Roger Ballen’s work is often deemed to be disturbing. I don’t think is actually is (my idea of “disturbing” might be different from yours), but we can probably easily agree on calling him one of the most creative photographers currently producing work. Boarding House contains his most recent images, and it shows the photographer following the directions laid out in his earlier Shadow Chamber.
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Just like Doug Dubois’ All the Days and Nights, Thekla Ehling’s Sommerherz is a portrait of family life. Unlike Doug, Thekla focused on her own children and on friends.
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Just a little while ago, Doug Dubois was maybe the archetypical photographers’ photographer: An artist well known and deeply admired by other practitioners, but without the wider recognition that so many of his colleagues felt he deserved. Thankfully, there now is All the Days and Nights, which comprises Doug’s photography from 1994 onwards. Fifteen years of photography of his own family.
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With a digital camera it is simple to take your own photo every day, for a few years (or however long you want to go for). Of course, there are many other ways to take your own photo. Ria van Dijk, a woman living in The Netherlands, found one: She shot her own portrait for the past seventy years. She used a rifle rigged to a camera at the various fairs she went to, getting a photo every time she hit bull’s eye. The only years she missed were those when the actual shooting happened: There is a gap from 1939 to 1948. But otherwise, she shot her photo, year after year, and she kept them all. Here they are, in In Almost Every Picture 7: Shooting Gallery.
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Thomas Ruff might be one of the most creative and certainly inventive photographers of our time. In fact, many people - especially adherents of photographic orthodoxy - will probably vehemently deny that most of Ruff’s recent work is actually photography. In general debates about whether something is photography or not, and if it’s not photography then what else, are not terribly exciting, and there is no need to get into them here. What is more interesting is to look at that work and to see what it does (call it photography, graphic design, visual art, whatever).
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Produced in collaboration with Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography comes the second installment of the Midwest Photographers Publication Project (MP3), MP3 Volume II. MP3 Volume II showcases the work of three young photographers, Curtis Mann, John Opera and Stacia Yeapanis. Just like its first version, MP3 Volume II is a set of three separate books in a slipcase, so it seems best to discuss the individual books separately.
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Milton Rogovin is one of those underappreciated photographers. His work could maybe be termed the photographic equivalent of Studs Terkel’s radio shows: Rogovin took photos of people who worked hard for their money and who often were very poor. Originally an optometrist with an interest in photography, in 1957 he was summoned before one of the House Committees on Un-American Activities, named “Buffalo’s No. 1 Communist.” Rogovin refused to give anything but his name and occupation, later noting how “a few of our former ‘friends’ […] testified against us in closed sessions.” Subsequently, most of his business withered away, and the family survived on his wife Anne’s salary (who had had to take a teaching job in the suburbs following her own refusal to sign Buffalo’s ‘Loyalty Oath’ for their school system). With his business mostly gone, Rogovin started to focus on photography.
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Photographic portrait studios have been well established as treasure troves of photography. The sheer number of yet-to-be discovered photographers who have been (or were) taking people’s photos in their portrait studios is hard to estimate. For me, the value of most of those discoveries is two-fold: First, it is amazing how many unknown photographers are (or were) in fact true masters of portraiture, often deviating quite a bit from standard practice. Second, with a larger collection of photography, the studios’ archives become a mirror of the society they are (or were) embedded in.
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“The phone had rung and I had been offered an artist’s residency. I had hastily answered yes, going to stay in a small town in the Arctic for two months was what I wanted to do.” Thus begins the 24 page introduction to The Place of No Roads, written by Ville Lenkkeri, the photographer. I will admit that with any photography book, I always skip the text to look at the images first, to then return to the text later. For once, I wish I had done it the other way around.
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Located about 50 miles south of Boston and just outside Rhode Island, Fall River is one of the countless American cities that is only a hollow shell of its former self. If you have ever driven from New York City to Cape Cod, it’s one of the towns that you pass through. It’s unlikely you’ve noticed it. Its motto is “We’ll Try.” (says Wikipedia).
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After more than twenty years of work, Paul Shambroom has assembled a large body of work, most of whose parts deal with aspects of power (for some details, see my conversation with Paul). In early 2008, Paul’s work became the subject of a retrospective, first shown at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; and thankfully, a companion book (the word “catalogue” doesn’t really do it full justice) was produced: Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power.
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There is no doubt that the re-release of Charlie Parker self-titled album is marvelous - if you stick with the tracks that were on the original release, that is. Just like many jazz albums, “re-mastered” and re-packaged to appeal to those who might already possess an earlier incarnation (or even more than one, since a true fan might own a vinyl version and the first CD release, for example), it comes with a whole bunch of “bonus” tracks, including - but not limited to - aborted tracks. Does anybody really need to listen to 13 seconds of “Confirmation” (and those 13 seconds include studio chatter)? Actually, you can decide for yourself if you go to Amazon’s page for the album and click the little “play” button next to track 23: Since Amazon allows you to listen to 30 second excerpts, you can experience the whole thing.
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Oxbow Archive by Joel Sternfeld is a book that I had been looking forward to. It contains photographs taken in a small patch of land - the East Meadows - right outside the city of Northampton in Western Massachusetts. I live not ten minutes away from the East Meadows, and ever since moving here I have been thinking about landscape photography.
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The difference between a good photo book and a great one is often that in the latter case, somebody paid attention to detail. Sometimes, the smallest things can make a huge difference. Adam Bartos’ Yard Sale Photographs provides an excellent example. The book cover looks just like what you would find at an actual yard sale, including, and this is the detail, the round blue sticker with the price (“$1-“). The cover, of course, doesn’t make a book, but it usually dots the i.
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The number of photography books published every year has witnessed a steady growth. Books themselves (at least some of them) have become collectible items. Since most photography books are published in rather small editions - a couple thousand or so - many photography books are sold out and are only available second hand, often for staggering sums of money. While this is good news for people interested in assembling a valuable collection, it’s bad news for people whose sole focus in on the photography and not so much on the value of a book. For example, I have been looking to get this book, but I clearly can’t afford to spend that kind of money.
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“Photographs capture a moment in time,” writes Jessica Backhaus in the afterword of her book What Still Remains. If anything, this sentence contains the essence of its photography: Moment in time. Or at least half of it, since the other, unspoken, half is occupied by a photographer who notices something about a moment and takes a photograph.
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I could be entirely wrong, but I think that as the photography book market has expanded, so have photography books themselves. This, in part, reflects the fact that the photographs in those books typically tend to come in very large sizes.
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There is a remarkable quote in Albrecht Tübke’s Portraits: “I want to show people from a variety of different backgrounds, as I am interested in the range of ways in which people present their public face. Though constant exposure to the multitude of public personae with which we are presented, we have become anaesthetised to the range of individuals that surround us. In this project, I am attempting to distil out something of the essence of that individual.” If we needed a key to how to read his images, here it would be, in “the range of ways in which people present their public face”. Given how similar Tübke’s photographs are to those of The Sartorialist and Rineke Dijkstra, we are given a clue what to look for: It’s not what the people portrayed by Tübke are wearing (even though that is part of it), it goes way beyond that.
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Just like any other aspect of our modern Western lives, health care has been turned into an industrialized business, with all its advantages and disadvantages (for a particularly noxious example, read this article). Their associations with illness and death aside, there is a reason why most people are very hesitant to go to a hospital (unless they have to): Hospitals are extremely unpleasant places. Thus most people probably prefer not to look too closely at the actual environment inside a hospital while being there. Enters Clinic. Clinic “explores the aesthetic of the medical world through contemporary photography” through the eyes of eleven photographers (Olivier Amsellem, Constant Anée, Eric Baudelaire, Geoffroy de Boismenu [who shot this reviewer’s favourite section of the book], Christophe Bourguedieu, Jacqueline Hassink, Albrecht Kunkel, Ville Lenkkeri, Matthew Monteith, Mario Palmieri, and Stefan Ruiz), with artistic director Rémi Faucheux.
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It is now not quite twenty years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, and things have not exactly played out as people had hoped. The country now has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the world, a staggering AIDS/HIV rate, and an enormous problem with crime (the reasons for all of this of course are too complex to discuss them here). Add to that what one could call “the usual problems” - those also known from other countries, such as migration from the countryside to big cities - and you end up with a volatile mix, which recently led to pogroms that left scores of migrants dead. Crime has been one of the main focus points Mikhael Subotzky (who in 2007 became a Magnum nominee) decided to look at. After working on prisons, in 2006, he decided to portray issues of incarceration and social marginalisation in a small town. He picked Beaufort West, a town of 37,000, where two-thirds of the adult population are out of work, and the homicide rate is ten times that of New York City. Most South Africans know Beaufort West only from driving through - one of the main highways cuts right through town. In fact, there’s a traffic circle, right in the center of town, in the center of which the prison is located. Most people don’t even notice while driving through.
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We have recently witnessed a vastly increased interest in photography done in China by Westerners. At the same time, Chinese photography has gained a certain amount of exposure in the West - as part of Chinese art being the latest big trend in the art world. For the most part, though, finding Chinese photography (or art) in book form is still a challenge - a few notable exceptions, as always, proving the point. And it would seem that most Western (publishers’) attention is directed at the new and shiny and its repercussions. Photographs of the rapid growth of various Chinese cities and factories and of the growing ecological price being paid for them have now become almost another one of the many photographic clichés: Lots of shiny skyscrapers, young Chinese people with mobile phones in discos (or at car shows), factories mass-producing cheap products to be sold at Walmart - OK, we get the picture.
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After seeing Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density one of my thoughts was that the project should have been done in the United States. Granted, there is a lot of anonymous, hideous architecture, housing thousands and thousands of people, in many parts of the world. But the story of skyscrapers and huge apartment buildings, all together in small spaces, is tied to the United States - and even though I’m not an expert in the architecture of skyscrapers up until recently the list of the largest ones was mostly populated by buildings in the US.
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There is a period in your life when you’re not old enough to fully realize what’s going on, so that you’re still reduced to taking it all in, maybe wondering why things are so ajar. I’ve always thought this is a good explanation for the “Eighties” craze that we witnessed a little while ago - most of the people who really enjoyed the re-enactment hadn’t lived through the 1980s (if they had, they would have surely noticed that it was a hideous time). Since I was born in 1968, for me the 1970s are the period where things just kept happening, with me just noticing but not understanding. I remember driving in my dad’s car, listening to Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” being number one in the US and then walking on those same Autobahns, which were closed down for traffic because oil was too expensive. I thought that all was kind of neat, but then what six-year olds find neat, most adults might not enjoy all that much.
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These are exciting times for contemporary photography, with vast amounts of new work to be seen, vast numbers of books published, vast numbers of young photographers emerging. Looking back over the past few years, one thing appears to be unchanged, though: Only every so often, one encounters photography that has the ability to stop one in its tracks, that makes everything else disappear for a moment. Those moments are to be cherished, especially since they’re so rare, so unpredictable.
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Television famously has been described as a self-referential medium, but it appears that it might be time to move beyond that. TV has now come to create its own actual reality, in what one could call an evolutionary step. And unlike in the case of the American ultra-conservatives’ version of such a newly (“faith based”) reality, this one is truly going to stay with us: the “faith based” reality only exists if you believe in it or, probably more accurately, if you want to believe in it; TV’s new reality exists even if you don’t want to believe it’s true. In this sense, what is called “reality TV” is not some form of TV any longer, it is a symbiosis of reality and TV, and it is not going away if we switch off the TV set.
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The fall of Communism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and subsequent economic “shock therapies” have resulted in drastic changes all over Eastern Europe, with some countries being hit harder than others. For example, the male life expectancy in Russia has dropped to less than 59 years. Another example is the meteoric rise of the number of people who are either HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS in the Ukraine.
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The year 1968 might be considered the time when the Sixties ended prematurely. Soviet boots had crushed what people in Prague called “socialism with a human face”, students revolting in France and Germany had achieved… well… what? And by the end of 1968, two American public figures who had inspired millions of people with their visions, Dr. Martin Luther King jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were dead, both assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president, promising law and order and peace in Southeast Asia (instead, the American people got a man who put himself above the law and who secretly expanded the Vietnam war into Cambodia).
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At the beginning of the 21st Century, photojournalism finds itself in a somewhat uncomfortable position. On the one had, it has become an established and widely accepted form of journalism. On the other hand, its main language - grainy, crooked, and/or partially blurry images, often still black and white - has lost most of its impact because of the fact that it has become so ubiquitous. Of course, I am somewhat exaggerating, but while some of the most egregious facts of life on this planet have not changed at all over the past thirty, forty, fifty years (take, for example, widespread poverty and starvation, combined with political corruption, in large parts of Africa), we, as the viewers of photojournalism, simply are not quite as affected any longer, simply because we are so familiar with the imagery. Just the other day, I read a comment where someone talked about the work of an American photojournalist who had covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the complaint being that the photographer had failed to deliver “something new”. Just covering the wars, it seems, is not good enough. Just showing what war does - what our war does - is not good enough, we have to see something new. This is because I do not envy photojournalists, especially since I know, from having talked to some of them, that they often are very engaged and very interested in making the world look at the injustice and/or violence they are trying to cover.
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Signs is Peter Granser’s third book about a part of the US (after Sun City and Coney Island), this time focusing on Texas. According to the publisher’s description, Signs “draws a telling picture of life today in America. For it, Granser traveled 12,000 miles through the ‘republic’ of Texas. With keen and objective precision, he focuses in his color photographs on the plethora of relics and signs that proliferate across the landscape and provide us with insights into the strange and contradictory state of contemporary American identity.”
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Edgar Martins’ Topologies is a product of Aperture Foundation’s “First Book Initiative”, which aims at publishing “new work by emerging artists”, and it contains what one might call photographs of landscapes. I do not know what it is that often makes artists somewhat reluctant to call such photographs what they are: landscapes. I do suspect that using the word “landscape” might maybe pre-set the viewer’s mind to something not desired. But then what effect does “topologies” achieve? After “typologies”, we now got “topologies”?
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Popular folklore has it that German photographers have had a dominating influence on the aesthetics of contemporary photography. In this context, “German photographers” means people from Düsseldorf, with their “cool”, “detached” style and their “typologies”. Needless to say, this image is a mere caricature, and a pretty shoddily drawn one at that. In reality, German photography has become a very important part of contemporary photography, but while the Düsseldorf Art Academie has spawned quite a few well-known practitioners, there are many others whose work doesn’t conform at all to the “cool” and “unpersonal” style that is supposed to be what makes the “German” in “German photography”. To wit: Wolfgang Tillmans.
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In spite of a “hot” photography book market, books giving an overview of contemporary photography are still fairly rare. Photo Art, edited by Uta Grosenick and Thomas Seelig and published by Aperture, is the latest and most welcome attempt to fill in the gap. Listing a whooping 112 artists, according to the editors the book is “a comprehensive survey of photography in the early 21st century”.
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At the beginning of the 21st Century, it seems that the only way to discover landscapes never seen before is to send robots and satellites to other planets or their moons. Those landscapes then amaze us, and I often wonder why that is. Have we really seen everything there is to see about our home planet? Is it the often somewhat unusual aesthetic of un-Earth-ly images, which are taken by often monochromatic, low-resolution cameras and only get their final look via the computer algorithms of scientists? Or is it just us, the viewers, being blasé after having seen everything? Everything?
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Why would someone load an 8x10 camera - a heavy and cumbersome piece of photographic equipment - into a small, inflatable craft and them move up the coast of Greenland to take photographs? There are probably many reasons for such an endeavour, and it would seem that picking just a single one would miss too many other important aspects. In that sense, treating Broken Line by Olaf Otto Becker as merely a book of landscapes, would be too one-dimensional.
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Andreas Gursky is one of the most important living photographers, despite the fact that his work is often being judged on nothing but else but its size or its price. While his photos are indeed monumental, size is merely a means to an end - as is obvious to a viewer who is confronted by one of Gursky’s photographs. The prints are not big simply because he can print them big, but because they have to be big, because of what they show and how they show it.
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Architecture is a form of art, just like photography or painting, and as such it says something about its time and about us. We, as spectators, often don’t see it as art - and how could we, if we are surrounded by, say, MacMansions? But who thinks of art in a Thomas Kinkade or Anne Geddes store? But then once we are exposed to what rises above the forgettable we just know that we are looking at a work of art, and not just that, we can usually even walk inside. Almost by construction (pun unintentional, but not unwelcome), contemporary architecture also contains an element of transition, an idea of showing us the world of tomorrow, or maybe more precisely what we hope the world of tomorrow might look like. Using architecture, we express our desire for a better future - and maybe that’s the reason why in the US - unlike in Europe - older architecture is often simply neglected and left to decay: Who wants to maintain the old, when they can get something new?
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There is no shortage of books about Havana and its decaying infrastructure, or about Paris and its architectural treasures; and there are many other such places which to some extent have been transformed into photographic clichés. “If Calcutta had the appeal of Havana,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, wrote, “its palaces would long ago have become the subject of various coffee-table books.” And who says they don’t have that appeal? Thanks to Calcutta (Chitpur Road Neighborhoods), we now have the opportunity to see for ourselves.
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A great photography book is more than just a collection of photographs, regardless of how compelling those might be. It might ask questions, or it might present insight into a world unknown, or it might show the presence of a passionate vision - and it makes you want to come back to the images, so that you can re-immerse yourself. There is no doubt that Joakim Eskildsen and Cia Rinne’s The Roma Journeys easily satisfies all of these criteria.
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In the foreword to Chris Coekin’s Knock Three Times, David Campany calls Chris’ work “archeology of the present”, and I can’t think of a better phrase. In fact it could be applied to a lot of contemporary photography. The term archeology implies that someone is unearthing something, and while actual archeologists dig up yesterday’s people rubble and trash to then infer something about those people, photographers do it with what’s hidden in plain view. Of course, ‘hidden in plain view’ sounds like such a terrible cliché, but isn’t it also quite appropriate for what many people see but not notice?
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We live in a culture that reveres youth. That’s because on the average young people display the largest amounts of restraint, discipline, experience, and wisdom — all properties our culture thrives upon. On second thought, in the previous sentence “because” might not be the right word. In any case, if you want to find out about the lives of young people, you will not have to spend a lot of time on research. In fact, you won’t have to make any effort, since the lives of young people are on display everywhere.
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It is interesting to note that while we are led to believe that in photography the digital age is upon us, we are still far from understanding what it actually means. Despite the fact that for almost as long as we can think back photographs have been manipulated to show things not quite the way they were - with the Soviet Union’s erasing of disgraced persons being an especially perfidious example - and despite the fact that every little technical choice - colour versus b/w, saturated versus unsaturated, how to frame and how to crop, etc. - chips away at the idea of the absolute photographic truth, many of us still believe that a photograph shows us things the way they are; and the digital era has now brought the subject matter of photo manipulations into focus.
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The simple principle form follows function can be quite useful when trying to understand architecture: If a building has a certain purpose, then that purpose is expressed via the architecture. Thus, a building that looks like a prison in all likelihood is a prison (even though it might also be something else). As it turns out, in our modern world things appear to be somewhat more complicated. Of course, a confusion like this could mean that applying too simple a principle oversimplifies reality. But we could make things more interesting by assuming that form does indeed follow function and by then asking questions about what we see. Alternatively, we can take a building whose purpose we were told, but which does not really look like what we would have thought it might look like, and start thinking about that. Or, if we don’t feel like theorizing at all, we can look at a building or place and simply ask what kind of impression we get from looking at it. Regardless of how you approach the photography shown in Richard Ross’s Architecture of Authority, you are sure to feel quite uncomfortable about what you see, especially since the journey will take you to infamous places such as the Guantanamo Bay prison and Abu Ghraib.
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It is somewhat of a cliché that contemporary photography has become sterile. It is supposed to be addicted to cold imagery, which is mostly devoid of humans. In any cliché, there is a grain of truth. But because it really is just a tiny grain and because the cliché ultimately is just an oversimplification and distortion, it does not provide a useful basis from which to explore contemporary photography. A beautiful example for why this cliché is so flawed is provided by Taj Forer’s Threefold Sun. Threefold Sun is firmly rooted in contemporary photography, and its photos contain a very quiet poetry.
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If you take photos in a foreign land, they will be different from the photos taken by the people who live there, because what you see is unfamiliar (maybe even strange) for you. In the same fashion, when you view photos of a country, to a large extent your perception of what you see is guided by how much you know already about that country. In that sense, there is no absolute photographic truth of any given place, simply because your preconceptions (or their lack) will determine what you see. I think it is very important to keep this in mind when looking at books like Matthew Monteith’s Czech Eden (there are some sample photos from the book here).
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A little while ago, I went to Holland for work-related reasons, and I met up with two Dutch friends of mine. They had both lived in the town where I stayed for a few years, and they took me to meet friends of theirs. As it turned out, their friends have been spending the past ten years restoring (or maybe more accurately de-renovating) an old house. They have been taking out all the new stuff - windows, ceilings, floors, etc. - and they have been replacing it with materials from around the time when the house was built, many hundreds of years ago. I’m quite glad that I can say that I have seen lots of quite interesting things in my life, but this particular house was quite a unique experience. How often do you get to see individually hand-crafted Dutch tiles in a kitchen that is still being used? And how often do you get to know people who dig through the layers of debris underneath the mass produced new interior of an old house to look for those old tiles? When flying back home I spent the better part of the long flight regretting that I had foolishly turned down staying at that house (they had actually offered me to host me on a bed-and-breakfast basis) instead of at the two-star hotel right next to the highway (with my only defense - “Accomodation is being paid for, and I can’t get the bed and breakfast reimbursed” - sounding sadder and sadder every minute).
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There is a lot of very interesting photography coming out of China. Unfortunately, we do not get to see much of it in the West. What we do get get to see is photography produced by Westerners who go to China to cover what we like to refer to as the “economic miracle” and , thus, our view of China is skewed towards images of production, of vast urban development, of ecological disasters. While there is no doubt that there has been some quite amazing work by visitors to China (see, for example, my review of Edward Burtynsky’s ‘China’), living with such an incomplete picture is not very satisfactory - especially in the light of Chinese photography itself.
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The term “contemporary photography” implies we are dealing with something quite distinct from whatever was done in the past. In some sense, this is true, but only in part. Defining what contemporary photography is is not all that simple. Someone not familiar with this kind of photography once told me (after having looked at this blog) that contemporary photography was mostly “bleak, rural landscapes, hardworking portraits, or linear landscapes and interiors playing with shadows, contrasts and lighting”. Again, in some sense, that is true, just as it is true that if you were to describe contemporary literature you could say it is “lots of characters printed on paper, which describe the mostly dreadful lives of people, many of which have terrible problems.” (well, at least the kind of literature that I like to read, for example Philip Roth’s or Thomas Bernhard’s novels) Maybe I just defined what future academics will use as the benchmark definition of contemporary literature. It is quite a bit more likely, though, that my description misses so many aspects that it is quite useless - just like pointing towards “bleak landscapes” or “hardworking portraits” does not really tell us anything about what contemporary photography tries to achieve.
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