FotoFest 2012 | Chapter V: Monday Morning

Eufalia Cristina Paz de Almeida, from The Destiny of a Heart

 Lives and dreams

There was some surprising, wonderful, entirely coincidental synchronicity between this morning's visitors, weaving a through-line from biography through imagination and back, a kind of mobius strip of depiction. Sort of left me breathless.

• Allison Leach - trenchantly hilarious and floridly troubling satirical portraits of "misfit explorers" and white-collar criminals in their new jobs as laborers (all "street cast"--one of my favorite phrases from the reviews--by the photographer; casting now more difficult and expensive for her, having moved out of NYC)  link
• Alexandra Huddleston - born Sierra Leone, lives in U.S.A. - contributor to photo-eye books, though she didn't mention that when we met - marvelous book design collaboration with her brother, a poet  link (to her website, though it doesn't include the collaborative project yet)t
• Eufalia Cristina Paz de Almeida - the "90-degree turns" our lives can take (don't I know!) - investigation in the form of a telenovela of a Brazilian childhood lived in separated households that shared a house - the artist posing as her father, in her father's clothes, imagining scenes that might, or could never, have happened in real life - Eufalia's story was astounding, and her images find an almost peaceful way to recompose the narrative  link
• Naoyuki Ogino - gorgeous, evocative views of abandoned Japanese film studios - the "womb of the myth" of cinema, as he put it  link (to his website, though he hasn't put this work up yet)
• Susan Berger - Martin Luther King, Jr. - after whom so many streets have been named - what forms do King's dreams, or the places that carry his name, have today? North, south, east, west, Berger records (and prints in graceful gelatin silver) boulevards, avenues, streets, and other roads that bear his name - saw Susan's work at the Griffin a couple of months ago, and was even happier to see it unglazed on the table in Houston  link

FotoFest 2012 | Chapter IV: Sunday Afternoon

Andrew Uchin, Modern Library, 2011, from The Reader Series

Midway

More good encounters this afternoon. Really enjoying the variety of strong projects on display. Photography is a very healthy medium from my vantage point, with many vigorous and inventive standard bearers.

• Topher Brown - evocative, hip-shot, New York City night views - homages to photographic film and grain - silver prints  link
• Chris Rauschenberg - one of my favorite people in the photo world - Chris, usually with his s.o. Janet, has covered quite a bit of the world - today's scenes were from Mongolia, plus a new cross-cutting edit with the artist statement as follows: "I was looking at my workprints and something was looking back." (Hold, published on Blurb)
•  Rylan Steele - project on Ave Maria, Florida, a community planned by Domino's Pizza founder - yes, rather Christian  link
• Andrew Uchin - The Reader Series - a bibliophile's attention to bookish details, evidence of use and poetry beyond what was intended by publisher or author 
• Jane Fulton Alt - an immersion in fire - entering a controlled burning zone and encountering a gateway to alternate perceptions of time and space  link

FotoFest 2012 | Chapter III: Sunday Morning

Banker's Lamp from Dietlinde Bamberger's series Orderly Withdrawal link

    

Light's back on.

Only took about fourteen hours of sleep, but I shook off whatever had been bugging me and felt fresh for day two. There was much to admire in both chapters III and IV.

• Paige Critcher - images of exclusion and anomaly, reading signs in the landscape that reinforce otherness and seclusion - both a road trip to Prudhoe Bay, including some fine images of the American and Canadian prairie landscapes, and around her neighborhood in Virginia link
• Evgenia Slobodnik - hand-worked photographs, surfaces abraded and painted to recompose light - good sense of artist's book carried out in Color Retouch project - one of many Russian artists, consistent with theme of this FotoFest
• Benjamin Dimmitt - a native son's views of south Florida wetlands - knowledgeable, descriptive, with a conservationist's passion and perspective  link
• Rob McDonald - English professor and visual interpreter of writerly southern landscapes - book on Erskine Caldwell's house was a Nazraeli One Picture book  link
• Scott Fortino - architecturals, mostly, but that's an understatement - an eye trained in observation of detail and discovery (I won't tell you what this means) finds its way through objects, perspectives, textures, and gloriously sculpted light  link
• F&D Cartier - old friends, from FotoFest Meeting Place 2006 (or 2004?) - their new project Wait & See involves photographic paper (the light sensitive kind) and its inherent, self-developing tendencies when exposed to light - amazing, the colors of black-and-white and the images embedded there, even without recourse to a negative

FotoFest 2012 | Chapter II: Saturday Afternoon

Photo by Gennady Meergus

Hit a wall. 

Was feeling under the weather all afternoon, and ended up retiring to my room for sleep and solitude following the afternoon session. My apologies to Gennady, Peter, Sarah, Toni, Phillip, David, and Diane, as I was not operating at 100%. Had to stretch out on the review room floor at one point. We are sensitive instruments, we humans.


Dyspepsia notwithstanding, I was particularly taken by two presentations. 

• Sarah Martin - a nouveau indie book maker a la Andrea Stultiens - utilizing other people’s archival pictures plus personal experience and photographic observations to fashion a narrative portrait in print – in this case, an eccentric, socially awkward scion  link (Sarah has another series, "You Are What You Love," that I've admired in past reviews; it's on her web site)
• Diane Meyer - embroidery as subversive intervention? - colored thread becomes pixels in selected areas of both personal photographs and family album pictures - ingenious transformation of light into texture - many good, worthwhile questions of scale and representation  link

FotoFest 2012 | Chapter I: Saturday Morning

The toothy ones

• Sonya Naumann - www.thousanddollardress.com - come to Minneapolis, Sonya! Bring the dress!
• Jeff Burk - subtle, astute work about the built environment - Quiet Places Blurb book
• Erika Diettes - chronicler of Columbian atrocity and witness, carrying the messages of the disappeared to the world at large - installations utilizing images on large-scale transparencies and printed on translucent fabric - saw her work Drifting Away here in Houston during FF08 Meeting Place - most recent work-in-progress encasing artifacts of the disappeared in clear, flesh-like rectangles - haunting and emotionally wrenching link
• Blake Gordon - urban nomad, exploring spaces at night with an animal sense of exposure and survival - panoramas that are about finding safe paths through the city (Austin, in this case) and thereby seeing a city from new perspectives link
• Ferit Kuyas - visual diarist - Swiss Turk, forming a reflexive five-part artist book addressing degrees of presence, from classic b+w landscape to scanned objects  link images from his Archetypes series form the first book of the series

Labors of love: Books by Gretchen Garner and Filipe Casaca

a minha casa e onde estas | Filipe Casaca

A Certain Curve | Gretchen Garner

Certain books just have to be done. With or without financing, reason, or likelihood of success. Nothing more, or less, than the realization of images and words in a sequence of printed pages, bound together and available to hold in one's hands, will suffice.

These two self-published titles fit the bill. Self-publishing enabled these books to come to fruition. Although they are both compelling and marvelous in their own terms, neither would swell a conventional publisher's coffers. Their physical modesty, however, should not be taken for a lack of content.

Both books address personal passion, which, for better or worse, is a compelling force. In Garner's case, a lifetime of looking and appreciating art as an expression of life. Garner staked her claim as an editor and curator during the 1970s and 1980s; A Certain Curve reflects work that she admired, collected, and was given during those years and later. There are about 90 pieces reproduced in the book, including photographs, prints, paintings, textiles, and sculpture; Garner gives each piece a brief note, indicating her connections to the artist and the work. Some artists are familiar, others relatively obscure. Nearly two-thirds of the artists present are women. The great gift of this book is the presence of an informed narrator who assumes roles as curator, historian, memoirist, and advocate, without ever giving up her innate fascination for the work she finds attractive. Such honesty is becoming, and rare.

Portuguese photographer Filipe Casaca's book is also a loving tribute, in the form of a set of photographs of Teresa, the artist's wife. There are innumerable precedents for such projects--Edward/Charis, Emmet/Edith, Alfred/Georgia, etc. But while the set-up is simple, the results vary from couple to couple. In the best case scenarios, the photographs are more than the sum of man and woman. One plus one should equal at least three--there is the viewer, the viewed, and the view in every case. Casaca's photographs are dark, shadowy things, but the female energy radiates within each. These are somber, thoughtful, and beautiful pictures, precious in that they conceal more than they reveal. Teresa, naked, never becomes a generic, objectified "nude"; we see her face, and we know that she is relating to the photographer, reflecting their relationship. The photographs manifest the nuances of a dialogue, an exchange in glances.

I am grateful to both Garner and Casaca for their labors, for ignoring the obstacles posed by reason, and for making the results available.

Links

Filipe Casaca, a minha casa e onde estas

Gretchen Garner, A Certain Curve

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

Billie "Lady Day" Holiday by William P. Gottlieb and Charles Caldwell

In Passing | Lady Day by George Slade link to post on Instagram

Cross over Interstate 94 on Broadway, heading west, and you move from Northeast Minneapolis to North Minneapolis. One of the first things you see along the street is Charles Caldwell's massive mural ornamenting one side of the 4th Street Saloon. It features a portrait of Billie Holiday, an iconic rendering of this quintessential jazz vocalist.

Billie Holiday by William P. Gottlieb link

The painting is based on a photograph made by William P. Gottlieb in 1948 or 1949; on his web site, Gottlieb observes that around that time "I took a photograph often cited as the most widely used picture ever taken of a jazz person. Whether or not so, I believe it captured the beauty of her face and the anguish of her voice."

I believe it may be one of the greatest images ever made of a person in the rapturous moment of creation. When I saw it glowing in the morning sun today, I had to pull over and record it. Thank you Charles, William, and Billie.


For more information about muralist Charles Caldwell, a longtime resident of North Minneapolis, please see the profile here.

For the 2005 New York Times obituary for Gottlieb, see it here on the photographer's web site.

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.

Yes, I'm still alive.

Danforth Biennial showcases diverse work of 39 photographers

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.