Book Review: Wayward Cognitions

April 2, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewWayward CognitionsBy Ed TempletonReviewed by Blake AndrewsI'd made it about halfway through Ed Templeton's new book Wayward Cognitions before an unwelcome question entered my mind: Would I care about these photos if they were by someone other than Ed Templeton?

Wayward Cognitions. By Ed Templeton. Um Yeah Press, 2014.

Wayward Cognitions

Reviewed by Blake Andrews

Wayward Cognitions 
Photographs by Ed Templeton
Um Yeah Press, 2014. 160 pp., illustrated throughout, 8x10".

I'd made it about halfway through Ed Templeton's new book Wayward Cognitions before an unwelcome question entered my mind: Would I care about these photos if they were by someone other than Ed Templeton?

This is a thought experiment I play sometimes with photobooks and the results vary. Some books hold up well as collections of photos regardless of who shot them. Others lean more heavily on the author for meaning. The duality is roughly analogous to Szarkowski's Windows and Mirrors. All approaches are valid and there is no right or wrong way, but Ed Templeton's bread and butter until now has been the Mirror category. He's published thirteen books leading up to Wayward Cognitions and to varying degrees they've all been autobiographical. Yes, they have documented the outer world, but make no mistake, it's been Ed Templeton's world. Each book to date has been theme based, filling in a small slice of the Templeton identity puzzle. The more diaristic ones, such as Deformer and Cemetery of Reason, straddle a line between photography, intimate memoir, and unbridled creativity that is electrifying. They're a view into Ed Templeton's skate/art/punk universe and no one else's.

Wayward Cognitions. By Ed Templeton. Um Yeah Press, 2014.

If we judge Wayward Cognitions by the same standard, it doesn't hold up very well. This book tells me very little about Ed Templeton. Instead the focus is outward. "It's about looking, people watching, finding pleasure in the visual vignettes we glimpse each day," explains Templeton. Gone are his painted effects, whimsical scrapbook style layouts, his odd captions, his boundary-busting invasive voyeurism. In their place are found urban moments: A cat on a curb, a bar reflection, prone figures in public, etc. Templeton's casual editing tone remains, plus a few suggestive photos of Deanna — his signature motif. Beyond that, what remains is a patchwork collection of monochrome street photos. There are some good ones here to be sure, but not enough to carry the weight of the book.

Wayward Cognitions. By Ed Templeton. Um Yeah Press, 2014.

If Wayward Cognitions feels like an assortment of B-sides and outtakes, that's by design. Templeton says the title is a poetic expression for "stray thoughts," and that phrase gives a good sense of the edit, which Templeton controlled, along with sequence and layout. The pages flow quite nicely and without pretense, dancing around like prints tacked to a wall. The basic theme is grab-bag. It's "a new selection solely by the intuitive eye of the artist-photographer," according to the Stijn Huijts in the afterward. I enjoy it when artists stretch into new areas, something Templeton is clearly reaching for here. But in expanding the territory, Templeton — one of the strongest visual voices in photography — seems to have left his core behind.

Wayward Cognitions. By Ed Templeton. Um Yeah Press, 2014.

Part of that core has always been candid photography, and that's true here. "Nothing is staged," states Huijts. "Nobody has posed for the photographer." Fine, but if we've reached the point that those claims are distinctive, then photography is in worse shape than I thought. Unstaged and unposed may be necessary to achieve certain artistic goals, but they're not sufficient. Unless such images can stand on their own they'd better add up to something to justify being in a book.

Wayward Cognitions. By Ed Templeton. Um Yeah Press, 2014.

Huijts throws the burden of meaning into the viewer's lap: "Setting to work with no preconceived plan has not detracted from the fact that his compilation provides enough material to be able to speculate on possible contextual themes and motifs contained in the images." In other words, here are some random shots, maybe they add up to something, interpretation is up to you.

Wayward Cognitions. By Ed Templeton. Um Yeah Press, 2014.

Perhaps Templeton has earned the right to do that. He has a proven track record and still retains one of the strongest visual voices in photography. If he wants to publish a few stray thoughts that's his prerogative. But would I care about them if they weren't by Ed Templeton? I'm not so sure.—BLAKE ANDREWS

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BLAKE ANDREWS is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

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In Stock: One Picture Books

April 3, 2015, 8:00 am

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BooksIn Stock at photo-eye: One Picture BooksOne Picture Books from Nazraeli Press are an on-going series of small, affordable signed and numbered photobooks that each include an original photograph and are limited to an edition of 500 copies. Today we highlight One Picture Books 85, 86, and 87 from Roger Ballen, Doug Rickard and Aaron Ruell.

One Picture Book #85: The Audience
Photographs by Roger Ballen from Nazraeli Press

Signed with original print $100 — Purchase Book

"A book of 11 reproductions and one original photograph by Roger Ballen. Limited edition of 500.

The photograph Audience from Roger Ballen’s book Asylum of the Birds has been deconstructed to afford viewers a more intimate look at the pictorial elements contained within it. In Ballen’s contribution to our One Picture Book series, The Audience, the individual drawings from the photographs are extruded singularly, presenting the reader with a close-up look at Roger Ballen’s drawings. The Audience is limited to 500 numbered copies, and includes an original signed photograph by Roger Ballen."—the publisher

One Picture Book #86: All Eyes on Me
Photographs by Doug Rickard from Nazraeli Press
Signed with original print $100 — Purchase Book

"A book of 12 reproductions and one original photograph by Doug Rickard. Limited edition of 500.

'Life deals you a hand. A Royal Flush... a pair of Twos.

Our American legacy, the horrors behind us, the gaps between us, the permeating malice. It's palpable.

These pictures speak. I don't need to say much. Our past, our present... whispers of the future.

Actions and reactions, losing hands and stacked decks. Suspicious looks, sideways glances, expectations, but not of success.

Lots of Twos.'"—Doug Rickard

One Picture Book #87: Ten Years Too Late
Photographs by Aaron Ruell from Nazraeli Press
Signed with original print $75 — Purchase Book

"A book of 12 reproductions and one original photograph by Aaron Ruell. Limited edition of 500.

On the tenth anniversary of its release, director, actor and photographer Aaron Ruell looks back on the production of cult classic Napoleon Dynamite. In addition to famously performing as older brother Kip in the movie, Ruell also photographed stills during the making of it. In Ten Years Too Late, he presents us with a selection of 12 photographs; some of famous scenes, and others made behind the scenes. Nazraeli Press published Ruell’s monograph Some Photos in 2007. We are delighted to follow it up with this timely One Picture Book, which is limited to 500 numbered copies, and includes an original signed photograph by Aaron Ruell."—the publisher

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Book Review: Alvin Langdon Coburn

April 4, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewAlvin Langdon CoburnPhotographs by Alvin Langdon CoburnReviewed by Karen JenkinsAlvin Langdon Coburn picked up the camera at age 8 and died holding the autobiography of his life in photography. In between those narrative bookends is a twenty year period at the turn of the twentieth century full of prodigious achievement and artistic zeal, in both his native America and adopted Britain.

Alvin Landon Coburn. Fundacion Mapfre, 2015.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Reviewed by Karen Jenkins

Alvin Langdon Coburn
Photographs by Alvin Coburn. Text by Anne Cartier-Bresson and Pamela Roberts.
Fundación Mapfre, 2015. 296 pp., 8½x9¾".

Alvin Langdon Coburn picked up the camera at age 8 and died holding the autobiography of his life in photography. In between those narrative bookends is a twenty year period at the turn of the twentieth century full of prodigious achievement and artistic zeal, in both his native America and adopted Britain. On both sides of the Atlantic, Coburn inserted himself and his talent into photography’s clubs and coteries, earning his place with a devotion to technique and a fresh vision, and no small measure of moxie. Beyond this period of practical mastery and avant-garde firsts, Coburn’s affiliations and aspirations changed, as a search for a more meaningful inner life altered his photographic practice, or marked its absence. Today, the largest collection of his work is at the George Eastman House, the result of the artist’s bequest in 1962. The Royal Photographic Society was recipient of another substantial gift from Coburn in 1930, now part of the collection of the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK. The exhibition this volume catalogues is the only one drawn from these two collections in over half a century. Now in a substantially larger pull, it aims to introduce Coburn’s work to a new generation and solidify his place in the canon of masters with its just-past run at Fundación Mapfre and showing at George Eastman House in late 2015.

Alvin Landon Coburn. Fundacion Mapfre, 2015.

Coburn’s distant cousin Fred Holland Day taught him the basics and laid out a vision of a photographic career and a cultured life. They traveled to Europe together, where at age 17, Coburn made his Pictorialist debut in Day’s explosive exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society. Subsequent connections with photographic elders and fellow rising stars cast Coburn as student and mentee, competitor and poacher, as he mastered and improved Pictorialism’s elaborate photographic processes and favored tropes. Like peers Edward Steichen and Max Weber, Coburn was both buoyed by and tethered to the grandiosity of Alfred Stieglitz. He was captivated by the Japanese aesthetic as adopted by Arthur Wesley Down and James McNeill Whistler, and their influence is seen in his views of Britain’s bridges and waterways, moods and monuments. Cutting his teeth in his home studio in Boston, Coburn made also portraits throughout his career. First prompted by a magazine assignment, he voraciously sought out subjects among his era’s celebrated authors and artists including George Bernard Shaw, Henry James and Auguste Rodin, situating himself in still other circles of influence and referral.

Alvin Landon Coburn. Fundacion Mapfre, 2015.

Alvin Landon Coburn. Fundacion Mapfre, 2015.

Coburn’s devotion to Pictorialism faded during his final stay in the United States from 1910-12. His well-known image The Octopus, from 1909 had begun his foray into abstraction and was revolutionary when he first exhibited it three years later. During travels in the American West, he further shaped his new vision, seeing in its landscapes a grand and mystical scope best explored in abstract form and pattern. In New York, he turned his experimentation to the urban landscape — working side by side with Weber and depicting the city’s new skyscrapers and skylines from an elevated and thoroughly modern point of view. Back in London, the new realities of World War I barred Coburn from roaming the streets with his camera or traveling abroad, so he turned to different modes of photography, including multiple exposure portraiture. His brief affiliation with the Vorticist movement resulted in his most nonrepresentational works to date. During the war, Coburn looked increasingly inward, searching for existential meaning during dark days. This was first a shift to painting and music, and then an immersion in societies and schools of thought that might expand his thinking, such as astrology, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and Druidism. In 1917, Coburn and his wife made their first visit to rural Wales, where they would eventually settle permanently. Here, Coburn’s spiritual pursuits led him from the bohemian cluster of artists and musicians assembled by photographer George Davidson to Arthur Edward Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an organization based in the tenets of Freemasonry. Eventually, they left the Fellowship behind in favor of joining the humanist group, The Universal Order.

Alvin Landon Coburn. Fundacion Mapfre, 2015.

Curator Pamela Glasson Roberts has crafted a convincing case here, in both superbly-reproduced photographs that speak well for themselves, and a densely packed biography full of ambition and achievement. She tells of Coburn as a singular force, captivated by a succession of trailblazers and charismatic leaders, absorbing their lessons and then making them his own. Coburn was decidedly a joiner — drawn first to the organized cause of Pictorialism, and all its camera clubs and photographic societies. Yet he also seemed to be impervious to entrenched loyalty or blind faith. In his later years, when the pull of the collective satisfied more spiritual needs, Coburn shifted from one fold or philosophy to the next, as he sought to give shape and sustenance to an inner life, and an artistic vision that ebbed and flowed. This is a captivating story of a photographic life and persuasive argument for Coburn’s distinction. It’s told not as a cartoon of artistic drive, or a glossed-over illustrated history, but with insightful scholarship that reanimates a rich body of work and makes fresh another era’s belief in photography’s power.—KAREN JENKINS

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KAREN JENKINS earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.


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Book Review: The Last Cosmology

April 6, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewThe Last CosmologyBy Kikuji KawadaReviewed by Colin PantallKikuji Kawada is best known for Chizu (The Map), his classic contemplation on post-war Japan. Chizu glories in its brooding blacks and radioactive greys. Published in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Kawada shows a Japan that is shamed and defeated, struggling to rebuild itself in an American nuclear shadow.
By the end of that volume, the question is answered.

The Last Cosmology. Photographs by Kikuji Kawada. MACK, 2015.

The Last Cosmology
Reviewed by Colin Pantall

The Last Cosmology
By Kikuji Kawada
MACK, 2015. 86 pp., 67 tritone illustrations, 11½x15¼x½".

Kikuji Kawada is best known for Chizu (The Map), his classic contemplation on post-war Japan. Chizu glories in its brooding blacks and radioactive greys. Published in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Kawada shows a Japan that is shamed and defeated, struggling to rebuild itself in an American nuclear shadow. It’s a dark flash of a book where the literal and the symbolic are folded together beneath a gatefold sleeve.

Push ahead fifty years and we’re in 2015. Kawada’s book is The Last Cosmology, and the pictures are from between 1980 and 2000. There is another transition in progress. In the eighties, Japan was floating in a bubble economy where the imperial palace in Tokyo was supposedly worth more than all the real estate in California. Asset-rich, the country was lavishing itself in imaginary wealth mortgaged against easy credit. In 1989 the bubble burst, the stock market crashed and property prices collapsed. We should all be familiar with what happened next because we’re living through it after the bursting of our own bubbles; there was a lost decade of stagnation and what, for Japan (but not the rest of the world), counted as unacceptably high unemployment. Japan was stagnating.

The Last Cosmology. Photographs by Kikuji Kawada. MACK, 2015.

The other thing that happened in 1989 was the death of Hirohito, the Japanese Emperor. In most of Asia, his death was welcomed as the demise of a war criminal who should have met his end back in 1945. For others, including Kawada, there was a different perspective, the sense of an ending of an epoch in which victory, atrocity, humiliation and rebirth were all combined.

And that is what the book is about, that time between the death of Hirohito and the beginning of the new millennium. It’s a book of portents, of symbols life and death, of meteorological patterns and eclipses.

We had an eclipse here in the UK five days ago. For a few hours, British social media was agog with everyone’s pictures of eclipses. The pictures were, give or take, all the same but they revealed a mindset; despite the disappointment, we are obsessed with infrequent natural phenomena and the fragility they reveal of the world that we live in. Twigs, crows, wisps of clouds and the occasional rooftop all got a visual mention as the moon snuck in front of the sun last week.

The Last Cosmology. Photographs by Kikuji Kawada. MACK, 2015.

And it’s not too different with Kawada. Only he does it so much better. And it’s not on Twitter but in a beautiful photobook with a moon (or is it a sun?) on the cover. Then you open the page and the eclipse begins. It’s the full eclipse from 1999; part of a cosmology that Kawada says “…is an illusion of the firmament which encompasses an era. It is also the cosmology of a changing heart.”

The sky made personal, the sky as a portent of what is to come; for himself, for Japan, for the world. The book begins with 1999, glossy pages brimful of the rim of the sun, the clipped sun, and the silhouette of a Tokyo apartment block.

The Last Cosmology. Photographs by Kikuji Kawada. MACK, 2015.

Then we’re into the cloudscapes, a homage both to Stieglitz’s Equivalents and the paintings of Emil Nolde, and from there we segue into the manmade world. It’s feeble in comparison. Time is frozen in a swirl of mechanical parts; vents, fans and underwater pipes hint at our attempts to control the elements of the world around us, but in Kawada’s eyes the light, the wind, the rain will never be stopped. They’ll just carry on regardless.

Trees grow beneath the clouded sky, jellyfish swim in the God-given seas, there is life and Kawada makes sure we know where it comes from. In the mountains, valleys are carved by rivers and ice, heavily filtered views bring the slate-grey of the sky together with the blacks of the mountains. In this harsh world, we are bit players in the firmament, minor details deluding ourselves. With the mass of earth beneath our feet and the weight of the sky above our head, we can be engulfed at any moment.

The Last Cosmology. Photographs by Kikuji Kawada. MACK, 2015.

A frog squashed into tarmac points to the cycle of creation and destruction (and our part in hastening the destructive segment of that cycle). This world is an ever-moving ball of confusion and to emphasise the point we see Kawada’s astronomical pictures of a long-exposed spinning starscape and the multiple phases of an eclipsing moon.

Life in the air, life in the sea, life on earth, the northern lights, and forked lighting mix with more clouds and foliage growing over an abandoned building and hay wrapped in harvest cladding. The skyscapes are matched with swirls of erupting mud, a close-up of the moon with one of the sun, sunspots clear to see.

The Last Cosmology. Photographs by Kikuji Kawada. MACK, 2015.

Our insignificance is noted again and again, the fragile nature of our existence and that of the world on which we depend is felt through the vein like tendrils of a tree reaching into the sun-scorched sky. And the tenuousness of our life on the very surface, and only the very surface comes through pictures that show the immensity of the night sky rising above the peaks of buildings, the portent of Haley’s Comet streaking overhead.

And it’s a bad portent, one of death, destruction and crows (or ravens?) on rooftops with an aerial in the sky. But not to worry because life will start again and maybe this time it will be better, a real Eden, a world where we understand the sun and the sea and the stars and the life around us and we learn to live with it and enjoy it.—COLIN PANTALL

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COLIN PANTALL is a UK-based writer and photographer. He is a contributing writer for the British Journal of Photography and a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. http://colinpantall.blogspot.com

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Book of the Week: A Pick by Sarah Bradley

April 8, 2015, 11:20 am

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Book of the WeekBook of the Week: A Pick by Sarah BradleySarah Bradley selects A Perpetual Season by Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine as Book of the Week.

A Perpetual Season by Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine. MACK, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Sarah Bradley who has selected A Perpetual Season by Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine published by MACK.

"This is a book that I keep returning to and keep recommending. On its surface, A Perpetual Season by Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine presents photographs of anonymous urban spaces — a series of buildings, walls, staircases and somber concrete forms. These images are punctuated by the occasional presence of living things, plants that seem at once starving and overgrown, and people wandering or peering with furrowed brows, their expressions locked in the pained look of waiting or a glance of unfulfilled anticipation. Though constructed entirely of images depicting what is mundane enough to be overlooked, A Perpetual Season is precisely assembled to build a space that quietly reverberates with surreal tension. It is a place both vast and claustrophobic, familiar yet seemingly nowhere. Forms lose recognition, flattening out, resting in a liminal state between what is recognizable for its commonplace utility and a bewildering perspective stretched to abstraction, reduced to lines, planes and tonality. The living seem trapped, yet they keep moving. The sole sparse lines of text by Roberto Juarroz tucked in the back of the book acknowledge the labyrinth we have just wandered through. Ultimately, it’s not so much the images that stick in my mind, but the space A Perpetual Season conjures, unfathomable yet knowable — known, even, as if recognized by feel from a dream.

It’s a striking object, too, perfectly sized to fit in the hand with a soft-toned image printed on the exterior cloth and gorgeous grey-blue page edges."—Sarah Bradley

Read the review by Adam Bell

Picked as a Best Book of 2014 by Alex F. Webb & Lewis Chalpin

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A Perpetual Season by Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine. MACK, 2014.

A Perpetual Season by Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine. MACK, 2014.

Sarah Bradley is a writer, sculptor and costumer, as well as Editor of photo-eye Blog. She is currently working with the Santa Fe collective Meow Wolf on their first permanent collaborative installation The House of Eternal Return. Some of her work can be found on her website sebradley.com.






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Interview & Portfolio: Jock Sturges on Fanny

April 8, 2015, 11:39 am

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photo-eye GalleryInterview & Portfolio: Jock Sturges on FannyWe are pleased to announce that on Friday April 10th, Jock Sturges will be at photo-eye Gallery for an artist reception for his new exhibition, Fanny — in celebration of his new monograph by the same title. In anticipation of the exhibition, we have asked Sturges to share a little more about his past, inspirations and how his long-term portraiture project in France began — and of course we discuss his goddaughter Fanny.

Fanny; Montalivet, France, 1995 — Jock Sturges

We are pleased to announce that on Friday April 10th, Jock Sturges will be at photo-eye Gallery for an artist reception for his new exhibition, Fanny — in celebration of his new monograph by the same title. The focus of this new book is one of Sturges’ most well known models and his goddaughter, Fanny. The images are photographed in the naturist community of Montalivet, France, where Fanny and her family make their home. The images span more than 23 years, beginning when Fanny was just four years of age. Produced in both black-and-white and color, this extended portrait documents not only Fanny’s journey from child to adult, but also her growing rapport with Sturges. Sturges has a firm belief that a model's relationship with the photographer is evident in the images, and that each image is the result of a collaboration.

In anticipation of the exhibition, I have asked Sturges to share a little more about his past, inspirations and how his long-term portraiture project in France began — and of course we discuss his goddaughter Fanny.—Anne Kelly

Fanny; Montalivet, France, 2005 — Jock Sturges

Anne Kelly:    How did you find yourself photographing in Montalivet?

Jock Sturges:    When living in Vermont I had a photographer friend by the name of Peter Simon. He was the younger brother of Carly Simon, the singer, if you can remember that far back. Their father was Simon of Simon and Schuster. Anyway, Peter would come and hang out at Marlboro college where I was both an undergraduate and the sole member of the photography faculty — a position which I created by insistence. (The faculty was sweetly tolerant of my arrogance...) He was pretty much a fixture. Then he disappeared from the local scene so when several years later I ran into him on the sidewalk in Brattleboro I was intrigued to know where he had been. He pulled a thick paperback book out of his knapsack and handed it to me. It was a guide to the world's naturist beaches. He'd been all over the world making the photographs for it. I flipped through it and was pretty impressed by the range of places and people depicted. I'd never seen anything quite like it. So, just to have a question to ask I asked him which place had been his favorite. "Montalivet!" he replied at once and listed a string of superlatives. Oldest, biggest, best, etc.

A few years later I was in Europe visiting friends. The weather in Paris was hot and oppressive so the collective vote was for a trip to the beach. Off to Montalivet we went for what was planned as a three day weekend. We stayed three weeks. I was hooked. The next year a planned trip of three weeks expanded into two months, which has pretty much been the pattern since.

Fanny; Montalivet, France, 1990 — Jock Sturges

AK:    When did you realize that photographing the friends that you made in Montalivet would become a long term project — and that you too would become a part time, long term resident?

JS:    Actually all my photography consisted of long term projects well before I started going to France. I discovered in the early seventies that the work of people whom I knew well was far superior to what I achieved with people whom I knew less well or not at all. So starting in about 1972 all of my work became serial. As to knowing I would become a long term resident...? I didn't have the financial resources to be at all sure of that during the first few years but pretty quickly the place became indispensable to both me and my wife, Maia. Living without it is pretty much unthinkable.

AK:    You have mentioned that many of your influences are painters — how does this impact your work?

JS:    I am indeed far more influenced by paint than anything else. I have specific heroes and influences (Egon Schiele, Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Boticelli (more the miniatures than the well known seasons), rose and blue period Picasso, Cranach the Elder, the Bruegels, etc., etc.) but in general I love artists who depict aspects of an elegant line, be it awkward or the opposite and/or whose work is articulate in the grace of the common. I am inspired by the craft of paint as well as by the choices painters make. I love to distraction the Chauvet Cave paintings in France as much as I do the sparse precision of Rembrandt etchings. Most recently I find myself stunned and inspired by a Spanish painter: Dino Valls. So much to see and swallow. We are what eat, right? Want to compose your photographs well? Look, borrow, learn.

AK:    Prior to receiving your MFA at SFI, you received a bacholors in perceptual psychology. Does your interest in psychology influence in your image making?

JS:    My reading in psychology has been an enormous part of my making pictures. I am always in search of who the people I photograph ARE so I might better work with and for them. My work is always about relationships after all.

When we make pictures the event can be one of three basic things in the life of the person photographed. With gradations betwixt, of course. It can be a negative, harmful event that erodes self-confidence and self worth, it can be a neutral event of no particular significance, or it can be positive, affirming event that reifies and helps and adds to self-worth. I try and work only in the third catagory. Always. But doing so has a lot to do with knowing who is before you.

AK:    Who was your most influential professor at the San Francisco Art Institute?

JS:    Fred Martin, who was head of the painting department and taught an obligatory course in art history. He was articulate and deeply well informed and full of enthusiasm which, given the early-morning, yawning, forced audience his class consisted of was pretty much a miracle. I quote and borrow from his pedagogy all the time.

Fanny; Montalivet, France, 2011 — Jock Sturges

AK:    Fanny, the book, contains almost every image that you ever shot of its namesake. Can you expand on that?

JS:    Fanny from the beginning only posed once or twice a summer. When she did, I made almost no failed pictures so I had not the least complaint about this. Given her family circumstances and the death of her mother, I think that she needed some level of reassurance that she was not in our lives because of her beauty as a model. In any case, with this book I decided for two reasons to print almost everything. Firstly, to paint as complete a picture of her being as possible and secondly to show the process and evolution of our shoots together. The latter was the sort of exposition that I found fascinating as a younger photographer.

AK:    Anything that you would like to add?

JS:    I've just last week returned from a glorious two days in France spent photographing Fanny who is now close to giving birth to her first child. The exceptional pleasures and emotions of our working together puts me in mind of the fact that a life lived in art has no greater reward than the privilege of doing the work. Shows, books, museums, workshops; these are acknowledgements for which I am grateful. But severally or even in aggregate they do not hold the least of candles to the intense joy of being in the light making pictures of someone I love. That for me is the solution to the problem of art — in a nutshell. It is the doing of it that eclipses all else.

Opening, Artist Reception and Booksigning
Friday April 10th, 2015 from 5 – 7pm
photo-eye Gallery, 541 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM
Exhibition continues through May 23, 2015

Order a signed copy of Fanny

For more information or to purchase a print, please contact Anne Kelly at 505-988-5152 x121 or anne@photoeye.com

Book Review: Father Figure

April 9, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewFather FigureBy Zun LeeReviewed by Tom LeiningerThere are a many ideas of what fatherhood is: the stern taskmaster who refuses to accept less than perfection, the distant father who is consumed by work, the father indulgent in material things but not emotions. The portrait of masculinity presented in Zun Lee’s book Father Figure goes against a number of stereotypes in popular culture. This book is about the fathers who are present in the lives of their children and aims to demystify the concept of the absent black father.

Father Figure. By Zun Lee.  Ceiba, 2014.

Father Figure

Reviewed by Tom Leininger

Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood
Photographs by Zun Lee. Foreword by Teju Cole, Epilogue by Trymaine Lee.
Ceiba, New York, 2014. 128 pp., 61 duotone illustrations, 12¼x8¼".

There are a many ideas of what fatherhood is: the stern taskmaster who refuses to accept less than perfection, the distant father who is consumed by work, the father indulgent in material things but not emotions. The portrait of masculinity presented in Zun Lee’s book Father Figure goes against a number of stereotypes in popular culture. This book is about the fathers who are present in the lives of their children and aims to demystify the concept of the absent black father. Informed by his childhood experiences, Lee set out to photograph the fathers and father figures who are there for others. Father Figure makes a strong but tender statement about black fatherhood.

Father Figure. By Zun Lee. Ceiba, 2014.

It is always a joy to find a photographer with a point of view and something to say. This is a topic that has seen little photographic coverage and Lee is able to bring his unique view to it. This is a content-rich book. Lee entered the lives of his subjects and worked in a way that is fresh, but not reliant on aesthetics. There are a few pictures I wish were not included; one early on is badly back focused and a few others seem a little obvious as compared to the images surrounding them. Lee is a relative newcomer to photography, but he has some serious chops when it comes to dealing with people and making elegant pictures in what might not seem like dramatic surroundings. He respects his subjects and lets their emotions come to the forefront.

Photography has the unique ability to freeze and record quiet times and contextualize them so they can shout a larger statement. Note the adoring look on Carlos Richardson’s face while holding an armload of stuffed animals, waiting for Selah’s next direction for their game; later in the book he holds her while visiting an aquarium and the light from above frames them dramatically. Father Figure gets its strength from images like these — everyday events that happen so often their meaning gets lost in the stream of life.

Father Figure. By Zun Lee. Ceiba, 2014.

The photograph of Jerell Willis and Fidel brush their teeth together in a small bathroom shows how Lee was able to integrate himself into these routine life events. They are all inches apart from another. Willis seems to be thinking about something, the day ahead, or the one just lived, and Fidel is doing his best to get a back tooth clean. I am reminded both of my own childhood and now my life as a parent, how at times it is not easy to convince my son to brush his teeth and how at other times he challenges me to see who did a better job brushing. As a viewer, I don’t know the specifics of their lives, but I know how this moment goes.

Father Figure. By Zun Lee. Ceiba, 2014.

By their nature photographs leave a lot of information out. Texts are used sparingly through the book and the introduction by Teju Cole and a personal essay by Lee help the reader to understand what the photographs leave out. Trymaine Lee’s closing essay shines the light of reality on the life around these pictures. His points are spot on and help to elevate the book.

Father Figure. By Zun Lee. Ceiba, 2014.

This is the kind of book that needs to be seen and shared, especially in the current political times in which we are living. The subtitle is Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood; the book accomplishes this goal and does so without being mired in sentimentality. Father Figure is the kind of book that gives me hope that the documentary tradition is alive and well. The book is nuanced and complex, yet full of clarity. It is the kind of book that needs to be used as an example of the power of the still photograph in book form. Too often photographers go for the visually dramatic to make a statement. Lee went in the opposite direction and found the subtle richness of life.—TOM LEININGER

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TOM LEININGER is a photographer and educator based in North Texas. More of his work can be found on his website.


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Interview: Anouk Kruithof on Artist Books and AUTOMAGIC

April 13, 2015, 7:00 am

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InterviewAnouk Kruithof on Artist Books and AUTOMAGICEric Miles of photo-eye Auctions speaks to Anouk Kruithof about her practice of making artist book practice and her Kickstarter campaign for her forthcoming self-published book AUTOMAGIC.

Anouk Kruithof has one of the most distinctive voices in the photobook world, creating thoughtful books that dynamically engage the medium of photography and bookmaking — all while not being a "straight photographer," as she puts it. Kruithof's publications have been a staple of photo-eye's annual Best Books lists for nearly five years, receiving admiration from a wide range of photobook lovers, including Daniel Boetker Smith, Ruth van Beek, Christopher McCall, Alec Soth and Martin Parr. Recent titles include The Bungalow, Untitled: (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo) (both selected as Best Books of 2014), Pixel Stress (selected as a Best Book of 2013), and the now out of print A Head With Wings and Happy Birthday To You (both selected as Best Books of 2011).  In his 2014 Best Book pick of Untitled, Colin Pantall described Kruithof and her book like this: "Anouk Kruithof is super smart and this is her super smartest book. She deals with hugely complex subjects (how we see, curate, and exhibit photographs) in a light and accessible form, making you work to see the pictures. Imaginative, intelligent and funny, it’s more about the process of how we select and view of images than a photobook."

from Untitled: (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo) by Anouk Kruithof

While she's self-published in the past, her newest book, AUTOMAGIC, is set to be her most elaborate self-published book to date including 20 or so chapters and featuring a wide range of projects spanning many years of her artistic practice. To get the financial backing to make this book possible, Kruithof decided to try crowd funding, launching her first Kickstarter campaign.

In the round of promotion for her Kickstarter, Eric Miles of photo-eye Auctions got a chance to speak with Kruithof about AUTOMAGIC, and we couldn't miss the opportunity to also get into her thoughts on creating spectacular artist books.

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Kruithof in the video for her AUTOMAGIC Kickstarter campaign

Eric Miles:    This is Eric Miles for photo-eye and I'm sitting here with Anouk Kruithof in her studio in Chrystie Street. Thanks for joining us, Anouk to talk about your books and your brand new Kickstarter project for your upcoming book AUTOMAGIC. What I want to talk about is the various ways in which the book has become central to your work as an artist?

Anouk Kruithof:    Yes. It has been a medium I’ve used from when I was still studying at the Art Academy from 1999 to 2003. I remember we learned in school to present projects in the form of a book. To me, the nature of photography and text very much matches with the form of a book. I guess I just continued from maybe 14-15 years ago until now and I'm on the way to my 10th book. Often, I would say photography works naturally with the pages, the spreads, the order — not so much a book as a container for a photo series but more a book where a whole photographic project gets its existence and stays there and is a work in itself. That's mainly what I’ve tried to do, what I find fascinating about the medium of artistbooks.

EM:    How do you think the experience of photography is fundamentally different in a book versus the way we experience it on the wall of a gallery or a museum?

AK:    Yeah. In the first place, of course, a photo in itself isn't anything until the moment you decide what you're going to do with it. You start to make a print, which already has infinite possibilities only when you think of for example: size. When deciding its size and when deciding what kind of print or what kind of frame, you make a decision of how an image comes across. You have to deal with subject matter, the space of presentation like a book or a wall or an elevator, spectators. To me those things are all important to think about.

To me, it's not like you can make a series of 10 pictures and then boom! You have a series of ten US letter-sized photo prints on the wall — I think you maybe don't respect the possibilities inherent to photography as a medium if you do that. An image on mega wallpaper in a museum room by itself is something very different than, I don't know, stamps of that same image which you're going to rotate through the world. It's a medium you can do so much with it. Therefore, you need to think what you do with it. What ways or presentation fit your photographic subject matter and ideas etc. It's so important after you’ve made the photos themselves.

from The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof

EM:    Yeah. Prints on the wall are only one way of using the photographic image, right? And a very narrow way at that. So much of the history of photography is based on that one use of the image as a print on the wall. Can you talk about the way that you use source material? In your last book, The Bungalow, you immersed yourself in collection of vernacular photography.

AK:    Yes. That was pretty exceptional in the sense that I'm not a straight photographer at all, but I also don't normally use found images from the Internet or another source of the vernacular kind. I came across Brad Feuerhelm — the collector of this vernacular photography collection I've worked with — I found a talk by him so fascinating that I started to talk with him. This was in France and the conversations lead to a visit to see his snapshots in London. I just placed myself within all these thousands of pictures for a whole day. I think maybe his mind in collecting corresponds with my curiosity towards these found images. Of course, we have some parallels, the two of us; I guess our fascinations is what brought us together to make this book. In the end in the process of developing an artist book, I'm very honored that I could work with this very rich collection. He's been busy with it since he was 17. It's already a whole big work by itself, finding those thousands of physical prints, but then the next step is what to do with it. I'm an artist and I have ideas of how to make an artist book or do the translating of these old photos to now — they are basically from the beginning of the 20th Century to up until, I guess, somewhere 90s or something like that, a very wide range. To me, this is just an artist book. We didn't do any exhibitions with The Bungalow. There are new photos made by me that contain some old photos but a lot of it is reproduced or reworked and there aren't any straight photos like the original snapshots in this book. That was also a condition for him; he would love for me to use it as material. Otherwise he could edit his own collection and make more of, maybe, a classical version of vernacular-photography-in-book-form book. He wanted to work with me because I don't do that.

from The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof

EM:    I know that you're very excited to talk about the project at which you are currently at work, AUTOMAGIC, which you're funding on Kickstarter. Can you talk about the experience of working on AUTOMAGIC, which like much of your past work, is based on your own archive of imagery collected over many years, as opposed to working on The Bungalow, which was a different sort of archive?

AK:    Yeah, I see that too. I always have groups of photos and text that I start to work with. In the case of Happy Birthday To You, I collaborated with an assistant who took most of the photos, so we had— not an archive, but we had a group of photos that we started to work from. In the case of Untitled (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo), A Head With Wings and then now AUTOMAGIC, the source is my own AUTOMAGIC archive. It's something else because it's huge. It's an archive I started to separate and order about 13 years ago up until now.

from the AUTOMAGIC Kickstarter campaign video

EM:    Can you give us an idea of just how big— for those of us who don't walk around with the camera as an extension of our head— can you give us an idea just how much imagery we're talking about?

AK:    I think we’re talking about thousands of pictures — I mean, 2,000-3,000 maybe, because of course I edit it. I always see it like this: when the phones came or when I worked with a small digital camera, it was something I would continuously do but I would never put actual value to. All my other projects are more concept-based and I would deliberately work with a Hasselblad or deliberately choose a device for a project, but this archive continuously grew on the side. It also got edited on the way and put in the folder of the AUTOMAGIC archive. It deliberately grew there and organized but I think you can see about 3,000-4,000 pictures to start with. The process of making it was very similar to The Bungalow, the reworking, the editing, the finding groups, and there's my writings. It’s very similar also to A Head With Wings, although that's out of the same archive, focused on one man I once photographed and filmed. I made 3D maquettes and rephotographed them but the variety of how things are reworked is bigger in The Bungalow and will be even bigger in AUTOMAGIC. It's related to the topics of a series or groups of images and what I do with them. I have all these ideas, I can tell a few. For example, I see this book as a holistic idea. There are many, many chapters, maybe 20 or something, but one is these portraits of people taken all over the world, everywhere I travel, basically. I took the portraits and in Syracuse during my residency at Light Work, would print them randomly on the laser printer, turn the pages and would print other portraits of people from other countries on the back. I would hold the new laser prints in front of a window and by chance this person in Thailand and that person in Belize and that one in New York would be morphed together. They would become one, or some sort of new people as how I see them. All the chapters have ideas behind them, but this is very much how I relate to the world we are in right now. If you think about your digital existence and the physical one, how that blends, everybody has those two, like, schizophrenic existences, you're the online one and you are the offline one.

from the forthcoming AUTOMAGIC by Anouk Kruithof

Every way of reworking, I have an idea of why I do it and create new photos. There are also straight photos in AUTOMAGIC, for sure. There are also certain chapters which are reworked bit, certain thoughts I also want to express in the work and sometimes you can really understand why it is done like that. I like to think about everything I feel although the process can be very fluid and I love to give chance a chance, in a way, because more interesting things come out of it than my own brain, eyes, hands or the computer.

EM:    The ways that you use your source material, you're telling a story in a way that has to do with classifications and taxonomies and different kinds of photos, but also our experience of taking them and how we record visual phenomena.

AK:    Yeah. That's the totally other thought that is behind AUTOMAGIC. I think the whole idea is how our memory works and how it also gets affected and changes our perception over time by the use of our little digital devices, our phones, like continuously framing and living through this window with beaming pixels all day long. I don't even know how it is anymore without continuously framing the world in my mind. My eyes already work like that. It's a bit of cliché to say. Everybody takes pictures and it's also very easy to take pictures, I think. Therefore, it's more interesting what you do with them.

EM:    Can you tell us a little bit about your Kickstarter campaign?

AK:    This is the first time I’ve ever done this. This book AUTOMAGIC I started, I think, four years ago. I did a lot of other work during that time as well, of course, sometimes it laid still because with making a book there is no deadline, it's not the same as making a solo show. I was waiting and waiting and I started stresspress.biz, my publishing platform where I post what I write about books of others and as well show and sell my own books. I’ve done books with other publishers, books I self-publish as well, but I want to develop it into a platform where I can collaborate with other artists and writers. I have many ideas. You need to have financial backing for that because it's very tiring to always find the money before you can execute something. Plus, AUTOMAGIC will be a very thick book, so it's expensive and it's also a high quality product and printed on different paper and I want to work with the best printers and binders and the paper sides of the book are going to be painted yellow plus the cover and the back of the book as well, so it appears as a blank yellow object, an energetic paving stone.

from the AUTOMAGIC Kickstarter campaign video

My Kickstarter is just to raise the money to pay my graphic designer, the printer, the binder, translators for the text and editors and maybe other people who are involved. I tried to find 25,000 Euro, which is not enough to actually make it but I will add to it myself and later you're going to sell books — you get it back, I guess, of course! That's not really a problem, but, yeah, it cost that much. The Kickstarter is a new idea, also. I find it interesting that all these different people get together to basically make that happen, and that's something so different than when, for example, you ask sponsors normally privately, which is what I have been doing for long time, or won a prize to make a book or you get book budgets related to a residency — but you always need to find sources. You cannot make artist books the way I do them without any external support. It's so not lucrative, so you need to find financial backup to do it and I don't even pay any hours for myself.

EM:    Would you say that AUTOMAGIC is your most ambitious project yet?

AK:    Yes, well book-wise for sure, but not if you include all my work, as a big part of my practice is not in book form. Yeah. Because it has work from all these years, which is also— I'm a bit afraid. There are things that are old and then all of the sudden you bring a new object into the world. It's strange to me because my work is so much more project-based, which relates often to the time and space in which its created. But this is very different, an archive. It's very, very different, I would say. It total it’ll be around 500-1000 pages maybe. Well, it's still a long way to go.

_____________________________

from Untitled by Anouk Kruithof

Pledge rewards for Kruithof's Kickstarter include prints, a variety of her previous publications and, of course, the forthcoming AUTOMAGIC. Find the Kickstarter page here.

Find books by Anouk Kruithof at photo-eye Bookstore

Read Colin Pantall's review of Untitled: (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo)



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Book of the Week: A Pick by Kevin Messina

April 14, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book of the WeekBook of the Week: A Pick by Kevin MessinaKevin Messina selects R+R (Rest + Relaxation) by Ryan Arthurs as Book of the Week.

R+R (Rest + Relaxation) by Ryan Arthurs. Houseboat Press.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Kevin Messina who has selected R+R (Rest + Relaxation) by Ryan Arthurs from Houseboat Press.

"I'm starting to see a lot more elaborately and thoughtfully produced book projects being released with increasing regularity, but it is still rare to encounter a photobook in which the physical object contributes as much to the experience as the content. This is one of those rarities.

The content, in this case, takes vintage found photographs of men in the military as its starting point. But then Arthurs takes the pictures someplace else entirely by screen printing brightly colored shapes over the figures in each image — simultaneously obscuring and highlighting the men. The result is a body of work that can be read on many levels, but it was the origins of the source material — photographs of servicemen at leisure — that led Arthurs to the very successful physical form of his book.

Unable to show the full body of work at an exhibition, Arthurs wanted to produce a small one-off book to show all of the images available for sale. His solution was to insert his images into a vintage military album. These particular albums can be challenging to find today, but they were extremely common during World War II, the period in which many of the original photographs were taken.

The contrast of the vintage album with the modernist imagery it contains has a remarkable impact. The form of the album is an intensely personal device, made all the more so here by the fact that both the album and the source material are real. When you hold this book in your hands, you are holding an object that once belonged to a man who may have been much like the men pictured in the images affixed to its pages. If that were all, the book would be merely interesting... add to it the remarkable way in which the artist has chosen to intervene in the original photographs, and you have something far more compelling.

That first copy of the book was stolen from the exhibition (perhaps the greatest compliment an artist can receive), setting Arthurs out in search of more albums so he could make a replacement. To date, he has made perhaps a dozen copies, each of them bearing the unique character of the vintage album his prints occupy. I've encouraged him to keep making them for as long as he can find albums, but in all likelihood, there won't be many more of these to come. Move swiftly, this one is special."—Kevin Messina

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R+R (Rest + Relaxation) by Ryan Arthurs. Houseboat Press.

R+R (Rest + Relaxation) by Ryan Arthurs. Houseboat Press.

Kevin Messina is the founder of SILAS FINCH, a design studio and publishing house based in New York. He likes to ski with his friends in Colorado.
www.silasfinch.org








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Book Review: Half Wild

April 15, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewHalf WildBy Peter Happel ChristianReviewed by Adam BellThe famed author, environmentalist, and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir first visited Yosemite in 1868. Years later in 1890, he successfully lobbied Congress to designate Yosemite a national park. Containing some of the most iconic landscapes in the United States, Yosemite often stands for archetypal wilderness in the United States.

Half Wild. By Peter Happel Christian. Conveyor Arts, 2014.

Half Wild

Reviewed by Adam Bell

Half Wild
By Peter Happel Christian
Conveyor Arts, 2014. 112 pp., illustrated throughout, 5¾x8¼".

The famed author, environmentalist, and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir first visited Yosemite in 1868. Years later in 1890, he successfully lobbied Congress to designate Yosemite a national park. Containing some of the most iconic landscapes in the United States, Yosemite often stands for archetypal wilderness in the United States. Like many national parks, it serves as benchmark against which we measure the natural world that surrounds us, while also fortifying the illusion that we can maintain a place that’s untouched. National parks may be a necessary bulwark against rapacious development and expansion, but pose a vexing conundrum. The notion that one could cordon off a space and designate it as wild assumes we stand fully apart from nature. Borrowing its name from Muir’s book Our National Parks, Peter Happel Christian’s Half Wild explores what Muir described the “half wild parks and gardens of towns.” Through a mixed assortment of images, Half Wild explores the divergent ways in which we refashion, preserve, and map an elusive wilderness that is always out of reach.

Half Wild. By Peter Happel Christian. Conveyor Arts, 2014.

Moving between the suburban Midwest and Yosemite, Half Wild attempts to define and map the illusive gap between the wild and suburban world. Combining landscapes, still-lifes, studio fabrications, and portraits, Happel Christian employs a variety of different visual strategies to engage his subject. Broken branches, camouflaged and fake rocks, strange holes in the ground, spray-painted grass, and photogramed nickels are all some of the many subjects depicted in Half Wild. If the ‘wild’ is itself an obtuse and mythically defined signified, Happel Christian’s work orbits this already elusive subject by compiling a heterogeneous collection of signs that point obliquely at their subject. Each image reads as a fragmented attempt to simulate or point back to something wild — signs gesturing at a murky signified.

Although the book includes many images, it is unified by still-lifes of various objects including rocks, twigs, broken ice or glass, and crystals. Shot both indoors and out, the fake collides with the real. Tin foil masquerades as a geode and a plastic crystal refracts light as it if we real. Even the real items, like the branches, which are alternately garishly light or dropped on a mute background, seem oddly out of place and fake. Corralled in the studio or shot outdoors, they are stripped bare and divorced from their typical surroundings. Dancing around notions of the wild, Happel Christian’s investigative photographs brings us closer to his subject than we might have imagined given their often minimal content. The pattern of pointing that occurs in the images and their careful sequencing becomes a gestural conjuring or performance of the wild. Slowly the differences between the crumpled foil and granite dissolve.

Half Wild. By Peter Happel Christian. Conveyor Arts, 2014.

Half Wild. By Peter Happel Christian. Conveyor Arts, 2014.

Again and again, the simulation of the ‘wild’ or its fragmentary nature is revealed, promised, erased, or withheld. Shrubs are marked for removal with white paint and a giant pile of cinderblocks is ironically topped with a sign pointing to a real mountain in the distance. In another image, entitled Sun Sets, the bright afternoon sunset passes over the sunset on a calendar landscape painting—the real sun overriding and merging with its representation. Images are doubled or shown in slight variation inviting us to compare and scrutinize. At three points in the book we also encounter images of the word ‘OK’ spray painted on the grass. Read variously as questions or assertions, these sign posts simultaneously check in on us as readers to see if we’re following, while also laying the foundations of Happel Christian’s argument. You got that, right? Is this ok? Does this make sense?

Half Wild. By Peter Happel Christian. Conveyor Arts, 2014.

Although not immediately apparent, it might be appropriate to think of Half Wild as a fragmented map or atlas. At first glance, the book’s small, unassuming size resembles a humble nature guide, much like the many volumes penned by Muir himself, but the book’s coda makes its map-like aspirations clear. Opening with a cropped map of Yosemite, the book’s concluding section is printed on a cream matte paper and includes Borges’ famous one paragraph short story about cartography, “Del rigor en la ciencia,” or “On the Rigor of Science,” an nice essay by Liz Sales, which explores the works parallel to maps and mapping, and an index for all the plates along with their titles. In retrospect, Half Wild starts to feel more like the field notes of a cartographer struggling to collect and decipher all the necessary elements to make their map. Even the smaller reproduced plates in the back of the book begin to resemble a jumbled and indecipherable map legend — signs and symbols that reference a distant landscape or landscape in transition.

Half Wild. By Peter Happel Christian. Conveyor Arts, 2014.

In Half Wild, Happel Christian has taken a well-worn subject, namely our relationship with the natural world, and explored it with humor and erudition. If maps are meant to reveal and describe, they can just as easily displace and confuse. Like the maddeningly exacting cartographers in Borges story, Happel Christian attempts to map the territory of the ‘half wild’ with intentionally varied results. Each effort to define or locate his subject shifts the target and expands the map. As much about the impossibility of photographic representation as it is about our relationship to the natural world, Half Wild also reveals the fluid nature of the boundaries we draw around us. The landscape, like maps and photographs, can only tell us so much. In the end, we’re left to hover in doubt between what we know, think, or assume is wild.—Adam Bell

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ADAM BELL is a photographer and writer. His work has been widely exhibited, and his writing and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Afterimage, The Art Book Review, The Brooklyn Rail, fototazo, Foam Magazine, Lay Flat, photo-eye and Paper-Journal. His books include The Education of a Photographer and the forthcoming Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts. He is currently on staff and faculty at the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Art. (www.adambbell.com and blog.adambbell.com)


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Book Review: Amc2 Journal Issue 9. Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy

April 17, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewAmc2 Journal Issue 9. Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s ItalyEdited by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti.Reviewed by Sarah BradleyI confess that I am a bit behind. Two of the recent offerings from the Archive of Modern Conflict’s AMC2 series (though not the latest…) have both accompanied exhibitions of images from the archive’s collection; in the case of Issue 9, Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy, the images appeared at the 2014 Brighton Photo Biennial.

Amc2 Journal Issue 9.  Amore e Piombo:  The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy.  Edited by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti. AMC Books, 2014.

Amc2 Journal Issue 9.  Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy

Reviewed by Sarah Bradley

Amc2 Journal Issue 9Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy
Edited and with an essay by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti.
AMC Books, 2014. 136 pp., illustrated throughout, 8¼x11".

I confess that I am a bit behind. Two of the recent offerings from the Archive of Modern Conflict’s AMC2 series (though not the latest…) have both accompanied exhibitions of images from the archive’s collection; in the case of Issue 9, Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy, the images appeared at the 2014 Brighton Photo Biennial.

With a title translating to Love and Lead, the photographs depict an era of sexual liberation and intense political strife. We encounter shrapnel wounds in the cover — literal holes that punch through the bright red paper, detailed on the interior flap, and pointed out — again, literally — by the first image, a close-up of a hand pointing to scarred concrete, making the violence, as well as the exhibition of such things for the camera, immediately evident. From this ominous beginning we move through a series of images of an inconceivably picturesque segment of 20th century Italian life. The photographs offer all of the eye-candy we want from this era. The clothing is precisely the right kind of outlandish, the protests so stylish, the politicians so clearly smarmy and corrupt, the clergy sleazy, perfectly captured in an image of a priest (cardinal?) walking by a fleet of reporters while adjusting his skull cap like a starlet bouncing her curls — and so many celebrities. It’s hugely cinematic. My immediate impression was of a Fellini film, and was reassured by the essay that the association was not merely from a lack of other mid-century Italian touchstones. Fellini is a heavy influence here, as is Hollywood, films in general. The essay suggests looking at the book while listening to a chunk of the soundtrack from the 1972 film Roma.

Amc2 Journal Issue 9.  Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy.  Edited by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti. AMC Books, 2014.

Amc2 Journal Issue 9.  Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy.  Edited by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti. AMC Books, 2014.

It’d be hard to go wrong with a selection of images like this, but real credit should be given to Roger Hargreaves and Federica Chiocchetti for some wonderful editing. I would guess that this was a sizable archive, and Hargreaves and Chiocchetti clearly pulled out an astonishing amount of choice material (it almost feels too perfect), but the editing within the book is notable as well. The whole story seems to fall open in your lap just asking to be absorbed; it’s immediately engaging and readable. Beautifully assembled with a terrifically lively layout, images are mostly presented full bleed, and pairings make easy and often funny conversation across the gutter.

Amc2 Journal Issue 9.  Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy.  Edited by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti. AMC Books, 2014.

Amc2 Journal Issue 9.  Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy.  Edited by Roger Hargreaves & Federica Chiocchetti. AMC Books, 2014.

The glamor and energy of the first half of the book shifts to anxiety and bloodshed in the second, yet even in the move from nightclubs and celebrities to scenes of brutal violence, the cinematic tone is maintained. All of these images were shot by the press, but in an Italy that seemed to exist for the cameras. The backstories are script worthy as well — a convoluted mess of nesting conspiracies where one faction would incite violence and blame someone else. As the real reasons behind events were often hidden, the obvious could not be trusted. It would all seem farcical if it wasn’t also so clearly real; the frenetic confusion is palpable, evidenced by photos of scattered pedestrian casualties in the aftermath of a bombing, a rivulet of blood making its way across the pavement from a shrouded body. It is all real, right? An image of a man shooting out the windshield of a car had a friend and I totally stumped. “That must be staged, right?” “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone in the car…” I don’t know, and maybe it doesn’t matter. These images are spellbinding, and as a whole the book walks an amazingly fine-line between boisterous humor and terrified tragedy.—SARAH BRADLEY

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SARAH BRADLEY is a writer, sculptor and costumer, as well as Editor of photo-eye Blog. Some of her work can be found on her website sebradley.com.

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Book Review: In the Shadow of the Pyramids

April 20, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewIn the Shadow of the PyramidsBy Laura El-TantawyReviewed by Colin Pantall“There are 90 million people in this country. Ninety million stories to be told. This is the beginning of only one.”
The country is Egypt, the year is 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full flight. Cairo’s Tahrir Square is packed with protestors against the president’s rule and El-Tantawy is in their midst.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids

Reviewed by Colin Pantall

In the Shadow of the Pyramids
Text and photographs by Laura El-Tantawy
Self-Published, Amsterdam. 440 pp., 125 illustrations, 9x7x1½".

“There are 90 million people in this country. Ninety million stories to be told. This is the beginning of only one.”

The country is Egypt, the year is 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full flight. Cairo’s Tahrir Square is packed with protestors against the president’s rule and El-Tantawy is in their midst. “In the square of Liberation I found dreamers. Just like in the films. Thousands of them. In Tahrir Square I found myself again.”

If the protestors are dreamers (in more than one sense), that is how the book plays out; like a color-saturated, grain-soaked, ISO-high dream. It’s dreamland all the way as the subdued fearfulness and paranoia of the early images explodes into the cathartic adrenalin rush of the massed crowds in Tahrir Square. They stand in the ranks, flags and banners aloft and fireworks blasting.

But even here, there is suspicion and distrust. People know they are being watched, fear is present, spies are everywhere and new schisms are being formed as the old ones are broken down. This is no peaceful revolution even when bullets aren’t being fired and rocks aren’t being thrown. It’s one where familiar forms of violence and oppression are biding their time beyond the short term, seeking new divisions in which to find an outlet; the uniform or the religion or the party may change but the violence and the power remain the same.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015.

There are people in these crowds who know this. That’s what El-Tantawy picks out, the quiet moments of faces amid the frenzy, and that’s what makes the book stand out as a very special book. It’s a triple edit; the before, the now, and the after, an edit made in the full light of what was to come; the old dictator becoming a new dictator, the oppression shape-shifting into suits and  fatigues, into the subsequent killing and torture that never fit into anything as neat and tidy  sounding as the Arab Spring.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids is a visualisation of a mentality, a picture of a repressive state of mind and what happens when that is manifested through violence and armed force. In the book, the dream becomes a nightmare and the square becomes darker. Barbed wire and shields and barriers are photographed or created by El-Tantawy through her off-kilter framing and use of foregrounds to form visual keyholes. Figures stand ominously in windows and then ranks of police appear on the scene against a backdrop of orange and red.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015.

In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015.

The faces of the protestors are isolated now. We see their anger and their tears. These are men and women who are shocked by what they have witnessed, as El-Tantawy is shocked by what she has witnessed. “I canvas the square looking for faces that express this revolution,” she writes. “Hope, fear, disappointment, joy, pride. This square has seen it all. I ache when they ache. Cry when they cry. Try to laugh when they try. In their faces I see my own.”

In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015.

She sees her first body on July 27^th2013. It’s something she doesn’t want to be in this story, in a place that she realizes is no longer home. And then things get concrete with a picture of a pool of blood against a line of police shields and suspicion, separation and fear reigns again. A portrait of Reda, a blind weeping boy, crystallizes that fear and then we’re finished and it’s “over.” The book ends with “normality,” with the pyramids and a couple sitting under a tree. Everything is back the way it was, but what kind of a way is that? On the surface things are normal, but what lies beneath this surface? What is oppressed? What aren’t people saying or showing or feeling?

In the Shadow of the Pyramids. Photographs by Laura El-Tantawy. Self-Published, 2015.

The phenomenal thing about El-Tantawy’s book is that she captures this subconscious dream-life of a nation where fear and distrust form the basis of everyday life. She tells the story of Tahrir Square but she also visualises a way of thinking and how that affects both herself and a people. And indeed all of us, because In the Shadow of the Pyramids shows what it feels like to live in a place where you’re not free to say what you think or to be who you are. Wherever we live corporate, political, communal, racial, religious or military violence is never too far from the surface. Including in the United States and where I live, in the United Kingdom. Tahrir Square could be anywhere.—COLIN PANTALL

This book is out of print

COLIN PANTALL is a UK-based writer and photographer. He is a contributing writer for the British Journal of Photography and a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. http://colinpantall.blogspot.com

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Book of the Week: A Pick by Andrew Roth

April 21, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book of the WeekBook of the Week: A Pick by Andrew RothAndrew Roth selects The Human Snapshot edited by Thomas Keenan & Tirdad Zolghadr as Book of the Week.

The Human Snapshot edited by Thomas Keenan &  Tirdad Zolghadr. Sternberg Press/Luma Foundation, 2013.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Andrew Roth who has selected The Human Snapshot edited by Thomas Keenan & Tirdad Zolghadr from the Sternberg Press/Luma Foundation.

"April 12, 2015

Dear Melanie,

In the spirit of the essay 'Humanist Correspondence,' written by Alex Klein in The Human Snapshot, the book I am recommending to you… I have chosen to write you a short note.

I purchased this book from the New York Art Book Fair back in 2013 on an impulse because it looked seductive: a color photograph inset onto the vivid-blue, front panel with yellow-painted fore-edges… but only just last week cracked open the shrink-wrap. I am a fan of most of Sternberg Press’s books and this one, particularly beautiful in design, is also an engaging read. It is a byproduct of a conference organized at the LUMA Foundation in Arles by Maja Hoffman in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard. The book kicks off with a 32-page montage (page numbers in bold Roman numerals) of black-and-white photographs on a thin, smoothly coated paper stock, printing images discussed in the accompanying essays which are written by 18 different authors, each reassessing, commenting on or taking as a point of departure Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition and publication. The text pages are printed on a heavy weight, uncoated stock, in keen contrast to the image block. The typeface is simple and generic but over-sized.

I was most drawn to Alex Klein’s essay which discusses the importance of visual and written communication between thinkers, curious minds, colleagues; building what he references as '…a community of thought.' Klein recounts that his father, after having seen The Family of Man exhibition at MoMA began corresponding with various photographers, in hopes to purchase their work, out of sheer love for their images and a desire to live with them on his walls: to purchase is a form of communicating. Klein reproduces two letters, one his father wrote to the photographer Gotthard Schuh and the other a letter he received from Paul Strand, in the 1960s. Klein’s father was looking to purchase The Family, one of Strand’s most iconic images, but was not willing to pay the $200 for a 5x7 inch print Strand had quoted him. In turn Strand straightforwardly suggests he look for and purchase a copy of a British Photography Yearbook from 1963 featuring a portfolio of 16 gravures, made under Strand’s supervision. He states: 'Most of them are first class, The Family among them…' Though this detail was not central to the ideas Klein was putting forth, it was the reproduction of the hand-written letter and that inimitable Paul Strand signature that sucked me in. Perhaps because hand-written letters have become so scarce or maybe the fact that I am presently working to sell a collection of correspondence… or the fact that I am about to move into an apartment that Strand lived in, in the 1960s... from where he most likely had written the letter.

I hope this works for you… Regards,

Andrew Roth, publisher of PPP Editions"—Andrew Roth

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The Human Snapshot edited by Thomas Keenan & Tirdad Zolghadr. Sternberg Press/Luma Foundation, 2013.

The Human Snapshot edited by Thomas Keenan & Tirdad Zolghadr. Sternberg Press/Luma Foundation, 2013.

Andrew Roth specializes in selling rare photographic and artist’s books from the 20th century, while also publishing limited edition books himself under his imprint PPP Editions. He maintains a gallery in New York primarily exhibiting the work of photographic artist’s from the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary art. Over the past 10 years he has presented exhibitions by key Japanese artists Makoto Aida, Nobuyoshi Araki, Ishiuchi Miyako, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Tadanori Yokoo, and Keizo Kitajima. Along with exhibitions on the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Collier Schorr and David Wojnarowicz. In 1999 he presented PROVOKE, the first exhibition in the US to outline a critical history of rare Japanese photographic books. In 2001 he published THE BOOK OF 101 BOOKS— a primer on the history of the photographic book, which went on to help define the rare photographic book market of today. Recent publications include: IN NUMBERS: SERIAL PUBLICATIONS BY ARTISTS SINCE 1955, William E. Jones’ KILLED, Ishiuchi Miyako’s SWEET HOME YOKOSUKA, Larry Clark’s PUNK PICASSO, Leigh Ledare’s PRETEND YOU’RE ACTUALLY ALIVE and MALE: FROM THE COLLECTION OF VINCE ALETTI.


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Jock Sturges: Fanny – Exhibition Introduction Video

April 23, 2015, 9:12 am

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photo-eye GalleryJock Sturges: Fanny – Exhibition Introduction VideoWe were thrilled to celebrate the opening of Jock Sturges' exhibition Fanny with over 130 visitors to photo-eye Gallery. While he was in Santa Fe Sturges took the time to give us a short introduction to the show, discussing his relationship to Fanny, the length and scope of the project, and his trip to photograph her pregnancy.

Jock Sturges at photo-eye Gallery, April 2015

We were thrilled to celebrate the opening of Jock Sturges' exhibition Fanny with over 130 visitors to photo-eye Gallery. Currently on view through May 23rd, this series features 24 portraits of Fanny made over 26 years, showing her evolution from child to adult, continuing now through her pregnancy with her own first child. As Anne Kelly noted in her interview with Sturges for photo-eye Blog, the photographs also display "her growing rapport with Sturges. Sturges has a firm belief that a model's relationship with the photographer is evident in the images, and that each image is the result of a collaboration." The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book Fanny from Steidl.


While he was in Santa Fe Sturges took the time to give us a short introduction to the show, discussing his relationship to Fanny, the length and scope of the project, and his trip to photograph her pregnancy.

Read Anne Kelly's interview with Sturges on photo-eye Blog

Exhibition continues through May 23, 2015
photo-eye Gallery, 541 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM

Order a signed copy of Fanny

For more information or to purchase a print, please contact Anne Kelly at 505-988-5152 x121 or anne@photoeye.com

Book Review: Tones of Dirt and Bone

April 24, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewTones of Dirt and BoneBy Mike BrodieReviewed by Sarah BradleyTones of Dirt and Bone is the second monograph from Twin Palms and Mike Brodie, and despite its later release, the photographs were made prior to the work of the 2013 release, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. These are the Mike Brodie images that first floated around the internet, a series of Polaroid photographs made with an SX-70, the work that provided his moniker, The Polaroid Kidd.

Tones of Dirt and Bone. By Mike Brodie. Twin Palms, 2015.

Tones of Dirt and Bone

Reviewed by Sarah Bradley

Tones of Dirt and Bone
Photographs by Mike Brodie
Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, 2014. 84 pp., 49 color illustrations, 10x11".

Tones of Dirt and Bone is the second monograph from Twin Palms and Mike Brodie, and despite its later release, the photographs were made prior to the work of the 2013 release, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. These are the Mike Brodie images that first floated around the internet, a series of Polaroid photographs made with an SX-70, the work that provided his moniker, The Polaroid Kidd. It is composed mostly of portraits and still-lifes, though perhaps they’d be more satisfactorily described as details or small moments — instincts honed with a Polaroid camera that make some of what’s in A Period of Juvenile Prosperity so distinct. But they are different books; Tones of Dirt and Bone is quieter, softer.

Tones of Dirt and Bone. By Mike Brodie. Twin Palms, 2015.

In a short interview in i-D, Brodie mentioned that his camera kept him in the role of observer, but it seems likely that the camera was also a connector, a tool that gave him permission to remain a step back but with the potential to forge a point of entry. There is a palpable vulnerability and urge to connect that make Brodie’s images striking — tender and human. The tiny baby boot cradled by the large ones, the slender neck pock-marked with finger-tip bruises, the corner of parted lips just visible in the upper right. There are a number of beautiful pairings of people and animals — the young woman with the parakeet, the man with the white beard and the pigeon, the toothy girl and the rabbit. The color pallet is cool with a slight greenish hue provided by those strange yet distinctive Polaroid colors, accented by the occasional texture of unpredictable emulsion. The printing is gorgeous.

Tones of Dirt and Bone. By Mike Brodie. Twin Palms, 2015.

Tones of Dirt and Bone. By Mike Brodie. Twin Palms, 2015.

Tones of Dirt and Bone reproduces just the images themselves, cropping out the characteristic white Polaroid boarders. Given that the photographs traveled with Brodie as he made his way across the United States, part of me wonders what the actual prints look like, but reproducing them as full objects would be an entirely different book, one perhaps informed by art book presentations of vernacular photography. There’s clearly a market instinct to distance Brodie’s work from this kind of thing, but removing the borders also allows the photographs to be reproduced at a larger scale. Despite being presented in this fine volume, the images still feel slightly worn, still like Polaroids — which may be annoying to some, but to me is a good thing. Too much cleaning and you lose something. It’s a fine balance.

Tones of Dirt and Bone. By Mike Brodie. Twin Palms, 2015.

I can understand why some may prefer this book to the last, but for me, Tones of Dirt and Bone doesn’t catch me in the same way. I expect that part of the reason can be traced to the differences between the mediums used to shoot. In my limited experience, shooting with Polaroid requires a special deliberateness on the part of both photographer and sitter, which carries through to the images of Tones of Dirt and Bone. It is a slower pace. If the rolling rhythm of the train can be felt in the images in A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, that stillness — the deep breath inwards as the shutter button is pressed – can be felt in Tones of Dirt and Bone. There are virtues to both, and I expect few will have difficulty picking a favorite.—SARAH BRADLEY

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SARAH BRADLEY is a writer, sculptor and costumer, as well as Editor of photo-eye Blog. Some of her work can be found on her website sebradley.com.

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In Stock at photo-eye: Signed

April 25, 2015, 9:00 am

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BooksIn Stock at photo-eye: SignedFour signed titles from Ken Schles, Lucas Blalock, Daniel Coburn and Iseo Nose, all in stock at photo-eye Bookstore.

Night Walk
Photographs by Ken Schles
Published by Steidl
$50 SIGNED — Purchase Book

"Twenty-five years after the printing of his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken Schles revisits his archive and fashions a narrative of lost youth: a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable Downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. Night Walk is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York's last pre-Internet bohemian outpost, a stream of consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to find the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble."—the publisher

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by Markus Schaden

Self-Publish Be Happy (SPBH) Book Club Vol. VII 
Photographs by Lucas Blalock
Published by Self-Publish Be Happy

$83 SIGNED — Purchase Book

"SPBH Book Club Vol. VII continues Blalock's investigation of stand-ins, or surrogates, with hot dogs acting as line, brushstroke, body part, and still life object. The bodied-ness of this food stuff has an uneasy, uncanny, relationship with the surface-less photograph, and this is a situation that the pictures exploit through humor and ickiness. The book itself is as much object as book with its contents in shifting orientation and the whole thing sealed shut with a sticker."—the publisher

Selected as Book of the Week by Rémi Faucheux

The Hereditary Estate
Photographs by Daniel Coburn. Text by Karen Irvine and Kirsten Pai Buick
Kehret Verlag

$55 SIGNED — Purchase Book

"The Hereditary Estate functions as a ten-year retrospective and as a conceptual work of art. Daniel Coburn's work investigates the family photo album employed as the visual infrastructure for the flawed ideology of the American Dream. Frustrated by the lack of images that document the true and sometimes troubling nature of his own familial history, the photographer set out to create a new archive, a potent supplement to the broken family album that exists in many families."—the publisher

Morphology
Photographs by Iseo Nose
AKAAKA

$47 SIGNED — Purchase Book

"A photography book that manages to capture the likeness of stars being born to form a galaxy, of plants eroding a vacant land, of the sensation of distance when we look intently while touching, of sediment in the gutter changing its shimmer with the flow of water and temperature.

If we abolish the dichotomy of the living and non-living, and regard all things in the world as living, moving beings, the sensations of us, who are alive, and the guise of the world, alive as well, meet, and from their interaction with each other, a “living form” emerges. A rare book that expresses the Morphology of Goethe, the Anthrosophy of Rudolf Steiner, in the form of art."—the publisher

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Book Review: The Bungalow

April 27, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book ReviewThe BungalowSarah Bay GachotThe Bungalow resulted from a sequestering. Kruithof locked herself away with hundreds of vernacular photographs and made a record of those electrified, metaphorical moments of experiencing pictures — imagining exactly how she thought these images should be processed and presented as “screen reality” in book form; making new photography from old. The book contains five chapters and differing grades of paper — blue-tinted, white matte, and thin glossy-color and black-and-white.

The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof. Onomatopee, 2014.

The Bungalow

Reviewed by Sarah Bay Gachot

The Bungalow
By Anouk Kruithof
Onomatopee, 2014. 272 pp., 7½x9¾x2".

The Bungalow resulted from a sequestering. Anouk Kruithof locked herself away with hundreds of vernacular photographs and made a record of those electrified, metaphorical moments of experiencing pictures — imagining exactly how she thought these images should be processed and presented as “screen reality” in book form; making new photography from old. The book contains five chapters and differing grades of paper — blue-tinted, white matte, and thin glossy-color and black-and-white. Each chapter is a visual riff that categorizes or conjures, layers or double exposes. “In my view,” writes Kruithof in her essay that introduces the book, “this is the way to record the screen reality in which we live.”

The project began when Kruithof e-mailed London-based collector, writer, and curator Brad Feuerhelm after encountering bits of his collection of thousands of vernacular photographs on Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr. “Here is the start of an idea,” she wrote in an e-mail to Feuerhelm in late 2012 after he invited her to London to see his collection of photographs in person, “... I need to make some kind of grid; create a structure. I have to find a method to deal with all the photos.” To do this — to “deal with” this collection — she selected 500 of the photographs, which Feuerhelm scanned for her. She then holed up with these 500 images in digital form in a remote bungalow in a small town “on an almost island in the South of Holland,” and spent a few months visiting and communing with them.

The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof. Onomatopee, 2014.

The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof. Onomatopee, 2014.

“Command Shift 3,” registers nearly two dozen screenshot spreads that Kruithof made while she had selections of JPEG scans open in Photoshop — images of weather, fetish, corners, obscure objects, missed exposures, and candid expressions – with filenames, rulers, scroll bars, and doc sizes lining their JPEG frames. In one screenshot, an image named “_<>_.jpg” shows a woman with a fire-engine-red lipsticked smile leaning back and looking up. She wears 1950s-style high-waisted and pointy-bosomed lingerie. She is layered over another vintage image (indicated by the purplish-red fade of its chroma) of a woman covered, cut off at the eyebrow by this other picture, but evidently lifting her arms over her head, running a hand over her hair. Above this is a photograph of a reclining silhouette propped up on one elbow over a glossy black floor. There’s a white curtain, a branch with sparse pink blossoms, and a piece of furniture that might be described as a tongue-shaped chest of drawers installed from floor to ceiling on a silver pole. A tiny JPEG frame, named “<...>.jpg,” shows something baudy, something with more than one cleavage, mardi gras beads, and other pendants. Another image is of bodies entangled, all tanned Caucasian skin and strawberry blond hair, rolling around on a grey plastic tarp. And then there is a fire, whipping up from a landscape, whispy clouds and mountains in the background.

The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof. Onomatopee, 2014.

The book includes selections from Kruithof and Feuerhelm’s e-mail correspondences nestled between chapters. Feuerhelm also contributes an “Outroduction” on collecting and the subjective nature of discovering meaning in photographs. The chapter “Screen-Reality” (which is broken up into chapter 1a at the beginning of the book, and 1b at the end) is printed on the pale blue paper and shows photographs juxtaposed and layered in Photoshop, with selection boxes and crop marks. The chapter “Eye Candy,” shows what looks like double-exposed centerfold-style, cropped, and grainy color images of women in vintage soft-core poses and is printed on thin, slightly glossy paper. To make these images, Kruithof blew up small sections of saucy Polaroids and printed these blow-ups on US letter-sized paper. She then printed another random blow-up on the other side of the paper and hung the whole thing in the window, allowing the light to stream through and illuminate both and photographed this light-doubled image. “Bunkerocks,” has only three images, a short dip into black-and-white photos of what looks to be boulder-living — examples of homes made under, in, and around boulders — images that thunder the kind of solitude that Kruithof may have been seeking in her own remote bungalow. The chapter that feels the most analog still is "Ghostbondage." Printed on matte white paper, Kruithof has ferreted out almost two dozen bondage pictures in which she has cut out the sexualized figure bound by things such as neckties and ropes, leaving a white void, or a layered and abstracted image beneath. As Feuerhelm puts it, this cutting shows “you nothing of what you are trained to or desire to see” — the sexualized figure. Or, perhaps it shows that what we see now is “even further removed from the original objects (the loose parts shown on the analogue photos)”—“loose parts” that represent fleeting moments photographed, printed, collected, sorted, scanned, re-sorted, and presented in a highly subjective and appropriated way.

The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof. Onomatopee, 2014.

The Bungalow by Anouk Kruithof. Onomatopee, 2014.

Kruithof is dealing absolutely in appropriation, specifically, a type of image-presentation. Any organized collection of images that has themes and categories synergistically becomes more than the sum of its parts. Themes and categories introduce a readable system into the collection’s architecture. Kruithof has appropriated this idea and modified it to what she calls “screen reality,” or a mode of storytelling that is unmoored from its original context and corresponding categorization. Her themes and categories are more about how we see images today and how we may so easily lose the thread of where images come from, symptomatic of the sheer volume of photographs we encounter. Kruithof’s “screen reality” sees images that flit by, are arranged in grids, are layered, or frenetically clicked and scrolled through one after the other, day after day. It’s natural to the vernacular — for hasn’t vernacular photography for over a century been gridded in albums, flipped through until something of note catches the eye, and stacked and shoved into boxes?

Kruithof has delivered the vernacular straight to the hard drive and dragged it back out in digits and jpeg markers. She swaps this digital form for book form and keeps the visual cues of the computer explicit. She layers on the gloss. She seeks the sexualized poses, re-imagined and diverted. She pinpoints the peculiarity. She overloads us with images. She sells us on the multitude. This is her new photography.—Sarah Bay Gachot

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Sarah Bay Gachot is a writer and piñata-maker. She is currently at work on a book about the artist Robert Cumming and her publications include Aperture magazine, ArtSlant, The PhotoBook Review, The Daily Beast, and The Art Book Review. Her piñatas have been exhibited and then destroyed at the Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Machine Project, Human Resources LA, and Pomona College, among other places. She also co-hosts the monthly event Hyperience, a free, ongoing series of artist residencies and live collaborative events. Sarah lives in Los Angeles. Lylesfur.tumblr.com


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Book of the Week: A Pick by Maki

April 28, 2015, 8:00 am

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Book of the WeekBook of the Week: A Pick by MakiMaki selects New Shinjuku by Daido Moriyama as Book of the Week.

New Shinjuku by Daido Moriyama  Getsuyosha, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Maki who has selected New Shinjuku by Daido Moriyama published by Getsuyosha.

"I was in Japan when I first read Shinjuku (Getsuyosha, 2002), which I considered as one of the best photobooks of Daido Moriyama (besides the historical Farewell Photography). That was in the last decade. I had rented a small and cheap room with my girlfriend Masami in Shin-Okubo, the Korean area right next to Kabukicho in Shinjuku. As I was looking at the book every night, attracted like a magnet to those pictures when back home, I recognized the places I could go myself in my day and night walks towards the neighborhood. I was not only fascinated by this geographical immersion but by the straight to the point editing of the book, inventive, with a great freedom and spontaneity, revealing the personality of the photographer and something that has been little said about him: his humor. Today with this new edition the book is rediscovered and restructured, compiling the original book with the book Shinjuku + (Getsuyosha, 2006) and expanding it by 150 pages and 110 new and unpublished pictures taken by the photographer during 5 years around 2000 in Shinjuku. This New Shinjuku keeps the atmosphere and the essence of the original but with a new edit. After all these years I realize with this new revised and expanded edition that it's not only one of the highlights of one of the best photographers of our time, but also a historical document of Japan."—Maki

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New Shinjuku by Daido Moriyama. Getsuyosha, 2014.

New Shinjuku by Daido Moriyama. Getsuyosha, 2014.

Maki— French photographer for over 30 years. Collector of photobooks. He was founding member of the collective SMOKE of European photographers (2007-2012). Publisher of the mini photobooks collection Média Immédiat. Photobooks reviewer on websites as well as in the "Photobooks Collectors" Facebook page.
http://dirtystylephoto.blogspot.fr/search?q=maki






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Interview & Portfolio: Tom Chambers on To The Edge

April 29, 2015, 8:00 am

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photo-eye GalleryInterview & Portfolio: Tom Chambers on To The EdgeAs always, we are excited to present a new series of photographs by Tom Chambers: To The Edge. In addition to sharing the images, I have asked Chambers to speak about his experience photographing in Iceland, the inspirations behind his imagery, and his aesthetic.

The Trickster — Tom Chambers

As always, we are excited to present a new series of photographs by Tom Chambers: To The Edge. In To The Edge, Chambers takes us on a journey through Iceland. As usual, his images are inhabited by children and animals, but in this series Chambers takes us a bit deeper into his dreams. In the new images we start to see elements that boarder on the surreal — a boy with handmade bird wings soaring over a vast green landscape, children catching birds like butterflies  and a young girl speaking in flowers. Each image is carefully paired with lines of poetry by Allen Chamberlin inspired by Chambers' images. In addition to sharing the images, I have asked Chambers to speak about his experience photographing in Iceland, the inspirations behind his imagery, and his aesthetic.—Anne Kelly

One Oar Out — Tom Chambers

Anne Kelly:    Your grandfather was a painter and illustrator — I have always perceived his influence in your work, but see it especially this series.

Tom Chambers:    My grandfather worked both commercially as an illustrator and in his free time as a fine arts landscape painter. He began his commercial work when magazines primarily were using illustrations created by painters, before the time photography took over the scene. I always felt that my grandfather’s work and what I do are similar. My work can be described as photo illustration, constructed photography, or photomontage. While my grandfather illustrated a story using gouache or oil paints, I digitally illustrate ideas or scenarios that come into my head. Though we share a similar style, I have wondered how my grandfather would react to the digital illustrations produced today. With my new series, To The Edge, I have pushed my connection towards painterly illustration by incorporating textures that mimic watercolor washes in the skies of the images.

AK:    You work within the genre of magic realism. While this series is not a departure, we are starting to see the incorporation of a few surrealistic elements. What are your thoughts on this and the intersection of the two genres?

TC:    I think that To the Edge might have a more surrealistic feel because the Icelandic landscape itself is strangely beautiful with its myriad of geological formations. Nonetheless, I feel that I continue to work within the genre of magic realism, which generally portrays a magical or unreal element in an otherwise realistic environment. With this new series, the landscape naturally has a surrealistic quality and one or more elements also is highly unlikely, as we find in magic realism. For example, one major theme is children catching birds. You don’t see this too often in real life, but when you do it turns your head. I try to keep my images close “to the edge” of reality, in the possible but improbable zone. Pushing them too far puts them into the impossible category and they run the risk of becoming somewhat hokey.

Fowl Play — Tom Chambers

AK:     In this series you collaborate with poet Allen Chamberlain. Did you have this in mind before you trip to Iceland?

TC:     Before the trip to Iceland I had a general idea of how the series would take shape. I envisioned Iceland with its surreal landscape as the perfect backdrop for my images. Once there I found that not only is the landscape surreal but there are many sagas or stories of local history which are fascinating and even magical. Today a large percentage of the population actually believe in elves and there are recent stories of road construction being rerouted to avoid an “elf habitat.”

After shooting in Iceland, I had the idea to run lines of poetry through the images that would enhance the magical vibe of the landscape. Initially, I was afraid that the viewer would get stuck on the line of text, or the text might work like a headline in an ad and become more important then the image itself. To avoid these potential issues, I decided to translate the poem into the Icelandic language. I’m intrigued by the language and the strange looking words, many of them containing multiple consonants and few vowels. I wanted to use the text as a design element but it also had to be meaningful to the series.

As I was developing the series, I met with a friend and poet Allen Chamberlain who imagined writing a ghazal style poem based on the images. The ghazal is an ancient form of poetry containing rhyming couplets and a refrain, each couplet ending in a similar idea or phrase; in my case, “to the edge.” Inspired by my images and her research about Iceland, Allen wrote a remarkable poem which creates mental pictures and captures the essence of Iceland. Most importantly, the poem connects perfectly with the images from the series. After writing the ghazal, the poem was translated into Icelandic. Lines were then inserted into each image.

Winged Shepherd — Tom Chambers

AK:     Traveling has inspired several of your recent bodies of work. Do you choose the location based on the desire to photograph there or has it just become natural for you to make images wherever you are?

TC:     I just love to travel, especially to places with a strong connection with the natural world or with a mythical heritage. After exploring an unfamiliar place, I am often inspired to interpret what I've seen or felt through my art. Most travel adventures are planned with the idea of using the photography for my work.

AK:     I know that you have many stories your trip to Iceland. Will you share one that is particularly memorable?

TC:     We rented a 4-wheel drive SUV and drove the loop route around the perimeter of the country. The main road Route 1 is not entirely paved, but very driveable. Touring the country, the first thing you notice is the lack of trees. Hundreds of years ago the country was deforested by the Vikings and then their sheep made sure the trees didn’t grow back. No problem; there are so many geographical elements that make your head spin, including hundreds of waterfalls, random steam shooting up from the earth, lakes, fjords, glaciers, ice flows, black beaches, volcanoes, and my favorite, moss covered volcanic rock. Luckily the volcanoes held their temper during the time we were there.

The summertime in Iceland is great for photography, and you can shoot all day and all night. The sun dips just below the horizon late at night and at that time it seems more like dusk. The hard part was keeping a schedule. Many times we would be out exploring and suddenly notice that it was way past midnight and realized that it was no wonder why we were tired. In the summer the weather can change on a dime. The Northwest coast was so windy that the car door flew back, hitting my wife on the head and knocking her to the ground. We drove to the nearest town looking unsuccessfully for ice (in Iceland) to hold to her bruised head and finally found a kind soul who gave us a bag of frozen mangos. We thought that was a bit ironic. A couple days later we were driving down a mountain on a switch-back road in a fog so thick we could only see 10 feet in front of the car. The next day when the fog lifted we could see that we were in a beautiful village on a fjord surrounded by mountains and ribbons of waterfalls. The northern most part of the “highway” (sometimes unpaved) took us within 40 miles of the Arctic circle. My wife and I are excited to be taking another trip back to Iceland this Summer.

Summer Soliloquy  — Tom Chambers

View the To The Edge portfolio

View more work from Tom Chambers
View Chambers' book Entropic Kingdom
View the Dreaming in Reverse portfolio

For more information about Tom Chambers' photography please contact the gallery by email or by phone 505-988-5152 x202

Book Review: Amc2 journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014

April 30, 2015, 8:00 am

≫ Next: Nudes/Human Form Newsletter Vol. 10

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Book ReviewAmc2 journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014Edited by Archive of Modern ConflictReviewed by Sarah BradleyIssue 10 of AMC2 from Archive of Modern Conflict brings together three disparate collections of images related to Africa. The first is a series from film sets in Nigeria, the second most active film industry in the world and bearing the industry nickname Nollywood.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014. Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC Books, 2014.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014

Reviewed by Sarah Bradley

Amc2 journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014
Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict
AMC Books, 2014. 84 pp., 8¼x8¼".

Issue 10 of AMC2 from Archive of Modern Conflict brings together three disparate collections of images related to Africa. The first is a series from film sets in Nigeria, the second most active film industry in the world and bearing the industry nickname Nollywood. My first encounter with Nollywood was though the images of Pieter Hugo who removed actors from the context of their films to perform for his camera in the surrounding world. Here, we see actual shots from sets, depictions of scenes, and off camera moments, each presented with a brief description of the movie.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014. Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC Books, 2014.

In lieu of the movies themselves, these pictures are fascinating, presented here as disjointed fragments, depictions of something both larger but also independent. A dramatic flair and a love of tragedy is readable in both the images and their descriptions, and while part of me loves how dislocated the pictured scenes are from their larger narratives, I ultimately felt like there weren’t quite enough of these images. They piqued my interest, but I never quite made a connection. The Nollywood images are the most contemporary of the three series, but somehow they feel the most remote.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014. Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC Books, 2014.

An awkward transition pairs two black and white images, one of a woman on her knees praying and another of a stuffed chimpanzee. The woman looks up with pleading gaze while the chimpanzee stares outward with eyes that are terrifyingly dead; its hind feet curl inward making it appear unnaturally club-footed. This mid-century series pictures the workshop of a London taxidermist named Rowland Ward and depicts a horrifying number of dead African animals. It also quickly becomes clear that some of the people assembling these creatures had never seen them alive. Those with similar physiognomy to European animals seem to fare better in their re-assemblage, but a number of specimens remind me of the famously over-stuffed walrus of the Horniman Museum. We see a hyena that looks like a costume from An American Werewolf in London, a pitiable leopard that looks like a dim overfed house cat with eyes spread a little too far apart, and elephants that look surprisingly fake, despite being constructed from real parts. These images are begging for analysis. Beyond their function as tableaux fabrications of some European projection of Africa, dioramas bursting with strange companions, I am struck by the act of attempting to recreate a creature without being able to put life back into it. Instead, a strange artifice is enforced, the resulting specimens reflective of the perceptions of their mounters and designed to conform to a fantasy set by institutional concepts of what these creatures “should” look like, and in the process, creating a whole other reality, one of bloated, distorted animals, elongated and misshapen.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014. Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC Books, 2014.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014. Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC Books, 2014.

The last grouping of images are from a Cameroon photo studio that seems to have existed in some parallel, cooler and more flamboyant version of the later part of the 20th Century than I ever experienced (well, I guess that’s technically entirely possible). Photo Jeunesse was the first color portrait studio in the country, and as evidenced from these photos, it was very well used. Posing in front of painted backdrops and bright foliage we see awkward looking couples, a trio of girls in first communion dresses, some insanely cute chubby-cheeked children wearing matching outfits printed with “New York” and “America” and cans of 7-Up, Coke and Pepsi, a family of five each staring deadpan into the camera, all wearing sunglasses, a guy outfitted in Rick James-style splendor — I could happily described each image individually, but I’ll stop there. Each is wonderfully memorable in its own often subtle way, frequently presenting something that is a little strange to a Western eye, like the man in unfamiliar ill-fitting military garb or the child holding what may or may not be a real Uzi. The choices of self-presentation are celebratory and purposeful, and despite being taken in a portrait studio the images have the informal feel of snapshots. They are a complete joy.

Amc2 Journal Issue 10: LagosPhoto 2014. Edited by Archive of Modern Conflict. AMC Books, 2014.

Issue 10 also served as a catalogue for the exhibition of these images at the 2014 LagosPhoto Festival and is designed with a beautiful double cover with a green and white Coptic binding. It ends with a statement from LagosPhoto Festival director Azubuike Nwagbogu whose description makes it sound like one of the more interesting photo festival offerings out there. Essays elaborate and give context — not that it’s really needed for this one. It’s one of the most straightforward offerings from AMC so far, and the theme “Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction” comes across plainly.—SARAH BRADLEY

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SARAH BRADLEY is a writer, sculptor and costumer, as well as Editor of photo-eye Blog. Some of her work can be found on her website sebradley.com.

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