First of all, why is this interesting? As it turns out, the Ruhr District has undergone massive changes over the past decades. The largest urban center in Germany - composed of various cities, which, in effect, form a mega-city inhabited by 12 million people - the Ruhr District formerly was the home of large parts of the country’s heavy industry: Coal, steel. Essen, one of the main cities, housed the infamous Krupp empire. Most of this came down, the steel mills are gone, the region changed massively - just like its counterparts in, for example, the US or Britain. How did the Germans deal with this transformation? (more)
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In our Western world we have either lost or appropriated the pagan rituals that ruled Europe before Christianity took over. In fact, those rituals are so alien to us that we do not even realize that they still exist as relics in some of the “holidays” we celebrate (just look into the pagan roots of various aspects of Christmas to get an idea what I’m talking about). Where pagan rituals managed to survive, they usually strike us as well, weird. For example, most people will be somewhat familiar with an image like this (it conveniently fits into our general visual culture), whereas something like this (here is a page explaining the background) will probably cause different reactions. I’m writing this review a few days before Halloween, but I can’t imagine someone walking around with such a Perchta mask. (more)
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You might remember my last post, in which I announced that the first book by Meier und Müller, the publishing business I am part of, had started to sell “Conditions,” our first book. I’m very happy to announce that there now are US copies, priced at $49, shipped directly from Northampton (MA). If you want one, go right to our store. In case you’re wondering what happened, you’ll find all the details below. (more)
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“Inde­pen­dently pro­duced and pub­lished photo books have gained preva­lence over the past years, and have proven them­selves to be an effec­tive way to dis­sem­i­nate pho­tog­ra­phy. How­ever, while mak­ing photo books may have become eas­ier than ever, mak­ing truly awe­some photo books is as dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing as it ever was. Enter Book Case Study: a three-day work­shop focussing on the art of the inde­pen­dent photo book.” (source) (more)
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In this very cool presentation (made by Dutchdoc), Rob Hornstra talks about his work, and about the design and ideas behind his books. (found here)
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Fabio Severo has an interview with Yannick Bouillis, the mastermind behind Offprint, here.
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“More people live along the Yangtze’s banks than in the whole of the United States,” writes Nadav Kander in the notes of his new book Yangtze, The Long River, “that is one in every eighteen people on the planet. […] This extraordinary and vast river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese. It is much more than a waterway. It contains their history and their folklore. It runs in the blood of the people.” And later: “China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past. Demolition and construction were everywhere on such a scale that I was unsure if what I was seeing was being built or destroyed, destroyed or built.” We are familiar with such narratives, and we have seen aspects of the imagery in the book before. What we have not seen, however, is a single artist trying to tie things together. (more)
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A while back, I tried to find photography from Africa on the web, and it was a pretty frustrating experience. There is some; but most artists whose names I came across somewhere - or who were mentioned to me by friends - were impossible to track down online. I still don’t know much about African photography. (more)
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Given there’s Meier und Müller, the photobook publishing venture I’m part of, it would only seem natural that there also is a blog associated with it. It’s (tentatively) called Litfaßsäule (featuring not just one, but two crazy German characters in its name - anyone noticing a pattern here?). In case you’re wondering what a Litfaßsäule might is, here is an explanation. The blog will center on photobooks (plus the occasional Meier und Müller announcement), and just like any blog, it will probably evolve with time. There are some posts up already, so have a peek!
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As someone who loves photobooks, I couldn’t be happier about Errata Editions. As is probably widely known, Errata publish reproductions of photobooks that otherwise would not be accessible to a wider audience. A truly wonderful case in point is provided by Yutaka Takanashi’s Toshi-e (Towards the City), originally published in Japan in 1974. (more)
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A little while ago, Dorothea Hahn, a German journalist whose blog I have been following, moved from Paris to Washington, DC. In her last post from Paris, she reflected upon her time in France, noting that the one thing that had always struck her was how there was basically no French debate whatsoever about the use of nuclear power to generate electricity. If that doesn’t strike you as particularly noteworthy, you have to realize that nuclear power is a highly contentious topic in Germany; in fact a few years back, the German government decided to phase out all nuclear power plants (the current government is trying to walk back from that decision, which has resulted in the Green Party currently polling at around 25%). Whether or not German concerns about nuclear power are justified is a matter of debate. What seems clear, though, is when you look at a nuclear power station, it feels different from looking at pretty much any other industrial site. (more)
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