I recently introduced Meier und Müller, the new publishing business I’m part of. There is good news, and there is bad news. Here’s the good news: Our first book, Conditions, can now be bought - our online store is open! Now for the bad news… (more)
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The first thing that struck me about From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America was the cover. That’s a great cover. You probably can’t see it very well, but it is filled with all this information (or maybe rather “information”) about the contents (for example, “[page] 177 - Learn how to repel women” or “[page] 137 - caves: Buy or rent?”). You don’t see such covers very often on photobooks, the majority of which, as I noted ad nauseam before, tend to be rather conservative affairs. Needless to say, to talk about the cover is a bad way to start a photobook review, but bear with me, hopefully we’ll be getting somewhere. (more)
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I’ve always thought that it was unfortunate that “Evidence,” produced by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, is considered to be so important. This is not because I think “Evidence” is a bad book - it’s because I feel that it casts too big a shadow on the work Sultan did afterwards: his own photography. It goes without saying that “Evidence” is great and influential and “a watershed in the history of art photography” (source). But I’m not going to remember Larry Sultan as the photographer who assembled “Evidence” - I’m going to remember Larry Sultan as the the photographer who produced truly amazing photography about life in California. (more)
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I decided to compile my thoughts about Kikuji Kawada’s The Map into a post and share them. You can find the piece here.
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Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Almost 2,000 people lost their lives, with an estimated property damage of the order of 90 billion US$ (this is where I found these numbers - just so you have an idea how much money that is, it ‘s about ten billion US$ less than what is currently being spent every year in Afghanistan to prop up that country’s corrupt regime, see this news report). While most Americans were lucky enough to be outside of the hurricane’s zone of impact, it still managed to send powerful shock waves across the country. During the first days people watched in horror - on live TV - as New Orleans was flooded, people were fighting for their lives, and no help was in sight. Later, scores of books with images from the immediate aftermath were published, to try to reveal the extent of what had happened. (more)
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Last December, I talked a bit about photobooks. As much as I love photobooks, what bothers me is that they’re all so similar: “You have an intro […] plus a bunch of images, usually one per page, so as you flip the pages you get one photo after the other […]. That’s it!” Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, especially if you look at how sequencing the images is used to create a narrative. But does it really have to be that way? (more)
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Maybe there is something new to be said about the lives of young people. For a while, I didn’t think anything worthwhile could still be added. After all, with our culture being centered on and catering to youth, what else is there to say? Of course, it would take just the right person to point out something new - or if we want to stay away from “new”, something different - and Tobias Zielony seems to be that person. Showcasing work shot between 2000 and 2010, Zielony’s Story, No Story tells what at first glance appears to be the familiar story of young people, “hanging out” at various places at night, in different countries. (more)
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“The first image I saw of the Terezin camp, formerly known as Theresienstadt, an hour’s drive away from Prague, was in a book by the German author W.G. Sebald.” This first sentence in Daniel Blaufuks’ Terezin sets the tone for what is to follow, in more ways than just one. If you are familiar with Sebald’s work, you realize that the book in question is Austerlitz, and you will also remember that author’s use of photographs and other images. The photograph in question (“It portrays a space that seems to be an office.” - D.B.) set off a process in Blaufuks’ mind, which had him research Terezin. (more)
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As an addendum to my earlier post about Noah Beil’s This Is Not My Sky, here is Noah talking about the details of the production (follow the links at the bottom).
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If I had to pick just one thing that is profoundly satisfying about Trevor Paglen’s Invisible it is this: Here is a book that is willing to look. That which is invisible in fact often is not invisible at all. Or phrased differently, things can be invisible because we agree to ignore them. Invisible is having none of that. Parts of the invisible world are being made visible. (more)
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It’s a simple assumption to believe that in photography everything has been done already. Of course, it’s not true. There are many things waiting for be discovered by a creative artist. But believing that everything has been done is easier than thinking about what hasn’t been done: It’s not like you can will your brain into coming up with a genius new idea. You can’t. What’s the point, though, of taking pictures if everything has been done already? The answer is simple and straightforward: Unless you want to view photography as part of the entertainment industry where all that matters are cheap new thrills, that which has been seen thousands of times deserves to be seen yet another time, in a different way. (more)
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What’s wrong with using newsprint for photo books? Nothing, of course, except that it does not feel like a “real” photo book. Here are Alec Soth and Andrew Roth answering some questions about it. Update (19 July 2010): Nicholas Gottlund and Grant Willing Update (24 July 2010): John Gossage, Michael Mazzeo, and Erik van der Weijde
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The blog photobooks.tumblr.com has short reviews of lots of independently produced photobooks/zines.
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A little while ago, a friend of mine emailed me, asking for my address. He wanted to give me a present, he said. Who am I to say no to presents? It arrived in the mail, a little later, sent by the artist himself, in the form of amwell, continuum, spring 2010, an artist book/journal (or maybe you’d call it a zine), made by and containing the photography of Raymond Meeks. I hadn’t heard of it before. (more)
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I had Florian Göttke’s Toppled in my “to review” pile of books, when I came across Pete Brook’s post about it. Pete writes “The book is a concept. I understand the concept. And, the images are essentially props to the concept (illustrations of the new biographies of statues, of things).” That’s what I thought - until I read the text. Turns out Toppled is considerably more complex than that. (more)
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Remember the Cold War? Yeah, I thought so. We’re so busy with our so-called War on Terror that we don’t even think much about that one any longer. I lived in Germany back then, the - so the narrative went - future battleground of World War 3, where on both sides of the Iron Curtain (it looked more like a pretty massive fence to me) hundreds of thousands of soldiers were held in an almost constant state of readiness. Thinking back, it wasn’t all that different from today where we’re living with colour-coded “threat levels” (those we didn’t have). But we knew who were dealing with, the enemy was well-defined and very visible. In fact being visible was part of the Cold War. It was a bit like in the animal kingdom where part of the game was to prance around, looking as strong and determined as possible. Except, of course, that in the end, we were all gonna die anyway, because of the thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us (and them). (more)
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The official description of Willem Popelier’s ____ And Willem talks of “identity,” “representation,” and “mankind’s image of himself,” and I suppose that’s how you can read this book. I’m not sure, though, whether such an almost academic approach might not limit its appeal. I think the book has a wider appeal than merely being interesting for those interested in “mankind’s image of himself.” So what is ____ And Willem all about anyway? (more)
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Alec Soth’s One Mississippi was published as part of Nazraeli Press’ ongoing series One Picture Books. Strictly speaking, the name isn’t quite correct. There isn’t just one picture in the book, there are twelve: eleven reproductions and one original photograph, all previously unpublished. So “one picture” refers to the one original print you get with each book, the idea behind the series being that “anybody should be able to buy an original artwork” (source). (more)
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You take a topic that’s more or less well defined, you unleash a group of accomplished, diverse photographers, and you assemble what you get back in a book. Not a bad idea for a book, albeit one we don’t get to see as often as you’d imagine. Of course, you’ll remember Magnum’s Georgian Spring, which involved some of photography’s heaviest hitters. Now there is Ostkreuz’s The City (the original title has the German version, Die Stadt, in its title, which I’ll omit in the following for reason of convenience), showcasing photography taken by the eighteen members of that German photography agency. (more)
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The other day, someone asked me why I liked self-published or independently published photo books (photo credit: Noah Beil; see this post). It’s a pretty simple question, the only problem being that up until that moment I had never thought about it. I had thought about all the various aspects, but I had not put them together. (more)
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How do you review a book like Queen Ann P.S. Belly Cut Off? Maybe a good way to start is to note that, yes, that is indeed the title of the book: Queen Ann P.S. Belly Cut Off, and if you look at the publisher’s description, you will learn where/how to order the book, plus a whole lot more about the book itself: I was going to write that “the suggestive, intimate force of the ‘found’ photographic material and other personal documents, as well as the sequencing of the images as a whole, are both deliberately arranged with great precision,” but, alas!, the publisher beat me to it! (more)
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Given how popular many types of sport are, I’m always a bit surprised how little non-specialized photography is produced around it. Of course, there are all those photographers with their fancy cameras and huge zoom lenses that produce the images you get to see in newspapers or in dedicated publications. But those photographs typically are “action” shots that, at best, tell you a lot about some particular sports event - some game or competition - but very little, if anything, about the cultural value that is attached to the game or sport in general. Regardless of whatever you might think about any given sport, there usually is a large and often surprisingly complex cultural component to it, which is where interesting photography can be produced. Just to give an example, I really could not possibly sit through a curling match, but a photography project about the people who play curling might actually be interesting. (more)
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There’s a great article about photographer Stephen Gill and his self-published photo books here. A must read for all photo-book fans.
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At the end of World War II, large parts of Germany, especially the cities, lay in ruins. It was mostly due to what Germans call the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) that in surprisingly little time in the West everything was back to normal - or maybe more accurately to a new normal. Cities got rebuild, as did factories. While East Germany ended up being stuck in yet another dictatorship, this one Communist, for forty more years, West Germany developed into a stable democracy. Along with the Wirtschaftswunder came the happy and carefree days of the 1950s, which, as it turns out, were pretty similar to the Eisenhower years in the US. As long as you didn’t ask any questions, you were golden, and who wanted to ask questions anyway, what with the Communist menace next door. (more)
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To a very large extent, the value of a portrait is determined by its emotional contents: A photo of a person that moves us - in whatever way - has much more of an impact on us than one that leaves us cold. This aspect of portraiture is especially important for images of a photographer’s immediate family, where the artist’s task is to produce photographs that take the emotional qualities s/he knows very (often too) well and to share them with the viewers: The artist has to detach her/himself to some extent to avoid falling into the trap of sentimentality (or outright kitsch), while s/he can’t allow her/himself to become too detached. (more)
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The Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Photoworks features an article about independent photo book publishing, written by Joachim Schmid (incl. a shout-out to The Independent Photo Book blog). If you’re still baffled what independent photo book publishing is about Schmid’s article offers a great introduction to the topic.
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The other day, I went to a new second-hand book store in New York City, and I looked through its impressive photo-book section. Since I had a lot of time at my disposal I had a peek at each book I was unfamiliar with, and I ended up buying a few. Venetia Dearden’s Somerset Stories: Fivepenny Dreams was one of them. I remember when I first saw the book and some of its images, I was blown away. How could I have possibly missed this book? Why had I never heard about it? (more)
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Whatever it is that can happen between a photographer and another person whose portrait is being taken might be undefinable (though one can try), but when it’s there you can see it in the picture: It is as if somehow the viewer is becoming an accomplice of sorts, someone who is entering a very intimate space to which access usually is denied. And you can’t pull back the curtain - so to speak - to reveal how it’s done, because the levers and smoke and noise are not the essential parts needed to get that good portrait (even though pretending you need all that bits makes for a colourful narrative). Marco van Duyvendijk’s Eastward Bound (which you can order via the artist’s website), a retrospective of ten years of his work, beginning in 1999, offers a few cases in point. (more)
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“Beginning in 1997 and continuing for twelve years, Mike and I, American and Turk, husband and wife, traveled to my home country in search of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose omnipresent image signals Turkey’s move toward Europe and the West that continues to this day. […] Mike is overwhelmed by his relentless presence in every public space. I easily recognize the stock iconic images - military hero, father of the country, visionary, and teacher.” These words by Chantal Zakari set the stage for The State of Ata, the book produced with her husband, Mike Mandel. (more)
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If you don’t know anything about Allison Davies, Outerland is not going to help you much. There is no text apart from the colophon, and even that you might miss. On page one… (well, is it one?, there are no page numbers), there is a photo of a young woman, in a stylish dress. The website informs us that “for more than a decade Allison Davies has been quietly making landscape photographs and ambiguous self-portraits of haunting beauty.” So the lone figure in the white overall in some of the photographs - the likes of which you’d expect in laboratories handling hazardous materials, that would be the artist. (more)
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In the early 1980s, German photographer Joachim Brohm managed to receive a Fulbright scholarship. He went to live in Ohio for a year, and he took photographs. This sounds like an interesting combination, doesn’t it? A German photographer, in the US, at about the time when colour photography was coming of age in the art world…
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Photojournalism is in crisis. Or maybe not. Who knows? But photojournalism is part of our modern media, and those media love nothing more than a crisis, so, almost by definition photojournalism is in crisis (as is photography, which, however, is not talked about as “in crisis”, instead it’s supposedly “over” or “dead”). It’s the end of the world as we know it. You gotta adapt to new realities. Embrace the new media and what they have to offer. Don’t embrace the new media and stick to what you can do best. Well, you’ve heard it all before, ad nauseam. But let’s assume for a minute that we’re all very tired of the way those debates are currently playing out. (more)
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I’ve lived in the US for about ten years now, so I’m now very familiar with many things that, when I first came here, surprised me or that I found unusual. But ten years are still a short period of time, compared with the thirty years I had lived in Germany before. What is more, those thirty years included the most formative periods of my life, which, I suppose, will mean that I will always see things if not exclusive from a German perspective, then at least with a German component. It’s not a bad position to be in actually, amazement (along with the occasional exasperation) is still a big part of my American life. Some things are just very familiar, yet still a bit alien to me. I should add that I have developed the same approach (if that’s the word) towards Germany now, which certainly makes for “interesting” visits back “home.”
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I’m sure by now most people will be familiar with the Independent Photo Book blog. There are new publications being added to it regularly, so make sure to check it out if you’re interested in artist books, zines, … Also, if you have a book or zine that fits the criteria make sure to send in the information so it can be added to the site.
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Part of the reason why I created Conscientious Extended is to invite photographers to talk about their work. I am thrilled to be able to announce the first contribution, by Greg Girard, who talks about In the Near Distance 1973-86. Find the whole piece here.
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Most photographers have a well-developed signature style, inside the boundaries of which they produce their work. But there are also photographers who experiment a lot and whose bodies of work look very different. Thomas Ruff is maybe the most obvious example I can think of. Ralf Peters is another one (his website is not being updated, to see his newer work go here). Of course, Peters isn’t nearly as well-known as Ruff, but for those curious about the photographer’s work, there now is Until Today, a compilation covering photography from 1995 until today. (more)
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East Germany’s national anthem started out stating that “From the ruins risen newly, to the future turned, we stand.” For those visiting from West Germany (or any other Western country), this seemed like a bold claim, a very odd description of a place that looked, well, ruined. Mind you, some of the World War II ruins had indeed been replaced, but many had been left standing. When I visited Dresden in 1987, one of the main palaces in the city center was still a burned-out shell. It’s true, many of the ruins had been removed, and new buildings had been erected - just like in the West, early 1950s East German architecture was mostly an insulting, almost inhumane mess - but it was obvious that not much - if any - money was being spent on keeping things up. And you’d walk into some back alley by mistake maybe and see bullet marks on the walls. (more)
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It’s very tempting to see Sarah Pickering’s Explosions, Fires and Public Order as some sort of artistic commentary on our Age of Terror. I personally am not sure, however, whether connecting the work to “global terrorism matched with omnipresent anxiety” (quoted from the press release) is such a good thing to do. It strikes me as maybe a bit too sensationalist, while at the same time vastly reducing possible ways to approach the photographs. So it might be better to turn the volume a bit down. Explosions, Fires and Public Order is about just, well, explosions, fires, and public order. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. (more)
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First things first. No, this is not the former tennis player Boris Becker. This is the photographer Boris Becker. Of course, you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you used Google, because not only is there almost no way around the tennis player, there also is almost no information to be found about the photographer. In particular, I managed to find a single photo from the one series that, I think, is by far Becker’s best. In fact, the main reason why I got excited when I heard there was going to be a book about his work. (more, updated below)
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August Sander is one of the usual suspects. A discussion of portraiture will inevitably have the author mention Sander and his work. If you have ever seen any of his portraits, it will be obvious why: Many of them are in a league of their own, catching glimpses of people living in a world that was either disintegrating or at least massively changing - as Germany changed from a monarchy to a military dictatorship (a pro forma monarchy) to an increasingly unstable democracy to a fascist dictatorship, against the background of various economic crises, plus the Great Depression, plus at some stage hyperinflation, and against the background of scientific revolutions, which resulted in massive improvements of living conditions as well as industrialized mass slaughter. And as if this wasn’t crazy enough, when Sander was ready to have his massive body of portraits shown, the Nazis prevented him from doing it, because his portraits did not adhere to their idea of what Aryans were supposed to look like (never mind that apart from the foreign minister the whole Nazi elite did not even remotely look like such Aryans). (more)
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Some time ago, I spent a week looking for African photography. I asked a friend of mine, who had spent years photographing in Africa and who is friends with many artists from the continent, and he sent me a list with names. The majority of those artists I never managed to find online. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that there’s no other way to find them. But as someone who is relying on the internet as the medium to disseminate photography, it was an incredibly frustrating experience. (more)
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I’ve always thought that good images will still be good images, even if you printed them in a newspaper; but of course, art books are not printed like that. Except for Thomas Ruff - Surfaces, Depths. The book, a survey of the artist’s work over the years, is printed on, well, what looks like the kind of paper you’d use for newspapers - it looks and feels just like it. The printing itself is of higher quality than what you find in newspapers, though. I came across Thomas Ruff - Surfaces, Depths by chance - visiting Ruff’s show at Zwirner gallery; and they had a copy on display (albeit none for sale).
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I lived for five years in Pittsburgh, the city that used to be the steel capital of the US. If you go to Pittsburgh you wouldn’t necessarily notice the city’s past, since most of the steel mills are gone. They are not just abandoned shells, they are literally gone. In their old places you can see a few signs of their former presence - such as the few neatly cleaned items used to decorate “The Waterfront” shopping area. A little down the river from The Waterfront, there is a single steel mill still operating, but it’s not the kind of spectacle you’d expect from Ye Olde Tales where Pittsburgh was described as “hell with the lid off” (in contrast Pittsburgh, city politics still is hell with the lid on).
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Whether “Walker Evans is probably the single greatest American photographer ever to have worked in the twentieth century” as Walker Evans: Decade by Decade asserts I don’t know. It does sound like a bit of a bold statement, given the competition. Bold claims aside, Walker Evans definitely was one of the most important American photographers of the past Century. This new volume, an overview of his entire oevre, from the early late 1920s work until the Polaroids from the 1970s, take a few year before his death, shows why.
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I got an envelope in the mail, from “A.M.”, Brooklyn, and of course, I didn’t remember anything about it. I order a lot of books online and have them shipped to me via media-mail, which usually means a delay of at least a week. Occasionally, someone will email me and offer me a copy of a book, and I usually forget about that, too. I’m not senile (I think), I just remember other things (often things that are entirely useless, I wish I had this under control). In any case, the envelope contained a hand-made zine, with the cover made to look like a very old letter (see above); and the inside contains b/w photography.
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If you haven’t seen and/or visited The Independent Photo Book now might be a good time. New books and zines are constantly being added (at the time of this writing, there are 85 up), and Hester and I have heard of many that sold through the site. So if you have an independently produced photography book or zine to announce please send it to us. The Independent Photo Book is not “curated”: Any book or zine that cannot be bought at a chain book store (or Amazon.com) will be listed. Also, you can comment on posts there (which nobody has done so far; strictly no anonymous comments allowed). Maybe you own one of the books/zines and want to review it as a comment?
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Let’s be bold! Compare Malick Sidibe’s photographs, especially the many ones taken at dances or social events, with Dash Snow’s party Polaroids. No, really, I mean it. You have to ignore the slightly different media (b/w versus colour, the film cameras versus the instant ones), you have to ignore the backgrounds of the subjects, and you’re off to the most amazing journey. But you might think it’s a weird comparison, isn’t it?
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Photography doesn’t have much of a history - compared with many other art forms or human inventions that we take for granted in our daily lives. What are not even two hundred years compared with cave paintings that date back thirty five thousand years (give or take a millennium or two)? But then, our world has changed much over the course of the last thirty five thousand years, and a large part of that change has happened over the past few hundred years - or maybe just one hundred years, if we look at all the various things we now take for granted: Synthetic antibiotics were invented after photography, as were air travel or computers. It is true, we could probably imagine a world without air travel or computers, but I’m not so sure we really would want to do without antibiotics any longer. Plus, there are societal changes we cannot imagine living without any longer: Universal suffrage, civil liberties, human rights. So despite its relative youth, photography has - literally - witnessed a lot of change in the way humans live. What makes photography unique, of course, is that it offers us visual testimony of that change, by showing us images taken in the past.
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Now that Apple unveiled their Colour Kindle (they’re calling it “iPad”) it will be interesting to see what kind of photography books might be produced for it. I can’t and won’t pretend I’m eagerly awaiting those, but of course I’m curious. Here’s the thing, though. As much as I appreciate new technologies for what they allow people to do, I’m still mostly focusing on what it actually is these new technologies are being applied to.
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To a large extent, contemporary photography looks the way it does because of two major revolutions. The first, originating in the US in the 1970s, not only made colour photography the dominant image mode, but also opened up new ways of seeing. The second, originating in Düsseldorf, Germany, very forcefully also made us see things in new ways. Thankfully, there are now two new books that talk about these two revolutions. The first, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, I reviewed last week. The second, The Düsseldorf School of Photography is the subject of this review.
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