It is a well-known fact that the 1970s witnessed the emergence of colour photography as an art form. But just like in the case of the Founding Fathers - where everybody can usually name the one on the $1 bill - there is more to the story than just that small number of names or bodies of work that everybody is so familiar with today. For those interested in this part of photography history, there now is Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980. The book chronicles the emergence of colour photography in the US in the cultural context of its time, smartly outlining the work - and individual evolution - of a large number of practitioners.
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The photography magazine market currently is experiencing some change as small, independently produced periodicals are breaking into a market that - let’s face it - had become rather stale. A wonderful example of such a new magazine is Publication, “a biannual periodical produced by street photographers for street photographers,” the brain child of Nick Turpin.
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With 56 - at the time of this writing - listings (in just over two weeks!), The Independent Photo Book is clearly showing that there are lots of independently produced photo books and zines to be found, and I’ve already heard from various sources that the site has generated sales. To repeat: If you send us a book/zine that falls into this category (please stick by the format outlined on the blog so listing the book/zine is a breeze), we will list it. If you don’t have your own book but are curious about independently produced ones and haven’t visited the site go and have a peek!
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I had been familiar with a lot of images by Bruce Davidson, but most of them never got me very excited. I know, people love the subway pictures, or the circus ones, or the gang ones, but I never had any connection with those images. Needless to say, a recent exhibition at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery provided a good opportunity to see many of the photographer’s images. Of course I went, because looking at something you still need to discover can be so much more rewarding than seeing something you already know. For the most part, the show did not change my impression of the work very much, though. But I noticed that there were some images, which really stood out for me, work that I was unfamiliar with.
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After a few thousand years of human (ab)use, our planet isn’t in such a great shape any longer. Granted, over the course of its history it has seen worse, but in pretty much all of those abysmal phases there weren’t any humans around whose very survival depended on temperate living conditions. If scientific data are correct our home planet’s atmosphere is heating at a rate that will make large-scale climate change inevitable - unless we do something about it. Oh, and we better do it yesterday. Of course, there are those experts who disagree, but you only have to have a brief look at their scientific record and at who funds their research to get an idea how credible they really are: Not very much.
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Beauty is big business. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s cosmetic surgery statistics, in 2008, 355,671 breast augmentations were done (compared with 101,176 in 1997), 341,144 cases of liposuction (1997: 176,863), and 147,392 cases of abdominoplasty (1997: 34,002). If one believes Plastic Surgery Prices, the average price of a breast augmentation (implant/enlargement) lies in the range of $5,500 - $7,000. If you take a number somewhere in that range, say $6000, and you multiply the number of breast augmentations with that price, you’ll end up with a total amount of money in excess of two billion dollars (2,134 million US$). Of course, there are various uncertainties - the number of procedures has a 3% error, and taking an average number for the procedure will only give you a ball-park number. But even if you assume that there are so many uncertainties that you got twice the amount of money actually spent, you’re still at one billion dollars. That’s a lot of money. And that’s only breast augmentations.
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I’ve noted that information about independently produced photo books and zines (publications by small publishers or self-published work that is not available via Amazon.com or chain book shops) is often hard to come by. When I go to shops specializing in photo books - such as Dashwood in NYC - the sheer number of such publications I have never heard about always makes me a little sad, because I know there are so many publications I never heard about. (updated below)
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Via Mrs Deane comes Photobibliothek, a German-language page (based in Switzerland), which, however, is easy to use even for people who don’t speak German: Simply click your way through the images on that page (the names and years are obvious). There also is the Artist Book Database, which is very simple to use.
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I’m sure everybody else noticed this, too, but Greater Atlanta by Mark Steinmetz is the only book you can find in Alec Soth’s, 5B4’s and my list of the best photobooks 2009.
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The 20th Century was filled to the brim with atrocities, war, and genocide. So far, there is no indication whatsoever that we have learned anything from those - just notice, for example, that “the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since the conflict in Congo began in 1998, making it the world’s most lethal conflict since World War II.” (source) Maybe this is because we are still unable to understand what actually happened. The suffering of a single person is often beyond our comprehension - and what does it then mean to hear about ten thousand people killed, or one hundred thousand, or millions? If anything, we have learned how to displace that which might cause us distress. In the snippet I just cited, the war in Congo is merely a “conflict”; and it’s easy to find similar euphemisms in your newspaper.
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One of the photo festivals I wish I had attended was the third Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg one. How do I know I really missed something? They published a book (Images Recalled), which is not simply just a catalog of the photography on display, but which also contains abundant text. In essence, it’s the next best thing after going to the festival in person.
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When I grew up, which is not that long ago (or so I want to believe), Europe was cut in half by what people called the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was more like a fence, albeit one that featured automatic guns (plus an assortment of other gruesome stuff). With a few exceptions, the western half of Europe was part of what was called the European Community, a group of countries, whose sole purpose appeared to be to determine how much milk and butter its farmers could first produce and would then destroy (at least that was my impression - I was a young boy, what did I know of economic realities? Now, I’m a grown man, and from what I heard they’re still doing that. Looks like I never learned to understand economic realities). If you wanted to travel from one country to another one, you would cross a border, which featured border posts and people who would pretend as if there was something to inspect in your passport. I remember once my family went to Holland, and there was no control. I thought “Did that just happen? Did I just get into another country without somebody checking?”
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Todd Walker has a response to my post about photo books. Magazines as the answer to why photo book publishers shun experimentation? I’m not convinced at all. I’d like to think there are publishers (or photographers) who want to aim a little higher.
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Over the past few years, there has been considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth going on about the funding of photojournalistic and/or documentary work. Needless to say, a democracy relies on its citizens receiving the information they need to be able to make smart decisions, so the implications of what at first sight looks like a mere business problem are considerable. When Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen decided they wanted to document the area around Sochi (Russia), where the 2014 Olympic Games will be held, their solution was quite simple: They created The Sochi Project, offering people to become supporters and to get unique and exclusive contents in return.
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It would seem odd to review Mark Steinmetz’s South East and Greater Atlanta at the same time, given that the former was already published last year, while the latter is a current release. But it is worthwhile to look at them together - and if I had a copy of South Central I’d include that, too. The photographer’s website informs us that South East covers the years 1994-2001, whereas Greater Atlanta was shot over a slightly longer period of time, until fairly recently (1992-2008). Whether or not that is an important detail I am undecided about (it might be a bit academic), but what unites these two books is that it is not very obvious when the work was produced. I’ve heard photographers say that they prefer to work in b/w because it gives more of a timeless look. How much sense that makes is not clear given that people’s clothes or cars or even advertizing in the background usually give away the time. That said, both South East and Greater Atlanta do not easily give away their time periods (while I looked at one of the books, my wife kept guessing, not very successfully).
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Boy, those Germans sure are ahead of their time - it’s not even 2010, yet. Anyway, amongst the winners of the German Photo Book Prizes 2010: American Power by Mitch Epstein (gold) and No Direction Home by Andrej Krementschouk (silver). Congratulations to the photographers and publishers!
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We might be experiencing a bit of a renaissance of Japanese photography books in the West, or rather a naissance - since outside of a small circle of dedicated collectors Japanese photo books are not widely known. Eikoh Hosoe’s Kamaitachi was originally published in 1969, and it is here re-released, in a slightly extended form, by Aperture.
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Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density was published a few years ago as part of Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door, a book whose rather bad production quality did not do the work any justice. Fortunately, there now is Hong Kong Inside Outside, consisting of two-volumes in a slip case, with one book dedicated to the Hong Kong architecture1.
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Having just finished reading Colin Thubron’s In Siberia I’m wondering whether there is an equivalent of travel writing in photography. A travel writer will usually not be willing (or able) to spend the time it might take to become familiar with a place. Instead, s/he will create the essence of the writing out of fleeting, chance moments and encounters - this is what makes travel writing such a hard thing to do, because even though we all can (and probably) will experience any number of special moments when we travel, it takes a master writer to distill more out of them than just a collection of such moments.
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It might come as no surprise to see that a Finnish photographer would produce a portrait of arctic landscapes that involves ice. More specifically: a portrait of the arctic landscape using ice itself to create images. Even more specifically - and actually accurately: a portrait of the arctic landscape that looks as if everything was frozen in ice. In reality, the images in Jorma Puranen’s Icy Prospects were produced by painting wooden boards with high-gloss acrylic paint and by then photographing the light reflected from their surfaces.
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Recently, German magazine Photography Now approached me for an interview. To give me an idea of such interviews, they sent me an older issue, which featured a long and very interesting interview with Gerhard Steidl. Unfortunately, the interview was in German and not available online - so I asked the makers of Photography Now whether I could translate the interview and re-publish it here. With Photography Now having a whole cache of such interviews, we agreed on a series of translations - which are due to appear here, every two weeks or so (depending on, for example, how long it takes me to translate them), provided the interviewees agree to it. The following is the first such interview, published in Photography Now 1.2009. My thanks to Marte Kraeher, Claudia Stein, and the staff at Photography Now, and, of course, to a Gerhard Steidl. - JMC
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Described as “one of the most significant movements in post-World War II architecture” (source), the Case Study House Program “included the building and design of 36 experimental modern prototypes single-family homes in Southern California.” The Program’s announcement stated that it was “important that the best material available be used in the best possible way in order to arrive at a ‘good’ solution of each problem, which in the over-all program will be general enough to be of practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live.” (source) Case Study House No. 22, “L.A.’s original dream home”, was made famous by photographer Julius Shulman. The houses in Peter Bialobrzeski’s Case Study Homes are also “good solutions”, affordable to live in, but they lack the cool and glamour of Case Study House No. 22. They are ramshackle contraptions, erected in a place called Baseco, a squatter camp near Manila, home to maybe 70,000 people. Nobody knows, there is nobody to count them. It is hard to say whether these houses are dream homes for their occupants - I’m tempted to think they are not.
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Sally Mann’s Immediate Family is probably the most important portrait of a photographer’s children produced so far. It contains unbelievably strong and powerful images, and - crucially - it portrays the children in a way that goes way beyond the usual sentimentality that, unfortunately, is so common in this type of work. I have always been under the impression that because of its success (and despite the various utterly silly scandals around the nudity) Immediate Family must have been an immense burden for the photographer - maybe just a subconscious one: Where to go from there?
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Turning the camera onto one’s own country poses many risks. In order for the work to have lasting artistic value there are many problems to deal with. The work can become too sentimental, too nationalistic, too propagandistic, too positive or too negative, it can end up containing too much navel-gazing, it can look to similar to the ground-breaking work by someone else (or not similar enough), and the list goes on and on and on. In a nutshell, turning the camera onto one’s own country is one of the hardest thing to do. So here we have We English, in which Simon Roberts presents his images of England and the English - effortlessly steering around all thosee aforementioned obstacles.
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Andreas Gefeller’s Supervisions have been the subject of two books, first Supervisions and now Andreas Gefeller: Photographs. Let’s assume that you think buying one is enough - which one, though, and why that one? To make what could be a long story short, you want to buy the newer one, Andreas Gefeller: Photographs. Here is why.
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Andrej Krementschouk was born in a city then known as Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Russia. His career include a completed apprenticeship as a restorer of icons and metal objets d’art, and a diploma degree as chorus director, work as a freelance jeweller and restorer of icons, a diploma degree in Communication Design, with a focus in photography, the latter in Germany: Here is a true wanderer between the worlds. No Direction Home takes him back to Russia, as a photographer, to create a very intimate study of the country, and that means his own roots.
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Is there a crisis in photojournalism? By “crisis” people either mean the business (“with the media in crisis how will photojournalism survive?”) or the photography itself. I am on record for criticizing a subset of photojournalism for its overly generous use of cliches; but I don’t think there is a crisis in photojournalism, at least as far as the photography side is concerned (In the following, I’ll ignore the business side, since I’m not an expert on it, and since it’s besides the scope of this article). Georgian Spring - A Magnum Journal is a wonderful book for many reasons, one of them being the fact that it can serve as a good starting point for discussions of the nature of the beast, photojournalism’s imagery. Of course, it is a little bit unfair to use the book in such a way - shouldn’t I be talking about the topic of the book? But in this case, talking about the book almost inevitably involves talking about photojournalism itself. (more)
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Photography books have become so popular that there is a steadily growing number of books about them. The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 and The Photobook: A History, Vol. 2 are probably the most well known examples, but there also is Bertolotti’s Books Of Nudes. Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s is the latest addition to the genre. But why Japanese photobooks? Why not American, English, or German?
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Just like almost every aspect of our modern life, child beauty pageants have become an industry that generates a lot of money for those behind them. In a nutshell, here is how this works: “There is a minimum cost of $545 to enter the [Universal Royalty] pageant, which covers basic entry fees. Another $395 is needed for the maximum options of this pageant. The average cost of the pageant is about $655 which includes the formal wear, sports wear and dance. The average cost does not include travel, hotel and food, which can be up to an extra two hundred dollars. According to several stage mothers participating in Universal Royalty, dresses for sports and formal wear can cost up to $12,000 with a minimum of $1500.” (source) The title to win is the “grand supreme”: “The grand supreme winner receives one thousand dollars in cash, ten-inch crystal crown, six-foot trophy, supreme entry paid in full to nationals, tote bag, satin rhinestone banner, teddy bear, bouquet of long stem red roses, gifts, video of the pageant, and photo on advertisement of beauty pageant.” (same source) So in a nutshell, the winner gets her/his [parents’] money back, some trophies, plus a title (which might or might not mean something). The rest also get trophies and titles, but no money.
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We are not unfamiliar with new countries emerging from the break-up of older ones, or from parts becoming independent. In fact, after the fall of Communism, a whole series of new countries emerged. But a country vanishing? As it does turn out, the country formerly known as the German Democratic Republic - aka East Germany - did disappear. Mind you, its people and cities remained where they were. But in the course of what Germans call “re-unification” its political and economical system, along with large parts of its social fabric, were made to disappear. A very good way for non-Germans to get an idea of what this meant is to watch the movie Good Bye, Lenin!.
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Despite the fact that the vast majority of people have long moved into the digital age - buying their music online - records are not only still be sold, but even made. Sold mostly in independent record shops, record shops are now frequented by aging vinyl enthusiasts (for whom CDs or - gasp!- mp3s are just the work of the devil) and young hipsters (for whom owning something as ancient as a record player has now become kind of “cool”). In a somewhat similar fashion, second-hand book shops are still around (even though it hasn’t become “hip” or “cool” again to read - and it probably never will).
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In physics, the term power describes the rate at which energy is used or work is done, and the average power is defined as energy divided by time. Dividing energy by time seems like a weird concept, but it makes perfect sense. For all meanings of the word power it is always helpful to think of some sort of energy (electrical, chemical, political, …) being consumed to achieve a desired outcome (blow-dry one’s hair, make the car go to the grocery store, bring about meaningful health-care reform, …). Or put simply, if you don’t have any power you won’t be able to move anything. While a negative definition often is not very useful, in this case it is: While we humans usually only have a somewhat fuzzy idea what it feels like or might mean to have power, everybody knows what it feels like to have no power, whatever the circumstances might be.
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The history of Latin and South America is filled with episodes of the United States meddling in the affairs of other countries - and “meddling” here includes a vast range of activities, most notably invasions and putsches (for a sobering account of this history see the book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, written by a respected US mainstream journalist). There are a lot of very unfortunate consequences of this history, one of them being that in Latin and South American countries, somewhat shady politicians can always run on a strictly anti-US basis, dismissing all criticism by simply pointing out that the US has very little moral authority in that part of the world whatsoever. Of course, the reaction to shady politicians then immediately becomes polarized, and, ultimately, you’re either supposed to be a supporter or an opponent; but regardless of what you are, discussions always become ugly.
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Beauty is most commonly associated with landscapes that have something obvious to offer: We want to be wowed. Everything else is “boring”. We don’t have time for that. Of course, whether we are doing ourselves a favour by constantly demanding to be entertained or at least tickled is not quite so clear: Aren’t we setting ourselves up like a bunch of junkies, always looking out for the next trip?
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As humanity’s technological abilities expanded over the course of the 20th Century, its willingness to slaughter large numbers of its own members remained the same. Developing new means of mass slaughter out of new technologies - where those new technologies were not in fact the sole purpose of such slaughter - has kept legions of scientists busy; and for almost every technology there has been a sinister application. For each and every one of those applications there have been enough people to find ways to justify their use so that what could potentially be used to killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in no time actually was employed for that very purpose. Artists have struggled to comprehend what was and still is actually happening - to give a voice to those who perished, to understand why humans have so eagerly embraced the technologies made possible by enlightenment, but so vigorously rejected the “categorical imperative” that was supposed to be part of enlightenment.
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Previously announced and now on its way to book shops: Hellen van Meene’s new book Tout va disparaitre (note: Amazon has the title and cover wrong). The book contains new photography, taken over the past few years in The Netherlands, Russia, and the US.
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Collections of portfolios that broadly center on Western Europe/The United States and Eastern Europe (with a bit of China in the mix), West and East, each edited/curated by Regina Maria Anzenberger, present broad views of what “West” and “East” might stand for. While East appears to contain only photographers from the Anzenberger Agency, West includes some non-agency members. I’ve had both books on my pile of books to review for a while, simply because I just did not and do not know what to make of them.
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There is a reason why Arnold Newman is one of the most renowned American portrait photographers. Newman died in 2006, at the age of 88, looking back to a career that spanned six decades. If the name does not ring a bell, you will certainly be familiar with at least some of his work, be it his portrait of composer Igor Stravinsky or his portrait of industrialist and convicted war criminal Alfried Krupp. Alfred Newman - Five Decades, originally published in 1986, contains over one hundred of his images, most of them environmental portraits, but also other work.
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Being familiar with Hans-Christian Schink’s wonderful Traffic Projects (see some of the images from the book here), finding LA was a bit of a surprise for me (even though I should have known from his most recent work - examples in the top row on this page that Schink is not a large-format one-trick pony). LA of course depicts Los Angeles, and it does it in two different ways. The first is similar to what Schink did with his German highway construction projects: Large-format photographs of deserted places against a grey, blank sky. I’m not that familiar with LA (but familiar enough to say that I could never live there), but I wouldn’t have expected to see photographs of that city without anybody (incl. only parked but no moving cars) around.
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There is a branch of portraiture that I want to call “conceptual portraiture”. In a nutshell - please don’t take this as some strict theoretical definition because it is not - its practitioners all seem to share some discomfort with the way standard portraiture is done, so they add something else to the process of taking a portrait to get closer to whatever it might be they want to show (feelings, or more spontaneity, or whatever else). The biggest problem with conceptual portraiture is that many of these projects fail to achieve their goals: It’s almost as if they decided to get rid off some straight-jacket, only to climb into a very narrow box which allows no movement.
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The other day, the current governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, criticizing President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan. The article contained the usual nonsense that Republican politicians have been peddling for quite a while now, and as John Kerry noted, the piece focused “on everything but the single grave challenge that forms the basis of all of our actions: the crisis of global climate change.” Of course, most Republicans either don’t believe that global climate change (aka global warming) exists at all or that it is the result of human industrial activity, and regardless they usually don’t bother dealing with actual facts. It would be rather straightforward for Governor Palin to see the effects of global warming in her home state of Alaska.
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The background: New Orleans, ca. 1912, the red-light district called “Storyville”. The “hero”: E.J. Bellocq, a photographer there, whose active period extends into the 1940s. The other “hero”: Lee Friedlander, whose interest in jazz and in the city brings him to New Orleans, where through a collector named Larry Borenstein he first comes across the (re-printed) photographs and then the original glass plates of some of Bellocq’s work, found in a desk after his death. In 1966, Friedlander acquires the plates - by now, some of them heavily damaged by years of abuse by the elements, neglect and acts of censorship (some of the faces are scratched out). Through a bit of trial and error Friedlander manages to produce a full set of prints, eighty-nine of them, thirty-four of which (there are thirty-three numbered plates plus one image in the front) are reproduced in Storyville Portraits, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 (using an edit by John Szarkowski).
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As I mentioned on this blog before, there is a little bit of soul searching going on in photojournalistic circles. What I find fascinating about the debates and commentaries I’ve seen is the implicit acknowledgment that fine-art photographers not only managed to expand the public’s idea of what photography can look like, but they can also produce work that challenges standard photojournalistic practice. Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain can be seen as a good example.
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Featuring photography by Elmar Haardt (on his website it’s the Nord project) and Bernd Kleinheisterkamp (his Siedlung project), Angesichts der Lage/In View of the Situation is a portrait of the same place, a part of the German city of Essen. Previously one of the most eminent industrial places in Germany, if not Europe (home of the Krupp family), Essen has undergone a lot of changes; and while it still is the home of a lot of corporations, it has also developed into a major arts center.
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You wouldn’t know this from their covers, but On the Human Being, International Photography, 1900-1950 and On the Human Being, International Photography, 1950-2000 are actually two pretty good books. I had wanted to mention these a while ago already, but I was unable to find them online - until this morning, when I was looking for something entirely different.
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Architecture forms one of the pillars of history, or at least of memory. Where there is no architecture, where there are no buildings, a sense of history is much harder - if not often impossible - to discern. History, of course, is not something (metaphorically) set in stone, whereas architecture usually is (remember, wooden buildings usually don’t last across the time scales history deals with). So when we change history - or maybe one would want to “write when we change the way we interpret and view the facts that form the foundation of history” - or when history itself changes, we often have to change our thinking about architecture as well. There are few places where this is more obvious than Berlin.
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The Higley portrayed by Andrew Phelps in his book Higley is everywhere. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. There are different ways of dealing with this change (unfortunately, the idea of “change” has recently been turned into a political cliché, where it can mean anything and nothing). It is tempting to use photography as a way to refuse to participate in change or, at least, to protest against it: You take some photographs, and then you hold them up and say “Here, look at this, this is all gone now!” Or you can simply document, neither looking back or forward, and you then let the images speak and the viewers decide. This latter approach is Phelps’: “it’s not my place to judge.”
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Yishay Garbasz’s mother was born in Berlin, Germany, four years before her family fled from the Nazis to Holland. During the war, she was deported first to Westerbork, then on to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Christianstadt, and finally - via a death march - to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated by British forces in 1945. “It has been over sixty years since these events happened to my mother,” writes Garbasz, “yet their emotional legacy has shaped our family in many painful ways.” And: “Her complex behaviors made it very difficult for me to love her, and I had to dig very deep in order to uncover my true feelings and the underlying reasons for her behavior.”
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Over the past few years, suburbia has been a frequent news source. When the price of gasoline hit the $4 mark, there was talk that the time of suburbia was finally past, as transportation costs made life there unaffordable. Gas prices have since come down, in part because of a deep recession, which was partly triggered by a collapse of the housing bubble - now suburbia is in the news since it spots so many empty houses, many of them abandoned or not even fully built. Of course, suburbia has always been based on an unsustainable life style, but it was fun (at least for those happy to live there) while it lasted.
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On July 1, 1990, a few months before re-unification, (then West) German Chancellor Helmut Kohl addressed West and East Germans on TV and said “No one will be worse off than before - but many will be better off. […] If we work together, we will be able to turn Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania and Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into blooming landscapes again, places where living and working really pays off.” It was not to be. One of the dirty secrets of the re-unification of Germany is that it was not run efficiently and well planned. A lot of money was spent, and the many infrastructure projects did create a short-lived economic boom, but a lot of money was wasted, poured into projects that nobody needed or needs; and the dismantling of East Germany’s ancient industries created large waste lands: blooming landscapes yet again, but with few people to enjoy it and a staggering rise in the number of political extremists, both to the very left (neo-Communist) and the very left (neo-Nazi).
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