Book(s) of the Week(s)

Due diligence lacking: Clanet and Larsen on reindeer herders in Lappland

Don't you just hate it when you write something for publication, then just as the piece is hitting the stands you find something you wish you'd known about when you wrote the piece?

Dang. I do.

My short review of Erika Larsen's book on the Sami reindeer herders, published last year by emphas.is, is just coming out in Afterimage.

Yesterday, I was flipping through a magazine--the Winter 2013/2014 issue of Modern Farmer, of course--and discovered a portfolio titled "Reindeer Country." Covering five pages are very good photographs by Celine Clanet, with text by Andy Wright describing Clanet's experiences in Lappland, first as a tourist then as an "embedded" observer.

What my photo-bibliographic mind failed to recall while reviewing Larsen's intriguing book was that Photolucida published Maze, Clanet's collection of the Sami, three years earlier.

I would have mentioned this work, almost certainly, as prelude and complement to Larsen's efforts. Not in a competitive or preemptive way, just as a comparison worth considering. I could have used the excuse that Afterimage allotted me too few words to explore external connections. But my conscience would have troubled me, as it did today when I thought about what I'd seen, did a quick search on Clanet, and recalled one of the things I try to mention when I write about a set of photographs.

Spread from Maze by Celine Clanet via photo-eye

 So, there it is. Due diligence performed. Until I find the next precedent; anyone else got a pre-2010 book of Sami photographs I ought to consider?


P. S. This issue of Modern Farmer (the print component of a lifestyle site--FARM. FOOD. LIFE.--at modernfarmer.com. Check out their Culture Feature, "Celebrity Gentlemen Farmers: They're Just Like Us!" while you're there.) also includes work by Daniel Shea, Nicola Twilley's series on refrigeration, and a fashion spread--modern, indeed--by Aimee Brodeur. "Big up" to the art department there--director Sarah Gephart, photo director Luise Stauss, and photo editor Ayanna Quint.

Richard Grossman, "The Man in the Gray [or is that "Grey"?] Flannel Suit," and Photography Books

I read in today's New York Times about the death of publisher Richard Grossman. According to the obituary by Douglas Martin, Grossman "was photographed, anonymously, for the cover of one edition of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" by Sloan Wilson, originally published in 1955, and the following year made into a movie starring Gregory Peck in the title role.

Martin quotes a friend of Grossman's as noting that "his pose was jaunty--the perfect suit with his back to the camera."

I searched Google Images and LibraryThing to locate covers of Wilson's book that would fit the bill.

Various covers of The Man... from LibraryThing

One image is of Peck, wearing the suit, dressed for the movie. And thus, clearly not anonymous or from the back, and appearing in variants on several other covers.

There is a graphic, probably derived from a photograph, appearing in the first row, far right, and the third row, far left, gracing the cover of a fairly recent Spanish language edition of the book (El hombre del traje gris, with a prologue by Jonathan Franzen).

So, my money is on Grossman's posterior aspect appearing in the positive/negative, animus/anima, figure/silhouette cover in the middle of the middle row, with its UK spelling of the operative color--"Grey" here, but "Gray" in all the other English-language editions I found. This paperback edition was published by PAN Books (based in West Molesey, Surrey, England - thanks to Tikit Resources at http://www.tikit.net/ for their compilation of data) in 1958.

Also on the bookshelves in 1958, at least across the Channel in France, was Robert Frank's Les Americains, published by Delpire (and in the US the next year, from Grove Press). Frank's photographs offered the flip side of the "gray flannel suit" version of America.

In partnership with Aperture, Grossman Publishers, started in 1962, released a second US edition of The Americans in 1969.

One of Grossman's biggest books was Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1965) which certainly annoyed a few men in gray suits.

While Frank's magnum opus may be the Grossman publication best known in photo circles, it was not the only recognized work from the company. Other photography books first released by Grossman Publishers include, in order by photographer or editor:

• Cornell Capa, ed., The Concerned Photographer 2 (1972; including work by Riboud, Vishniac, Davidson, Parks, Haas, Hamaya, McCullin, and W. E. Smith)
• Robert Capa, Images of War (1964)
• Elliott Erwitt, Son of Bitch (1974)
• Leonard Freed, Black in White America (1968) and Made in Germany (1970)
• Mark Jury, The Vietnam Photo Book (1971)
• Andre Kertesz, On Reading (1971), Sixty Years in Photography (1972), and J'aime Paris (1974)
• Dorothea Lange, To A Cabin (1973)
• Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room (1974)
• W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith, Minimata (1975; with Aperture)
• Dennis Stock, California Trip (1970)
• Paul Strand, Tir A'Mhurain: Outer Hebrides (1968; in conjunction with Aperture)
• Adam Clark Vroman, Dwellers at the Source (1973)

And these are culled from the first 191 entries on ABE's list of 6,292 results from a search for Grossman Publishers, arranged from most to least expensive. There are over 6,000 items priced $200 and below still to be considered. (Be my guest.)

While it's clear that there wasn't a lot of women's photography appearing in Grossman's books--a fact we might attribute to the abundance of gray-suited guys a la Mad Men--it is also clear that Richard Grossman is responsible for an important chapter in the history of photography book publishing.

According to today's obituary, he also prompted some great work to be made. Here's Douglas Martin again:

One story [Grossman] liked to tell about his publishing days concerned a visit to the photographer Richard Avedon at his home on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He found Mr. Avedon crying.
"Where are your 35-millimeter cameras?" he said to Mr. Avedon, who was best known for his fashion work. "Get out on the streets immediately."
The haunted faces of grief that Mr. Avedon shot that day are considered some of his most moving work.

Richard Avedon, The Night of John F. Kennedy's Assassination, November 22, 1963

Thank you, Richard Grossman, for making it possible for us to see this moving work, and so much more through your will to publish great black-and-white photography against the grain of those ubiquitous flannel suits.

Douglas Martin, "Richard Grossman, 92, Crusading Publisher of 1960s" NYT 2/1/2014

From walking with reindeer to driving with Keillor - Erika Larsen

I was happily surprised to see the February 2014 issue of National Geographic lying on the kitchen table today; the cover feature was about the landscape of brains, and one of the pictorial features (not explicitly related to the cover story, as far as I could see) delved into the topic of Garrison Keillor's imagination. Or, rather, a survey of the real landscapes that have inspired his fictions of small towns and large lives enacted in this midwestern space we occupy.

The photographs accompanying the story are by Erika Larsen; Garrison wrote the accompanying piece, "There's No Place Like Home" and the captions for Erika's photos. I recently reviewed Larsen's book SAMI (emphas.is, 2013) for Afterimage (v. 41 no. 4, just released). So it was a pleasure to see her work in another, not unrelated context; Minnesota's tundra-esque qualities, which imbue humans with an extra-sensitive layer of aura, are comparable to those Larsen photographed earlier.

Interesting, too, to compare and contrast what National Geographic did in 1999 when it published "In Search of Lake Wobegon," a portfolio of Richard Olsenius' photographs on the theme, with commentary by Garrison. (This work was also published in a 2001 book with the same title.) Olsenius worked with a 4x5 and the general idea of finding woebegone scenes in Minnesota's Stearns County. Larsen's photographs range across the Minnesota landscape and establish a more psycho-emotive mapping of the terrain.

Link to Erika Larsen's photographs
Link to Garrison Keillor's text
erikalarsenphoto.com

Book of the Year: Anatomy, by Malerie Marder

In November I saw a PDF version of Malerie Marder's new book, published by Twin Palms. On screen, and when I received the finished book, it made a deep impression, both intellectually and viscerally. It has lingered and haunted me since. No other book this year, or in several years, has had such an impact on me.

Marder's work is provocative, and she has refined her skills to a point of dramatic simplicity. The women she has photographed, Dutch prostitutes, embody and stir desire as a way of life. In this heterosexual male's opinion, however, they are repulsive, anything but attractive; there is not a figure, a face, or a bodily pose that draws me. Except that Marder has photographed these women, singly and in staged groups, in ways that prompt consideration of them as objects of allure--colors, settings, costumes, lighting, focus, all tuned to radiate sensuality. And the women, a dramatis personae largely uncostumed, are complicit, clearly engaged in a collaborative effort to simulate...what? Sexiness? Seduction? If anything, a somber self-awareness seems the operative mode.

The antitheses to these disaffected tarts would be the images E. J. Bellocq made in New Orleans' Storyville bordellos, of prostitutes jiving the photographer, caught in between-session settings with little on their minds or bodies but a benign sense of play. There's no play in Marder's work, even in friezes that resemble ill-wrought takes on Greek tableaux. But there are occasional twists of irony, of the artist tipping her hat, that hint at a subversive willingness to tweak and tease, to remind us that the optical is the central allusion here.

"It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph," Robert Frank wrote. I believe the same holds true when looking at photographs, individually or collected in some form--one's reaction in the moment of encounter constitutes a lasting, meaningful take on that image, no matter what meta-detail is appended later. One must watch oneself watching photographs--the viewer, like the prostitutes in her images and Marder herself, must remain conscious of his or her own circumstances while regarding this work.

Vision runs amok in these photographs, never clarifying where one should look for meaning. And I'm afraid my writing can't offer much, either. Georges Bataille's comments on the insufficiency of writing as a tool for describing lives, compared to prostitute's bodies, is inscribed on the jacket-less cover of the book.* I can't testify to the truth of this. What I do know is the deep sense of disturbance these photographs create in me. Writing to Twin Palms' publicist, I expressed the following, feeling scarcely coherent after just viewing Anatomy in PDF.

I need to cleanse my brain after looking at this work. Deeply troubling. I'm not sure how I would write about this book. It really pushes my buttons. One thing that contributes to that is the shifting alignment of the pages, from the horizontal arrangement to the vertical. It's a big book, according to the description below, and that re-orienting might be easier to accomplish with the book than with my laptop. Actually, at 18 x 13 one might be able to reorient simply with the head and the eyes.

The bigger challenge is conceptual, reorienting to Marder's vision of the bodies in front of her. And to the self-conscious presentations that these women are creating. This collaboration really digs into some complex psycho-space. Exploring my own psyche, I am compelled to say that I find almost nothing sexy about this work, though there is a lot that is sexual about it. Anatomy is a cold and fitting title--not strictly physical anatomy, which is there but takes the shotgun seat next to the driver, a less tangible assessment of the shape of desire--men's, women's, photography's.

The photography itself is seductive. Marder's images destabilize the illicit qualities of her complex subject, which fluctuates between social commentary, analytical fetishism, and psychological portraiture. At once beguiling and stand-off-ish, the virtuosity in her work and her edit makes me reconsider this big book again and again. And I remain repulsed, and fascinated by my repulsion. Someone's desires must be channeling through these enactments; but who, why, how? This is Marder's most significant accomplishment--enacting desire by rejecting its most overt expression.

I think it's hard to name books of the year. Short of a receiving clerk at photo-eye, who can really see enough of the shelves-full that are published annually to arrive at a sufficient judgment? All I can do is respond to myself, to the books that have crossed my visual field, and say that Marder's Anatomy has poked, prodded, and provoked me like no other in many moons.

 

* The excerpt, originally in French, is from Bataille's essay "The Problems of Surrealism" and appears, in a variant translation by Michael Richardson, in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, published by Verso, 1994.

The book on Twin Palms' web site

WIIGF? The Aftermath Project

From theaftermathproject.org home page

What is war good for? Unfortunately, it has given us a lot of significant photography. I say unfortunate, because most war photographers would say they'd like to be out of a job. Sara Terry, whose work as founder and artistic director of The Aftermath Project has been going on since 2005, might express the same wish.

Terry is an established photographer. Her multi-year project Bosnia's Long Road to Peace brought home to her the need to continue attending to locations of conflict long after headline news has turned its focus elsewhere. She guided the evolution of the project until 2012, when managing director Gretchen Landau joined the team. Together, the two oversee the grant program (deadline for 2014 funding is this November 11 link), the publications, and educational outreach for the non-profit.

It is useful to visit the project web site and review the work that has been done under Aftermath's aegis. It is critical to recognize that this is not combat photography. One must keep in mind Brady and O'Sullivan on Civil War battlefields, or Fenton on the Crimean Peninsula, in that there is no war currently happening in these photographs. (Those mid-19th century photographs would exemplify the most immediate kind of "aftermath" images.) The projects supported reflect not only geo-political and ethno-cultural range, they also move way back in time. In some cases, armed aggression ended decades before the contemporary photographer arrived. The effects of conflict may endure beyond the lives of firsthand witnesses. The suggestion is implicit; there may, in fact, be very little life on this planet that does not qualify for attention as life impacted by war

I am one of two people who have written about The Aftermath Project in conjunction with their annual publications of award winners and finalists titled War is Only Half the Story:

• Volume 4 (2011; GS review published on photo-eye blog 9/10/2012)
• Volume 3 (2010; Joscelyn Jurich review published on photo-eye site 4/11/2011)
• Volume 2 (2009; GS review published on photo-eye site 11/24/2009)

Volume 1 was published in December 2008 and featured Jim Goldberg's 2007 series "The New Europeans"; volume 5 was released last December. All volumes are listed as available through the project's web site; a link to the bookstore can be found in the banner on the home page.

Those awards are given each year to "working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of conflict." As I see it, the more such work gets noticed, the more the negative effects of armed conflict are imprinted on our species, the less likely we may be to think that war only affects those nearest to it, or that war actually solves anything. The more warlike we behave, the less human we become.


Link to 5-minute video about Sara Terry's work in Bosnia

theaftermathproject.org

Two books by Lewis Koch

Former Walker Art Center Librarian (my one-time boss, now, sadly, deceased) Rosemary Furtak working on the artist files in the museum's renovated and expanded library.

Seems like another lifetime, twenty years ago, when I was a library assistant at the Walker Art Center. One of the great things about that job, aside from the remarkable history of modern art that sat on the library’s shelves and in its drawers, was that from time to time I would be asked to meet with visiting photographers. Because I’d been pretty involved in the medium, could talk and listen well to photographers, even then as the 1990s were hitting their mid-decade stride, and I liked to entertain myself thinking there might be a future for me at the Walker if only they’d allow a curator to concentrate on one medium as I had on photography.

Well, that was not to be. I got distracted by medium-specific projects, including editing a quarterly journal for pARTs Photographic Arts and curating a couple of exhibitions there, above the body shop on Lyndale and 28th, before the organization relocated to Lake Street, the decade ended, and pARTs became the Minnesota Center for Photography. And we all know what happened in 2008. Well, a few of us do.

One meeting I recall vividly was a discussion with Madison, WI-based Lewis Koch (b. 1949), who brought his portfolio in one day. We met in the Print Study room (hey, what was that about no medium-specificity at the Walker?) and spent a good hour looking at his Totems, vertical stacks of finely printed black-and-whites that combine social, cultural, natural, and linguistic tropes in what might be called piled psycho-typologies. Lewis struck me as a very thoughtful artist, very smart in a post-modernist way, but also a very fine photographic craftsman; his chops were all in place and appealing to the emerging esthete in me.

Accordion-folded totem by Lewis Koch, published by Nexus Press, Atlanta, 1993

Somewhere I have a copy of his publication Double Caution Totem (Nexus Press, 1993). Or maybe it stayed in the Walker Library, which would have been better. Foldouts of three of his treatments of streetlights and other vertical markers of the automotive landscape. Clearly, this is work meant to be experienced ensemble, single prints merged into a whole greater than its parts.

There’s an organic, almost effortless turn to make here into books, more conventional volumes that nonetheless reflect a collective. sequenced interest in images. Lewis recently sent me a couple of his independently published books, to update my awareness of his work and to forward along to Larissa Leclair and the Indie Photobook Library. There is Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text from the Real World (Borderland Books, 2009) and Bomber: A Chance Unwinding (Areness Press/Blurb, 2011).

Soda advertisement, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India, 1996. From Touchless Automatic Wonder by Lewis Koch

Touchless recalls both the glories of duotone vision (reproduction almost as good as good silver prints) and the intrigue of reading text as both strings of letters and photographic grain amassed into light and shadow. Koch shares a page with text recorder Nathan Lyons (almost 20 years Koch’s senior), though Koch’s work sings more clearly to me, bittersweet and rich like Franz Schubert’s musical Lieder. These are funny works, more strange-funny though than ha-ha-funny. They are straight-faced yet they elicit something uncanny, poignant, and acutely responsive to both contextual and optical vernacular.

From Bomber: A Chance Unwinding by Lewis Koch

Bomber, coming later and setting itself apart from Touchless and the Totems, is an intriguing evolution of Koch’s work. The book sets itself one subject in one place; the photographs Koch made are color, largely lacking text, and all from a rubble field atop Bomber Mountain in the Cloud Peak Wilderness, Big Horn National Forest, Wyoming. The mountain was named for a B-17 that crashed here in 1943; evidence of the crash, the tangled remains of the plane, are strewn across a site that is eminently undistinguished aside from the wreckage. Each fragment speaks of the betrayal of myth—whatever magic (Bernoulli effect, bah!) keeps planes in the air failed here, and the penalty was harsh. 

Koch’s photographs in the modest volume are sequenced with archival Air Force images, bombing maps, and Koch’s own concrete poetry, which weaves a thread that figuratively draws the pieces back together again. It is an elegiac and enlightened bit of work that shows a great deal of daring and personal commitment; making the photographs alone, which he did on two trips, was an ordeal in a very inhospitable place where there were, Koch writes:

Gleaming shards

on a field of stones—

rubble on rubble

and clouds, clouds

in every direction

including down,

There is something reflective in the Bomber project, signaled perhaps by its subtitle, A Chance Unwinding, which is an elusive yet provocative phrase. I feel the photographer unwinding, looking back, casting this arbitrary and indifferent landscape as a metaphoric field where he has operated for years, spotting and capturing moments of twisted brilliance lodged in between the mundane earthen boulders and the ethereal yet expansive clouds. A nice symbolic self-portrait of the artist as visual poet/alchemist, turning dross and jetsam into significant texts.

Good Reads - 2012

Out of the box. Chelbin, Casaca, Gaudiani, Briechle, Aftermath, Moukhin, Johansson, Ventura, Steacy, Asnin

In my role as a book reviewer and self-directed photography observer I increasingly gravitate toward publications that don't just please, amuse, or reinforce my preconceptions of what constitutes a good photography book. I don't feel qualified to make up a top ten list; to do so would be to suggest that I've glimpsed a large-enough percentage of the year's releases to judge which are the most accomplished or outstanding compared to the rest of the year's field. I'm not sure how anyone even finds the time to open enough packages to do that these days; how many new titles has the image-publishing world brought to our attention this year? I feel like I saw scarcely enough 2012 releases to retain "browser" status, let alone serve as a year-in-review, photo-bibliophile arbiter.

I think Alec Soth probably has a decent handle on the market, given all the books people send him. I found confirmation, befuddlement (so much I'd not heard of, let alone read), and even inspiration (Juergen Teller, what a hoot!) from his recently released list. I have cavils and quibbles with some of the titles on his list that I have looked through; in the case of Anthony Hernandez' Rodeo Drive, 1984 my feeling was one of disappointment that it wasn't better. I'd carried a fascination with that work since first seeing it in Aperture, circa 1985, and wanted to have a better re-encounter with it.

I'm enthusiastically with Alec in his admiration for Ron Jude's Lick Creek Line and J Carrier's Elementary Calculus; they accrue meaning and implication with every reading. And I do mean reading, or whatever one calls the closest attention one can give to photography's non-linear narratives--glancing through these books (especially from back to front) scarcely scratches their accomplishment.

What I want to do in re:photographica, year-round, is draw attention to books (images, themes, exhibitions, photo-phenomena, etc.) that move me. New slants on the medium that have shown me something either in or within photographs I wasn't sure I needed, or would ever be likely, to see. Images and texts that get under my skin, that won't leave me alone, that claim or alter an enduring chunk of my visual memory. Like Hernandez' views of over-processed, narcissists in the Rodeo Drive consumer ecosystem, with the benefit of hindsight and perspective. And always minding the caveat that great photographs don't necessarily make great books.

Photographs Not Taken  Edited by Will Steacy (Daylight)
Photocritic International A. D. Coleman (Web log)
The absence of realized images in the former and the dominance of considered ethics/politics in the latter characterize these good reads. Although most photographers do better writing with light than with words, there must be something about the "ones that got away" or were decided against that prompt eloquence. Coleman, for anyone who doesn't know, is one of photography's great agonistes. For over forty years he has served as a critic, in the truest sense of that word, on behalf of photography's better angels. His observations will always stir feelings in me, whether my head is nodding in agreement or shaking in opposition.

Deutschland Gerry Johansson (MACK)
A brilliant idea, executed with straightforward precision. An alphabetical list of German cities, each represented by name and one image. Illustrations tipped on to front and back covers. No dustjacket. Gorgeous, clean, and conceptually hefty, Deutschland makes me eager to seek out this Swedish photographer's previous books.

Blue Mud Swamp Filipe Casaca (Self-published)
As lush as the Johansson is austere; jacket-less hard cover with dark blue felt and perspective-bending view of tracked mud glued to the front. Comparable in its muteness, Casaca's book beguiles with surreal, faintly apocalyptic impressions of a modern China. The analogy, and an implied question of accuracy, beckons--Germany : Swedish eyes :: China : Portuguese

War is Only Half the Story, Vol. 5 (The Aftermath Project)
I have reviewed two earlier volumes of this sad chronicle of man's eternal inhumanity to man. I can't sufficiently stress its importance, but I will continue to cite it until its reason for being fades. WIIGF? You know the answer. 

Between Destinations Candace Plummer Gaudiani (Kehrer)
Over several years I have seen Gaudiani's work evolve and expand in four series related to views from moving trains. I was never sure, though, how it could possibly become a book. Guadiani found just the right team in San Francisco; Martin Venezky's Appetite Engineers performed the miracle of replicating the flickering transience of these images while still respecting the case they make for the transformation of American landscape. Brava, Candace.
 
The Automaton Paolo Ventura (Dewi Lewis)
I wrote about this for photo-eye online earlier this year. And I still find it moving, both wondrous and unsettling. It lasts.

My Moscow Igor Moukhin (Schilt)
A sprawling and alluring mess of a book, veering from sublime to repulsive, but rife with the energy of an insider both recording and experiencing the uneasy maturation of a formerly repressive society. There is skill here, though it takes a back seat to testimony and exuberance. To edit this more strictly would be to dilute its compulsive thrust.

Uncle Charlie Marc Asnin (Contrasto)
Like Moukhin, Asnin is emotionally enmeshed with his subject. And like Moukhin's book, Asnin's teems with an overabundance of descriptive wealth, from the 30 years of photographs to the edited and insinuatingly typeset conversations between the photographer and his tough-guy uncle. A remarkable hybrid view into the life of a troubled soul.

Gary Briechle Photographs Gary Briechle (Twin Palms)
From out of the blue this sequence of reproductions of poured emulsions opened on my table; I was unprepared for the impressions they made on me. And continue to make. This is one of those great photo-books that allows you to experience individual images as well as appreciate Twin Palms' typically outstanding editorial work that fashions a page-by-page evolution, one image segueing into the next to create an acutely detailed yet ultimately inconclusive narrative. You couldn't tell a story like this without photographs, and you couldn't tell the story these photographs tell with words.

Sailboats and Swans Michal Chelbin (Twin Palms)
Chelbin showed her work at the PRC in Boston shortly after I arrived there. I had heard about the work in prisons that we weren't able to show. I think that work, which shows up in this new volume, probes into dark areas of juvenile dysfunction that we aren't meant to experience in everyday life. Not to sound paranoid, but I find these imprisoned youth extremely unsettling, and have a hard time grasping what it must have been like to make these unusually tender portraits in such harsh circumstances. Chelbin has a singular purpose, and photographing may make her invincible.

I have two good reads to cover in separate posts. But I needed to get this one done first; all that pressure, time running out, etc etc. Stay tuned for Peckerwood revisited and two books by Lewis Koch.

Happy New Year, everyone.


Link to A. D. Coleman's Photocritic International

Links to photography book lists:

• From the International Center of Photography Library 
• photo-eye: The Best Books of 2012
• Alec Soth's list on the Little Brown Mushroom blog
• TIME Magazine

WIIGF? Exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath

On Veterans Day 2012, the MFAH debuts an unprecedented exhibition exploring the experience of war through the eyes of photographers. The exhibition gathers together nearly 500 objects, including photographs, books, magazines, albums, and photographic equipment.

Images recorded by more than 280 photographers, from 28 nations, span 6 continents and more than 165 years, from the Mexican-American War in the mid-1800s to present-day conflicts. Iconic photographs as well as previously unknown images are featured, taken by military photographers, commercial photographers (portrait and photojournalist), amateurs, and artists.

The exhibition examines the relationship between war and photography, exploring the types of photographs created during wartime, as well as by whom and for whom. Rather than being organized chronologically, or as a survey of 'greatest hits,' the images are arranged to show the progression of war: from the acts that instigate armed conflict to 'the fight,' to victory and defeat, and photos that memorialize a war, its combatants, and its victims. Portraits of servicemen, military and political leaders, and civilians are a consistent presence.

Accompanying the show is a 600-page illustrated catalogue featuring interviews and essays by curators, scholars, and military historians. After the Houston premiere, WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY travels to the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and the Brooklyn Museum.

[From the MFAH web site]

The exhibition, assembled by the MFAH photography team--Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, Will Michels, photographer and Glassell School of Art instructor, and Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant for photography--opens November 11 and runs until February 3.

I was alerted to this exhibition by an electronic news release from FotoFest which points out that MFAH has both the major show and two auxiliary shows, and there's a fourth at Houston Center for Photography (Soldier, At Ease, featuring Louie Palu, Erin Trieb, and the late Tim Hetherington; link to HCP web site). 

Plus, the museum is hosting a massive signing event in conjunction with the opening and the exhibition catalogue; some two dozen photographers, curators, and writers will be at MFAH on Saturday 11/10 to sign both the museum tome and their own publications.

Humans have an appetite for war that photography feeds. At best, collecting images in this omnibus fashion should incite protest and heighten our awareness of enduring injustice in the constant default to violence implied by war. What is war photography good for, if not this, if not to serve as a mnemonic compendium of our most abject failing as humans? Don't the most conscientious war photographers wish themselves out of a job? 

From the Bottom of a Well | Shawn Records

Some photographers fit the age in which they come to maturity. The times, that is, and the conditions of those times, seem ideally suited to the even progress of their work. Something about their modus operandi, their attitudes, the choices they make, and their spirit is congruent with the world around them. This is not something I know the moment I see a particular set of works; it becomes apparent after a while that photographer X seems especially well-tuned to the setting in which s/he is evolving. At the same time, photographer Y may be making more provocative work, but in a way that does not seem sustainable. Often it seems wedged into the image bank, a bull in the frame shop with no sense of swing or pace, while X keeps plugging along, working the main line with economy, insight, and minimal fanfare.

I've known Shawn Records for a few years, since the mid-aughts if I remember correctly, and have admired the steps his work has taken. (I also admire the time he has given to the community of photographers, especially those working in the Pacific Northwest and specifically involved in Photolucida; this isn't necessarily germane to his photography, but it helps explain to me why his accomplishments have a deeper resonance.) Shawn photographs from the heart, as much if not more than from his head. His new book is about China, a place that has entranced scores of photographers over the past decade. I sense the fondness he has for the cultural, topographical, historical, and material idiosyncrasies he saw during what one must assume was a whirlwind tour of the massive social phenomenon that is modern China.

Many of these photographs could have been taken with a cynical eye, and the image might not have been terribly different. But the net product of Records' book is not cynicism or critique. The photographic sequence is odd, enigmatic, and clearly seen; there is a cumulative accomplishment that bears attention. The book is modest, produced in soft cover with a misty landscape printed across front and back. Hovering in mid-space on the front cover is a dragonfly (no, it's not a smudge). That simple insect presence grounds us. This is no dream, no Shangri-La utopia. It is a framed piece of reality, and the land, throughout the book, functions as both backdrop and ideal.

And the dragonfly isn't the only insect to make an appearance. If the book had a soundtrack, it might well be a cicada chorus.

I would like to make a bigger case for Shawn Records as photographer X, but I need a bigger space in which to do so. Until then, I keep watching.

Links
Shawn Records
From the Bottom of a Well

Grace Before Dying | Lori Waselchuk on Daylight

I have been fortunate to know Lori and see this work evolve over the past several years. It was a special pleasure to have had the chance to exhibit the traveling set of framed photographs at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston earlier this year (link). Grace Before Dying addresses an intensely fascinating phenomenon--a hospice program designed and carried out by inmates at Angola state prison in Louisiana that has transformed both inmates and correctional staff. The benefits of caring are clearly drawn in Lori's distinctive work.

Lori Waselchuk's site for Grace Before Dying (including information about the book)

Albania in Transition 1991- | Hans Peter Jost + Christina Kleineidam (Benteli, 2011)

My initial response to this book was to channel Robert Frank in the spirit of ethno-cultural awareness. I felt handicapped by not knowing much of anything about Albania. I wondered how contemporary Albanians might respond to this depiction of their country transforming over the two decades since the fall of Communism. Would it be like late 1950s Americans responses to Frank's photographs (which were, on the whole, strongly negative)? Or does the effect of photographing change over time (almost twenty years in Jost's case) mitigate the "snapshot in time" quality that was such a shock to most initial readers of The Americans?

Perhaps the Albanians depicted in Jost's two time-frames were less self-conscious than the Americans who strutted and posed throughout Frank's images. Certainly the residents of Tirana, Korca, Elbasan, and other Albanian cities and villages were, given the evidence, fairly underdeveloped. That is, sort of agrarian, unworldly, simple. By 2010, however, Jost's record evinces a slide toward the commercial. Its borders opened to global capitalism, Albania has accrued ATMs, Coca-Cola, mobile phones, satellite dishes, and, in tribute to burgeoning ownership of private vehicles, roadside memorials to individuals killed in car wrecks.

One must look closely, though, to ascertain the vintage. Conventional indicators, like b&w versus color, or donkey carts versus limousines, are in short supply. Don't be surprised to be surprised if you play the "spot the old and new" game and lose. Especially in sections addressing religion, politics, gypsies, the military, and international relief efforts; Jost gives special attention to the efforts of a group of Swiss Franciscan nuns who seem to echo Jost's own concerns for the survival of this tenuous new democracy.

BTW, lest I forget to mention, Jost was born in 1953, in Zurich. Where, 29 years earlier, Robert Frank was born. Although using the elder Swiss as a model may not have been apt, my intuition wasn't totally off the mark. Perhaps the Swiss, in their professed and time-honored neutrality, are among the world's empaths when it comes to observing other cultures.

Hans Peter Jost

Link here to a review I wrote of Jost's 2009 publication (also with text by Christina Kleineidam), Cotton Worldwide.

My nonpopular year in books

 

How did photo-eye know how ill-prepared I was to consider the best books of 2011?

Having written for their year-end summary for two years, I thought I might be asked to contribute again. But as the year in books approached its close, I wondered about what I’d seen and been impressed by, new-book-wise, during the last twelve months. As I am most years I was deeply involved with books, including co-curating Threefold, a show of indie photobooks at the PRC, with Shane Lavalette and Larissa Leclair, and writing several essays for photographers' monographs. But apparently I missed a few new titles.

Scanning the published lists (including photo-eye’s 26, which cite 157 books, and the astounding, labor-of-love compendium from Marc Feustel of eyecurious noting books that appeared on at least two of 52 lists he surveyed--he had to find some way to winnow down the 313 different titles that were highlighted), I realize that my friends in Santa Fe understood something, perhaps unconsciously, about my bandwidth as a reader/reviewer. It is, I am surprised to realize and admit, quite narrow.

Where have I been this year? Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland; I’ve been around the photo circles, but still I saw only a small percentage of the books “everyone” is talking about (52 “best of” photobook lists? That’s a large bandwagon.). I have scarcely enough in-person experience of the  “bests,” let alone the entire 2011 crop, to pass judgment. I have 22 of the listed items; some I bought, others I was given (thanks Alec, Jen, Ken, Lydia, Susan), and a few I reviewed. There are ten titles that I was interested in before they were lionized, including one very highly ranked one that I am awaiting for review (Talk about pressure! See the review here.). And there a few I have coveted, and in more flush years I might have purchased.

I am, in short, woefully incapable of passing judgment on the burgeoning trade in contemporary photobooks. Many of the books on people’s lists were completely unfamiliar to me. I should add that I am also comparably clueless when it comes to year-end rankings of popular movies, video games, music (I’m not always sure which is the name of the group and which is the music they produced), and local bars. I am decidedly not enmeshed in the "popular." But at least in the realm of photography I consider myself more involved than most. Still, I am glad I didn’t have to rely on my fractional awareness of the year in publishing to make my own list. It is so hard to keep up these days.

Recent Acquisitions

A lot of books cross my desk, at work and at home, and wind up in piles before they can find their way to shelves. Some are given to me by photographers, for which I am grateful and often touched by the individual's generosity--or, rarely, concerned that they've over-committed themselves by sending out expensive materials without properly having vetted their targets. Some are sent by publishers, for which I am sometimes grateful, sometimes embarrassed, sometimes inspired to write. Some are sent expressly for reviewing, in photo-eye and elsewhere, and for these, well, I am thankful that I got to know Darius Himes a number of years ago, for he (and Joel Eisinger, when he was editing Exposure for SPE) got me on the path of reviewing photography books. Larry Frascella, at Photo/Design way back in the eighties, and Christian Peterson, who hooked me up with the Washington Post to review Penelope Niven's biography of Steichen, are also due a credit or two for looping me into the photobook opinion mill.

But there was a time before I went pro, when I bought books, a lot, too often, to my financial detriment and esthetic enrichment. Starting circa 1981, I guess, when I bought a Stieglitz monograph (from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, no less) for Alan Trachtenberg's "Photographer in American Culture" seminar. During that class, researching my paper on Group f.64, I discovered a gorgeous, oversize Weston book in the art library. Gazing into its quarto-scale reproductions, I began to appreciate that the distance between a fine photographic print and a meticulous reproduction was relatively small, a displacement that is far less fictionalizing than that undergone by a painting, drawing, print, or other two-dimensional work (no need to talk about sculpture or cinema) in the translation from real to represented. The Weston reproductions, in fact, had a beauty all their own; since I'd never held a Weston print, or seen one unglazed, the book held me in thrall. Not better than the real thing, but a lot realer than the projected images I'd seen on screen.

I still seek this kind of unique experience in books. Quality standards have risen significantly in most books, and prices haven't risen too terribly much over the past five to ten years due to excellent, affordable printing in China and elsewhere. I am under some severe restrictions these days, in terms of disposable income available for purchases, but I do still acquire books (more than I ought to) and find my appetite getting just a bit pickier. At the same time, of course, the number of new publications has skyrocketed. I didn't know photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, where one could fairly easily acquire all newly released, serious photography publications. When I went to A Photographer's Place bookstore in Soho, I had to be careful and selective. I'm glad I didn't know how much more I could, and perhaps should, have bought there in the 1980s. But my library grew like topsy anyway. Now and then I wished I'd written little capsule reviews of every book I brought into the collection; that would probably qualify me as a bibliomane, or at least kind of a nut.

Today, with a limited acquisition budget, I must be more thoughtful. Which is a good exercise. It means that every book I buy has something special to recommend it, something that causes its punctum to trump its studium (apologies to Roland Barthes). Here's a list of publications, in no particular order, that I've acquired with my own money, not on behalf of any organization other than my own, in the last couple of months:

• Candida Hofer, Hamburg Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Koln 2002 - I couldn't resist this tiny (about the size of my hand) book when I saw it, particularly since Hofer and her Dusseldorf colleagues so often go for the grandly oversized when it comes to scale, in print or on the wall.
• Peter Fraser, Material Steidl, Gottingen 2002 - Like the Hofer, purchased at Ars Libri in Boston, where I had to resist a half dozen other books on the shelves. This one is about color and stuff, strange inexplicable things, run almost full bleed with minimal text. As the back cover states, "Here are outstanding objects and objects left outstanding." Outstandingly weird.
• The Spectacular of Vernacular exh cat org by Darsie Alexander, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2011 - Acquired this one after a too-hurried viewing of the show, which contains Walker Evans, Marina Abramovic's 2005 video Balkan Erotic Epic: Exterior Part 1 (B) (which transfixed 5-year-old Milan), Lorna Simpson, a Christenberry sculpture and Eggleston dye transfers, and Shannon Ebner, among others less notably photographic. The catalogue, only about twice as big as the Hofer noted above, with fewer pages, has an essay by the late J. B. Jackson. How could I resist (though the title really rubs me the wrong way)?
• Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century exh cat org by Peter Galassi Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010 - Though the show opened last year in Manhattan, it took me until this month to see it in Atlanta, at the High Museum. One can not have too much Cartier-Bresson; though I thought the show could have been edited, I wanted to have the catalogue to learn why I still gain so much looking at HC-B's work. 
• Whiteout: Poems by Marvin Bell, Photographs by Nathan Lyons Lodima Press, Revere, Pennsylvania 2011 and Balanced Equation: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Lodima Press Portfolio Book no. 14 2010 - Also in Atlanta during the SPE conference, with Arno and Nathan sitting at the Lodima Press booth ready to sign, there's no saying no (for me, at least). These two modest volumes together with all the material I picked up during portfolio reviews during the conference don't equal the Cartier-Bresson catalogue in weight.
• Eirik Johnson, Sawdust Mountain Aperture, New York and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 2009 - How can this book have been around since 2009? Anyway, it's a lovely and subtle accumulation of evidence, topographical, socio-economic, and environmental, to describe a certain angle of light and life in the Pacific Northwest.
• Jesus and the Cherries Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2005 - Almost bought this one when I was at Ars Libri a couple of weeks ago (see Hofer and Fraser above), and glad I didn't; it was nearly half their price at the Museum of Fine Arts store yesterday, when I picked it up with Eirik's. The plastic cover gives Jessica Backhaus' early publication an odd feel and smell, but the sequence and the images have a beguiling intimacy and mystery.

Well, if I don't spend money on books, I can still spend time.

Get 'Em Here, While They Last!

One of my first book essays, published in 1999 in a collection of works by select members of Moorhead State University's (aka MSU Moorhead) documentary photography class under the guidance of the estimable Wayne Gudmundson. Thanks to the Becker County Historical Society, To the Lakes is available for a sweet and low price ($10, including shipping). Act now! (Link here.) Who knows how many copies they have on hand?

(Obsessive collectors, take note: If memory serves, the renowned Mickey Smith was one of the photographers in that collection, in her earlier incarnation as a "straight" photographer.)

An Immodest Blog-folio Overview

I was just deriving a certain pleasure from skimming my reviews on photo-eye's blog. I was pleased to see that I'm one of their blog's most productive contributors; I post more stuff there than I do here on my own space (hmmm). Why not, then, give a link? If my entries on the PRC blog can carry re:photographica tags (which they do, see here), why not at photo-eye too? See here.

Pieter Hugo Redeemed

I was distrustful of his over-close, highly detailed records of light-skinned, Albino African faces that featured in his catalogue of facial portraits from 2005 and 2006. I liked his 2007 book, The Hyena and Other Men, quite a bit. I was put off by Nollywood, as I intimated in my review for photo-eye.

But this portfolio, "A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana," on the New York Times web site brings me back into the Pieter Hugo fold. He's tied people to the post-industrial myth once again, but unlike the "dream machine" and its exemplary spear carriers that I cited in my Nollywood review, the situation in the Agbogbloshie dump in Accra, Ghana, is a waking nightmare, far more insidious and toxic. His photographs in this portfolio address both cause and complication, and veer just far enough from the people to address the dangers--burning computers, keyboards leaching metals into the ground, child laborers supporting distant families at sub-subsistence, scavenger pay.

Bravo, Pieter, and thanks.

Special thanks to Lori Waselchuk for circulating the link.

The Pencil of Nature at the University of Minnesota

Peter Martin with W. H. F. Talbot's Pencil of Nature in the Special Collections and Rare Books at the University of Minnesota's Andersen Library on the West Bank

My St. Paul friend Peter Martin, above, knew there was a copy. I had seen a copy, too, in a display case in the early 1990s that highlighted the very specialized Mertle Collection on the History of Photomechanics; Pencil, of course, was the first book illustrated with photographs, hence its inclusion in Mertle's unique assemblage. The library's special collections had experience a massive relocation into the caves, the carved-out storage area below Andersen Library, during the late 1990s. Peter wanted to show it to a class he was teaching in the early 2000s, but it was not to be found. AWOL, within the walls or outside, no one quite knew. But Peter kept pushing, kept requesting, kept nudging me and a couple of other photo folk to help pressure the U to locate and serve up this rare volume.

And it finally surfaced; not a complete copy, and in somewhat rough shape. But it included Talbot's well-known images and captions, and a surprise in the form of a paper negative. Peter printed the negative, and I may be able to persuade him to let me show it here. Can you imagine, though, having the chance to handle this masterpiece, this landmark of photographic history, in our hometown library, no less? It was a thrill to see it again, up close and in person, to hear how curator Tim Johnson found it tucked behind other material, and a credit to Peter's persistence that it reappeared.

William Wylie, Route 36

Bill called me when he was in Minneapolis in the late winter, during the waning weeks of a winter that didn't have much to say for itself in terms of notable Minnesota winters. The upside of global warming is the endurable, even boring, version of the winter season that's been the case the last several years.

Anyway, Bill was in town having a new book project printed by Shapco Printing. I offered to pick him up from the printer and take him to his hotel. I'd hoped to have had time to hang out over beers and a meal, but as it tends to do, time shrank to the point where all I could do is chauffeur him from one spot to another, and pause briefly in the hotel driveway to look at sheets hot off the Shapco presses.

I'd been eager to see Shapco's shop, as I'd been acquainted with their work over some time; my long-time designer for McKnight materials, Mike Lizama, used to do most of our printing there. Shapco is located in the shadow of the new Target Field in downtown Minneapolis; the stands loomed over my car as Bill sat in the front seat. I didn't get time to see inside. But Bill was extremely excited about the production, and mildly surprised to find such excellence in Minnesota. (I had to remind him about Litho Specialties.)

The book, Route 36, came out in June. Published by Flood Editions, a small (about a half-dozen titles per year) non-profit publisher in Chicago, it's a modestly-scaled but beautifully produced volume of photographs resulting from several road trips across Kansas. The light is summer, and fall, mostly light that you can feel, light that bears upon you as an almost physical force in these photographs and in the prairie and town spaces Wylie has captured. Elegant spaces, quiet and calm. Spectacularly unspectacular.

It is good to see such quality in an affordable, and affordably made, volume; accessibility is part of Flood's mission, and while they are publishing photography along with other types of books, they have affirmed, in Wiley's Route 36, a clear commitment to photography engaged in a dialogue about representing place. The promise evinced in the early sheets came through in the final book; thanks again, Bill, for calling.

Pause, To Begin

I was pleased to write a review of this remarkable book, and wish I could have done more to describe my wonder about the whole project. Its founders, David Wright and Ethan Jones, carried out a 10,000 mile journey to interview 15 emerging photographers and publish the results in e-reports during the process and in this compact, lovely volume.


The project's web site.