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photo eye BOOKLIST
SUMMER 2007 US $8.95/CAN $9.95/UK ÂŁ4.50
the international magazine of photography books
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HUMANITAS II by Fredric Roberts “Humanitas II ... is a book about relationships that tells a story of beauty and grace, work and family, spirituality and devotion ... Echoing photography of India through time yet created in a contemporary context, the photographs in this book are concerned with the present and its link to the past.” —From the Introduction by Deborah Willis, PhD., MacArthur, Guggenheim and Fletcher Fellow and Professor of Photography, NYU, Tisch School of the Arts Humanitas II: The People of Gujarat. Photographs by Fredric Roberts. Hylas Publishing, Irvington, NY. 96 pp., 55 four-color plates, 10.5 x 11.25, clothbound. ISBN 1-59258-268-0 $60.00 Also available Humanitas Volume One. Photographs by Fredric Roberts. Hylas Publishing, Irvington, NY. 88 pp., 55 four-color plates, 10.5 x 11.25, clothbound. ISBN 1-59258-130-7 $40.00 Books available at photo-eye Books and fine bookstores everywhere. To view more of the photography of Fredric Roberts visit www.FredricRoberts.com
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CONTENTS
Summer 2007
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Detail from Particulars © David Goldblatt
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About Our Cover
VOLUME 29 // ISSUE NO. 2
Detail from New York billboard detail, 1940 © László Moholy-Nagy
Istanbul style, as seen through the lens of Martin Parr. » BY AVIS CARDELLA
20 Publisher Profile
One by one, the publishers of the books we love are interviewed. » A PHOTO-EYE QUESTIONNAIRE
24 Survey of New Books
The quarterly survey of the best new photography books. » BY VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS
46 Where We Live
The Getty hosts a show that surveys a basic human need. » BY JEN BEKMAN
52 Considerable Sway
Two recent titles add depth to the potent vision of Moholy-Nagy. » BY RICHARD WOODWARD
56 Publishing the
The acclaimed column on publishing photography books. » BY MARY VIRGINIA SWANSON AND DARIUS HIMES
Photography Book 60 The Old & Rare Survey
A regular column that surveys important books of the past. » BY ERIC MILES
80 Editor’s Choice
In this new column, our editor reviews a singular title of the season. » BY DARIUS HIMES
ON OUR COVER From Parrjective: Style Hunting in Istanbul © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
PHOTO-EYE BOOKLIST PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY PHOTO-EYE BOOKS & PRINTS 370 GARCIA STREET SANTA FE, NM 87501 TEL 505 988 5152 FAX 505 988 4487
© SaraStathas.com
DIRECTOR/PUBLISHER RIXON REED rick@photoeye.com
In my home, on a low-lying bookshelf, I have displayed a humble book published in 1930 with a Rockwell Kent woodcut debossed on the cover. The woodcut depicts a young man leaning against a chest-high tree stump, upon which he has placed the book that he is reading. It is a striking, elegant image that is emblematic of the Social Realism he is often associated with. What continues to strike me about this image is the simple, visual device of letting the book stand-in for the upper reaches of the tree, and in some ways, for the whole tree itself. It is easy to make the leap from the figurative depiction of the book resting on the stump to the metaphorical reading of the book as a source of knowledge, a symbol for the Tree of Knowledge, in other words. And for an editor of a magazine about books, it is a pretty potent metaphor. The issue that you hold in your hands is filled with essays and reviews of wellcrafted, persuasive, influential books, books that inform and educate and inspire. Several master image-makers are honored on our pages: Richard Woodward reviews two new books about Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian-born visionary, and Larissa Leclair muses on the steady, powerful voice of South African photographer David Goldblatt. We also have several new voices in the magazine: Jen Bekman, a gallerist from New York, has offered her impressions of an impressive show at the Getty, and Jonanna Widner, a respected and rising young writer on music and popculture, contributes a piece on photobooks of specific music scenes. Lastly, I’m particularly happy to institute a new column at the back of the magazine entitled Editor’s Choice, which will feature a favorite photobook of the season. And now for a correction: in our last issue (Spring, 2007), much to our embarrassment, we inadvertently made one of those mistakes that shouldn’t be made. And, unfortunately, we did it twice. Two fantastic books which we happily reviewed were attributed to the wrong publishers. They were Don’t Kiss Me (p. 22), a book on the art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and The Apollo Prophecies (p. 40), with work by the artists known as Kahn & Selesnick. Both of these books were published by Aperture (and if you haven’t seen them, you should). For the full bibliographic information for these titles, please visit our website. And, as always, our faithful readers make photo-eye Booklist possible. We thank you for your continued support, and please feel free to send your comments! DARIUS HIMES, Editor
darius@photoeye.com
EDITOR, PHOTO-EYE BOOKLIST DARIUS HIMES darius@photoeye.com BOOKLIST ASSISTANT ELIZABETH FROST elizabeth@photoeye.com BOOKLIST & DATABASE ASSISTANT JENNY GOLDBERG booklist@photoeye.com COPY EDITOR LAURA ADDISON PRINTED BY THE STINEHOUR PRESS, LUNENBURG, VT DISTRIBUTED BY UBIQUITY MAGAZINES, BROOKLYN, NY INGRAM PERIODICALS, TENNESSEE SUBSCRIPTION INFO COVER PRICE $8.95 ONE YEAR (4 ISSUES) $26, TWO YEARS (8 ISSUES) $50 CANADA/MEXICO: +$6 FOR POSTAGE (1ST CLASS MAIL
SUBSCRIPTIONS HANDLED BY PRESTIGE FULFILLMENT TO ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION CALL 954 772 6659, 954 772 6823, OR 954 772 6848. ADDRESS ALL SUBSCRIPTION RELATED CORRESPONDENCE TO: PHOTO-EYE BOOKLIST, P.O. BOX 9823, FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33310-9823. BY CHECK (US FUNDS DRAWN ON A US BANK) OR VISA, MASTERCARD, AMEX., DISCOVER.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.PHOTOEYE.COM/BOOKLIST
PHOTO-EYE BOOKLIST SUBMISSIONS POLICY THE EDITORIAL OFFICES OF THE PHOTO-EYE BOOKLIST ARE HAPPY TO RECEIVE REVIEW COPIES OF PUBLISHED BOOKS. UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS OR BOOK DUMMIES ARE NOT ACCEPTED. REVIEW COPIES WILL NOT BE RETURNED. PLEASE ALLOW 4-6 WEEKS FOR RESPONSE. PHOTO-EYE BOOKSTORE, A SEPARATE BUSINESS FROM THE MAGAZINE, CAN BE CONTACTED AT MELANIE@PHOTOEYE.COM
GENERAL PHOTO-EYE CONTACT INFO 800 227 6941 OR 505 988 5152
BOOK DIVISION MANAGER MELANIE MCWHORTER melanie@photoeye.com SHIPPING AND RECEIVING MANAGER DANIEL FULLER daniel@photoeye.com SHIPPING AND RECEIVING ASSISTANT BYRON FLESHER byron@photoeye.com PHOTOGRAPHER’S SHOWCASE HEATHER PRICHARD heather@photoeye.com BOOKTEASE/GALLERY ASSISTANT VICKI BOHANNON vicki@photoeye.com AUCTIONS ERIC MILES eric@photoeye.com GALLERY DIRECTOR ELIZABETH AVEDON elizabethavedon@photoeye.com PRIVACY POLICY
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OCCASIONALLY PHOTO-EYE RENTS OR EXCHANGES NAMES AND MAILING ADDRESSES WITH OTHER COMPANIES IF WE FIND THEIR MAILING TO RELATE TO FINE-ART PHOTOGRAPHY. IF YOU PREFER NOT TO HAVE YOUR NAME RELEASED, EMAIL WEBMASTER@PHOTOEYE.COM OR CALL 800 227 6941
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CONTRIBUTORS JEN BEKMAN owns a gallery (www.jenbekman.com), writes a blog called Personism (www.personism.com) and runs a quarterly photo competition, Hey, Hot Shot! (www.heyhotshot.com). Her latest endeavor is 20×200 (www.20×200.com), a place to buy editioned prints and photos at ridiculously affordable prices. AVIS CARDELLA is a freelance writer specializing in the areas of photography, art and pop culture. Her work has appeared in various publications, including American Photo, ArtReview, Picture, Surface and British Vogue. A born and bred New Yorker, she currently resides in Paris, France. DEBRA KLOMP CHING gained her M.A. in critical history and theory of photography from the University of Derby (UK) in 1998. The former director of Pavilion (UK), she now resides in New York, where she is an independent curator, writer and photographer. ZANE FISCHER is an arts-and-culture-preoccupied writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He writes a regular column for the alternative weekly The Santa Fe Reporter (www.sfreporter.com). MARY GOODWIN is an M.F.A. candidate in photography at the University of New Mexico. She was a guest student at the Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany, in the Summer 2006 semester. PHIL HARRIS is a photographer, teacher and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. In 2000, he published a twenty-year photographic retrospective book, Fact Fiction Fabrication.
English, art history, anthropology and applied piano. She has been with UT Press for nearly thirty years. ERIC MILES, an art historian, is photo-eye’s rare-book specialist. He writes a regular column on rare and collectible photobooks for photo-eye Booklist. He relocated from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2003. MARY ANNE REDDING is an independent curator and writer who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Previous professional experience includes authoring essays for numerous exhibition catalogues and stints at New Mexico State University, the Light Factory, the Center for Creative Photography, the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University. AARON ROTHMAN is an artist living in Phoenix, Arizona. His most recent exhibition was at Gitterman Gallery in New York. View his work at www.aaronrothman.com. JIM STONE is an associate professor of photography at the University of New Mexico. His photographs have been exhibited and published internationally and he is the author or co-author of seven books. He has set foot in North Korea. MARY VIRGINIA SWANSON is an author, educator and consultant committed to helping photographers advance their careers. She lives and works in Tucson and New York City. Visit her at www.mvswanson.com.
LARISSA LECLAIR is a photographer, writer and traveler. Her work focuses on visual history and culture, and international photography. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.
JONANNA WIDNER is the music editor for The Dallas Observer. She received the first place award in the 2006 Alternative Newsweekly Awards for Best Music Criticism (circulation under 50,000) while she was the assistant editor/music columnist for The Santa Fe Reporter.
THERESA MAY is assistant director and editor-inchief at the University of Texas Press. She oversees an annual list of some hundred book projects from acquisition through publication. May has a B.A. in the history of art and architecture from Texas Tech University and has done post-baccalaureate work at the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin in
RICHARD B. WOODWARD is an arts critic in New York who contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. His most recent essay on photography appears in South Central, a monograph by Mark Steinmetz (Nazraeli Press).
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ABOUT OUR COVER
IT WAS WRITER HENRY DAVID THOREAU WHO SAID,
Parrjective Istanbul style, as seen through the lens of Martin Parr. By AVIS CARDELLA
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“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” And while this is an oft-used accolade for many photographers, Martin Parr has taken it to another level. His projects have a way of showing us things that are right in front of us but that often go unseen, of showing us what others choose to ignore. His unique eye for modern society’s foibles, follies and globalization’s attendant ironies has won him much-deserved praise during the past two decades. Often shot at close range and utilizing garish color, Parr’s photographs are distinct and at times disturbing, cutting close to the bone with enough humor to make it palatable. While he has had his share of detractors—accusations typically range from “exploitation” to being just plain mean—overall, his talent is greatly admired. He has even managed to win the affections of the fashion world, a notoriously snobby world that fields its own fair share of accusations of exploitation and exclusivity. Fashion Magazine was Parr’s 2005 parody of fashion publications, rife with self-referential fun-poking and high jinks (Parr appears as the cover model in a goofy self-portrait, for example), and the publication has quickly become a fashionista collector’s item. Parr has also frequently been hired by international brands for commercial assignments. One such clothier, Mavi jeans, has been so smitten with Parr’s work that they have commissioned him on several occasions to photograph their seasonal campaigns. Now, in celebration of the Istanbul-based manufacturer’s fifteenth birthday, Mavi (which means “blue” in Turkish) has collaborated with Parr to produce a photobook titled Parrjective: Style Hunting in Istanbul. Jacketed in vivid turquoise faux velveteen, Parrjective contains more than 100 images. Shot in the streets of Istanbul over four days, the images cover familiar Parr territory. There are portraits, primarily of 35 Turkish style-setters hand-picked by Mavi, a few shots of Istanbul street youth and several still-life images, mostly involving food and bazaar-stall items. According to Mavi’s Elif Akarlilar, Parrjective is a natural outcome of two dovetailing philosophies. First, Parr’s, which she describes as being unafraid of the current moment. “He understands and enjoys consumer culture and is brave enough to go into the street and get close to the ordinary and create something that is totally unique,” she explains. And second, Mavi’s, which is proud of “not being exclusive and being in touch with the street.” Being in touch with the street is the backbone of Parr’s oeuvre. Throughout his career, most of his photographs have been created in public places like shopping centers, beachside resorts, parking lots and city sidewalks. His photographs of Britons on vacation, for example, are priceless for their spot-on depiction of the happy holiday-makers, in all their pale-skinned glory, displaying their distinctly British manners, (or lack thereof ). That said, what, if anything, does Parr’s “style hunt” in the streets of Istanbul reveal? Not surprisingly, the search for a unique Istanbul style appears to have come up globalized and teeming
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ALL IMAGES © MARTIN PARR AND MAGNUM PHOTOS
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ALL IMAGES © MARTIN PARR AND MAGNUM PHOTOS
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ALL IMAGES © MARTIN PARR AND MAGNUM PHOTOS
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with ingredients of the urban one-world melting pot. Nike baseball caps, pierced lips, hoodies, tight jeans, cargo pants, little black dresses and the ubiquitous pet Chihuahua all make an appearance. Parr’s lens searched for, and found, a few subjects with quirky, Turkishstyle tics: dropped-crotch harem-pants paired with Converse sneakers, for instance, look cool and may also inadvertently illustrate the East-West push-pull that is so much a part of Turkey’s history. Parr balances the bounty with still-life shots of items for sale at shops and open-air markets: a display of neatly folded local newspapers, vintage LPs from long-forgotten Turkish pop stars, cans of Yaksi sardines and colorful pillow-shaped hard candies on display in cylindrical glass jars. All look undeniably Turkish. The one page of introductory text to Parrjective describes Parr’s photography as being neither subjective nor objective, thus the book’s inventive title. If the term “Parrjective” could be further defined, it would simply be synonymous with “a mirror for society,” that keenest of observers. The success of Parrjective as a project is in how deftly Parr has honed in on what’s happening there. But he is, after all, just doing what he has always done. He sees what’s going on rather than merely looking at it. And then he takes the shot. Parrjective: Style Hunting in Istanbul. Photographs by Martin Parr. Introduction by Ízzeddin Çalislar. Mavi Jeans, Istanbul, 2007. Designed by Esen Karol. Printed by Mas Matbaacilik A.S. Clothwrapped boards with printed belly-band. 132 pp., 102 four-color illustrations, 9¾ × 12¾ $60.00
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PUBLISHER PROFILE
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS The column that surveys the publishers—one by one— who create the books we love.
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PUBLISHERS form the X
and Y axes upon which great photobooks are crafted. This column explores the vast continuum of publishers that exists in the world today, from small art presses to mid-size publishers to the large houses that have survived the decades. In this issue we spoke with Theresa May, assistant director and editor-in-chief at the University of Texas Press. She has been with the Press for nearly thirty years. What is your vision of photography and publishing? In an age of streaming video, it feels as if we never quite see anything clearly, in detail. Contemporary photography is a mirror in which we are caught, both reflected and reflected upon, as individuals and as societies. Publishing contemporary photography seems a cultural imperative, especially in our region where so many different vectors cross, but it is also a joy to showcase incredible work. We are looking for two things in a book: the quality of the work, and the resonance of the work with our larger list. We do hope, of course, for some sales potential, since most of these books have to be subsidized in order to maintain our very high production values. In the end, though, it’s the things that speak to us personally, the ineffable intangibles, that help us decide among the many projects that we see. We are almost always in agreement about which ones to pursue. Who do you see as your audience? Art and photography professionals, as well as general readers.
(left to right, top to bottom) Keith Carter, Photographs Kate Breakey, Small Deaths Laura Wilson, Avedon At Work Graciela Iturbide, Eyes to Fly With O. Rufus Lovett, Weeping Mary
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What quantity of books do you publish per year/season? We publish four to six pure photography titles per year. Many of the 100+ books that we publish annually have a significant photographic component. Our photography books fall into two categories. Wittliff Gallery Series books are chosen and edited by Bill Wittliff. The photographers come from the Wittliff Gallery Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography, housed at Texas State University in San Marcos. The second category comprises books that we choose in-house, usually cooperatively between the marketing manager, Dave Hamrick, and the editorial staff. How do you acquire new titles? About half of our photography titles are part of a series in Southwestern and Mexican photography, edited by Bill Wittliff. Others come by referrals from other authors or photographers or through active research. Photographers are attracted to us not only by our high production values and the quality of the photographers we have published, but also the authors and critics who have written for us, notably John Szarkowski, Anne Wilkes Tucker, A. D. Coleman,
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PUBLISHER PROFILE
Page spreads from Eyes to Fly With, by Graciela Iturbide
Larry McMurtry, John Wood, John Berendt, Elena Poniatowska and Charles Bowden. What future projects really excite you right now? This Fall we are anticipating a true landmark at the intersection of popular culture, literature and photography. Bill Wittliff ’s iconic photographs taken on the set of Lonesome Dove will be published for the first time in a gorgeous book with texts by Wittliff, Larry McMurtry and Steve Harrigan. In the Spring of 2008, we will publish a stunning group of New Orleans, post-Katrina photographs by digital techniques pioneer Dan Burkholder, with text by Andrei Codrescu. Later in 2008, we have a 22 photo-eye Booklist
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new collection by O. Rufus Lovett and a two-volume abridged edition of Anita Brenner’s journals illustrated with more than 600 works of art, including some 375 Edward Weston photographs. What are your submission guidelines? Our submission guidelines are on our website (www.utexas.edu/utpress) under Author Guidelines. Contact Information: Theresa May theresa@utpress.ppb.utexas.edu To see a list of the publishers to be featured in this column: www.photoeye.com/templates/PubShowCase_home.cfm
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A Survey of New Books CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: DEBRA KLOMP CHING, ZANE FISCHER, MARY GOODWIN, PHIL HARRIS, LARISSA LECLAIR, MARY ANNE REDDING, AARON ROTHMAN, JIM STONE, and JONANNA WIDNER
BOOKS REVIEWED, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: p. 25 HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, SCRAPBOOK BYRON WOLFE, EVERYDAY p. 27 JOHN PILSON, INTERREGNA ROGER NEWTON, OP TICS p. 28 MARK REINHARDT, BEAUTIFUL SUFFERING HIROSHI WATANABE, I SEE ANGELS EVERY DAY p. 30 SIMON ROBERTS, MOTHERLAND GREGORY CREWDSON, FIREFLIES DONOVAN WYLIE, THE MAZE p. 33 ANDREW MIKSYS, BAXT p. 34 JIM JOCOY, WE’RE DESPERATE RON GALELLA, DISCO YEARS p. 38 DAVID GOLDBLATT, PHOTOGRAPHS DAVID GOLDBLATT, HASSELBLAD AWARD 2006 p. 40 KLAUS STAECKE, PORNOGRAFIE ADAM BROOMBERG AND OLIVER CHANARIN, CHICAGO p. 42 CHARLIE CRANE, WELCOME TO PYONGYANG NICHOLAS RIGHETTI, THE LAST PARADISE: NORTH KOREA PHILIPPE CHANCEL, NORTH KOREA MARK EDWARD HARRIS, INSIDE NORTH KOREA
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Henri Cartier-Bresson | Scrapbook TEXT BY MARTINE FRANCK, AGNÈS SIRE AND MICHAEL FRIZOT. EDITED BY AGNÈS SIRE.
Thames and Hudson, Inc., New York, 2007. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Hardbound. 262 pp., 234 tritones, 10¾ × 13 $85.00 Just when you think you really have the classics down, you have them nailed, along comes some whole new thang that sets your chair a-rockin’ all over again. Sometimes the behind-the-scenes revelation is just a gentle nudge, and simply reconfirms what you already know (Robert Frank’s Black and White and Things, Harry Callahan’s The Photographer at Work), but sometimes it’s a little more like a kick in the fundament. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s resurrected Scrapbook is definitely a kick. It’s a thoughtful historical recreation (in both senses of the word), a chance to vicariously experience the pre- and slightly post-WWII glory of this consummate fly-on-the-wall Leica shooter. During the war, Cartier-Bresson was given up for dead by the photography world outside of Occupied France, so the Museum of Modern Art decided to give him a posthumous show. When it transpired that the photographer had been imprisoned in Germany, and that his third escape attempt had been successful, a correspondence began that ended when Cartier-Bresson arrived in New York in 1946 with about 300 prints. He bought a scrapbook, and glued in the postcard-sized prints that he intended to show the curators. This handsomely produced book commemorates that decisive moment in what would become a planetwide career; it sums up Cartier-Bresson’s prewar achievement, and hints at the great work to come. There are plenty of wellloved old favorites here, perhaps a little frayed from frequent publication and republication. But there are also obscure pleasures, like the landscapes and alternate takes from various well-known sessions. Perhaps the choicest tidbits are the reproduced letters, telegrams and snapshots of Cartier-Bresson and his circle before, during and after the war years. The curatorial essays are clear and cogent, and include lots of narrative nuggets from the Master’s career. All in all, a wonderfully affirmative memorial to a (now truly posthumous) wonderful eye. PHIL HARRIS
Page spread from Everyday
Byron Wolfe | Everyday. A Yearlong Photo Diary PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY BYRON WOLFE. EDITED BY ALAN RAPP.
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2007. Designed by Iza Dar. Printed in China. Paper-wrapped boards with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 272 pp., 365 color illustrations, 8½ × 8½ $29.95 Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s the fact that I never had children of my own. Although I have two wonderful grown stepchildren, I wasn’t a part of their formative or even their early or mid-teenage years, as we became an extended family a bit later. But Byron Wolfe has taught me what would appear to be a simple life lesson with his first solo effort, Everyday: A Yearlong Photo Diary. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical at first. Books beginning with “Dear Reader” seem a tenuous literary contrivance. So it is with some chagrin I have to ask myself, If the lessons of this book are really so simple, why has it taken me so long to understand that it is the familiar that weaves the richly textured fabric of even the most extraordinary lives? I had to take off my glasses to look at the smaller picture—and this would be my strongest criticism of the design of the book. The small images, sometimes three or more to a page, are so dense that some of the finer detail and, therefore, meaning, is lost printed at such a small size, although I commend the publishers for printing an image for every day of the year. In laying aside my glasses, and immersing myself in the book (it’s hard to not get lost in the pages when they are three inches from your head), the rest of the world slipped away: the too-loud TV in the next room, the RV generators outside, the wind sweeping the blowing dust under the hotel room door, the small planes headed in for a landing on the nearby airstrip that calls itself an airport. I read the book for the first time
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Screensaver II from Interregna, by John Pilson
Ramp from Interregna, by John Pilson
SURVEY OF NEW BOOKS
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SURVEY OF NEW BOOKS
alone, in an old hacienda now modern bed-and-breakfast inn that is nestled uncomfortably in the embrace of a surrounding RV park. Never having seen an image of blueberry blossoms or chocolate persimmons at dusk I was struck by the beauty of these simple images. They sum up the cycle of life and thus the premise of the book—one year in the life of a working photographer; teaching, professional work, bringing up two young boys with his wife, traveling, navigating family crisis and death, the stuff of the quotidian. Wolfe insists that we take another look and in looking closely, really see. MARY ANNE REDDING
photographers such as Stephen Shore than to any blackand-white tradition—but it is the key to their poetry. A telling contrast is Lars Tunbjörk’s excellent 2001 book, Office. Tunbjörk’s scenes of corporate offices, shot in color and lit by harsh frontal flash, present alienating and inhuman spaces where any trace of the individual is a sign of clutter and chaos. Pilson’s elegant tonalities—even the fluorescent lighting is transformed into a nearly beautiful, suffuse glow—give his images a sense of sympathetic empowerment and allow us to see the small signs of vitality in an overwhelmingly impersonal environment. AARON ROTHMAN
John Pilson | Interregna TEXT BY JEFFREY ANDERSON. EDITED BY TAS SKORUPA.
Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2006. Designed by Christine Moog. Printed by Dr. Cantz'sche Durckerei, Ostfildern. Trade edition of 1500. Limited Edition (including a gelatin silver print made by the artist) 25 copies and 5 AP. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 128 pp., 59 duotone illustrations, 10¾ × 9¾ $50.00 John Pilson’s Interregna is a surprising and subtly complex book that sneaks up on you quietly, getting better with each viewing. Pilson made these photographs between 1996 and 2000, when he worked night and weekend shifts at a Manhattan investment bank. At first glance, the photos reveal the dull oppression of half-lit corporate corridors and office machinery. There is a sense of being contained, perhaps trapped, looking out over the outside world from 30 stories up. Images of the city at dawn, obscured by reflections of fluorescent lights and computer monitors on the huge pane-glass windows, are interspersed throughout the book. We also see figures boxed in by the architecture of cubicles and elevator lobbies; Xeroxed pictures of tropical islands pinned over desks offer the futile idea of escape. In the end, however, Pilson’s vision is a humanizing one. Pilson is a strong individual presence in these images, not literally—though there are a couple reflected self-portraits here—but in the palpable sense we have of him behind the lens. These are photographs that speak in the first person. Interregna means “between the reigns,” and there is a crucial sense of being in-between, being on hold. The stillness of an active and purpose-driven space all but emptied of activity allows Pilson to simply observe this sealed world, and in doing so to reevaluate its purpose. The photographs become still lifes that celebrate the presence, and traces of presence, of individuals: the small gestures of life in a dead space, making a place for oneself while longing to be elsewhere. That these pictures are in black and white is somewhat surprising— they seem to relate much more to the color lineage of
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Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina Duganne | Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain TEXT BY MIEKE BAL, ERINA DUGANNE, HOLLY EDWARDS, MARK REINHARDT, JOHN STOMBERG.
Co-published by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass., 2007. Designed by Barbara Glauber & Emily Lessard/Heavy Meta, New York. Printed by Transcontinental Litho Acme. Softbound. 216 pp., 74 color plates, 16 figures, 10½ × 9½ $25.00 Debates over controversy in the arts often reveal more by their public performances than by the contents of the arguments championed on either side of the polemic. By examining the public and institutional intersections between aesthetic disinterest and the passionate, even volatile, expressions of public interest and support (or the threatened withdrawal of financial support) for the arts, the complicated interrelationships between the graphic visual representations of violence and the violence of representation can begin to be understood. Rupture and discord can expose the fault lines, revealing perceptions of the various roles that both art and museums play in society. Rather than avoiding controversy altogether, it seems better to reposition the arguments in order to foster a dialogue that is crucial if art is to continue to be relevant in contemporary society. Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain positions itself to foster just such a dialogue. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art in collaboration with the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, this smartly disturbing book probes philosophical and aesthetic questions that in and of themselves may not be unsettling; the visual exploration of their answers, however, can be deeply disquieting. Both the exhibition and book address the ethical complexities of picturing the pain and suffering of others and pose a number of disconcerting questions regarding the photographic image. Is it inherently problematic to seek aesthetic pleasure in a rendering of pain? Which pictures genuinely further understanding or inspire useful action, and which, instead, exacerbate existing injuries or, worse, instigate further violence? Does beauty deepen critical engagement or is it a
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distraction, anesthetizing the viewer to pain? A thoughtful introduction and five essays answer these questions (with varying degrees of success) along with perhaps the most troubling question: how do we know which image is which and what might be the responsibilities of display? What are the politics of exposure? Photographic imagery, the authors/curators state, presents distinct “ethical, political, and aesthetic problems and possibilities,” that run through photojournalism, the art market, cultural tourism, fashion and advertising. Beautiful Suffering focuses primarily on photographs produced since the mid-1980s and the essays trace the historical antecedents of the current debate swirling around various modes of representation and the dilemmas of picturing suffering. Most of the imagery will be familiar to the majority of viewers, which points out a limitation of both the book and the exhibition in that a too-narrow depth and range of imagery is included. The constraint comes, no doubt, from space and budgetary concerns. In the end what this book does best, as Mieke Bal acknowledges in her essay, is summon viewers into an uncomfortably open-ended and philosophical analysis of visual culture. MARY ANNE REDDING
Hiroshi Watanabe | I See Angels Every Day TEXT BY HIROSHI WATANABE, MASAFUMI SUZUKI AND EIKOH HOSOE.
Mado-sha Co., Ltd., Tokyo, 2007. Designed by Katuya Takasaki. Printed by Toppan Printing Company. Edition of 1500. Clothbound with dustjacket and printed cover belt. 92 pp., 80 black-and-white illustrations, 8¾ × 10¼ $60.00 Ostensibly, this book is a document about the inhabitants (patients, nuns and doctors) of a small psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. In reality, however, it turns out to be a finely tuned attempt to expand our sense of mutual humanity through the unfiltered experience of mental illness. One of the remarkable qualities of Watanabe’s achievement is the incredible gaze he shows us. Time and time again, his small square pictures are a strange, almost Daguerreian mirror: we see, but we feel seen in return. It has always been a rarity to encounter a portrait photographer who not only “brings ’em back alive,” but preserves the life in his subjects. It feels as if a species of magic, thought extinct, has been discovered thriving in an unexplored corner of the yard. Portrait photography, particularly the contemporary variety, often has a coolness toward its subjects, and that sense of separation is generally deliberate. Watanabe’s work eschews separation; in fact it cherishes the clinches,
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pursues idiosyncrasy and context. There are pictures of the environs of the hospital, and of the patients in various states of repose and wakefulness. There are images of caregivers, and dental and medical tools, and quite a few Catholic icons. The place seems old and underfunded, but clean and orderly in a mental-hospital kind of way. Yet … one can’t help but return to the close-up portraits. The draw seems to be at least twofold: First, the experience of suffering and inner aliveness, the vitality born of resistance, is plainly written on many faces, giving them an amazing strength and grace. Beyond the surface, however, there is the regard of the photographer. These people were looking back at Watanabe with the same intensity with which he looked at them, and he allows us to see that gaze with all of its conflicted power intact. Watanabe has been working with the human face (and surrogates for the face, such as masks) for some years. But his interest is clearly in the mutual discovery of identity, the elusive solidity behind our fungible faces. As he says in the afterword, photographs “repeatedly remind me of who I am.” PHIL HARRIS
From I See Angels Every Day, by Hiroshi Watanabe
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Simon Roberts | Motherland
Gregory Crewdson | Fireflies
INTRODUCTION BY ROSAMUND BARTLETT.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY GREGORY CREWDSON.
EDITED BY BRUNO CESCHEL.
Skarstedt Fine Art and Luhring Augustine, New York, 2006. Designed by Giampietro+Smith. Printed by Oddi Printers, Iceland. Clothbound. 128 pp., 61 tritones, 12 × 9 $45.00
Chris Boot Ltd., London, 2007. Designed by Murray and Sorrell FUEL. Printed in China. Paper-wrapped boards. 192 pp., numerous four-color illustrations, 9½ × 8 $40.00 Between August 2004 and July 2005 British photographer Simon Roberts fulfilled a childhood fascination with Russia by completing an epic 47,000-mile journey, from the federation’s Far East, to the Northern Caucasus, the Altai Mountains and along the Volga River. The result of this remarkable journey is the photographer’s first book, Motherland. The publication exemplifies the magnificence of the traditional photo-essay, coupled with images made by a talented photographer who demonstrates a contemporary and original eye for detail. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book contains 150 images which portray a positive and defiant Russia, against a backdrop of brutality. Whilst Roberts states that he did not set out with any specific political agenda, his images do convey what he discovered to be at the heart of Russian life—the sense of home, or rodina. We witness a father and son plunging into a lake following a sauna in Yekaterinburg, elderly people cruising on the Volga River, a pair of sturgeon poachers in Kamchatka. Throughout this body of work, there is a deep, old-world connection to the land that reads as a pride in the “motherland,” despite the challenges of everyday life. The images are uplifting despite the bleakness which also pervades. Part of the reason for this might be the perceptive editing and pacing of the book. Arranged chronologically to mirror Roberts’ journey, there is a well-conceived balance between landscape and portrait. The photographs are accompanied by carefully measured text to contextualize them, providing the reader with enough insight to appreciate the story behind the photographs without overwhelming them. The sense of motherland which Roberts explores is also present in the intermittent quotations from Russian thinkers, writers and travelers. Motherland is an exemplary photobook that melds together objectivity, wonder and desire. Finally, it is a great example of a successful collaboration between publisher and photographer. I can imagine Chris Boot (publisher) and Simon Roberts sneakily opening the book themselves and feeling quite proud—and so they should. DEBRA KLOMP CHING
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Being a pretty jaded spectator of Gregory Crewdson’s usual Spectacle, I found myself pleasantly surprised by his newly published collection of firefly pictures. Taken eleven years ago when the photographer spent a couple of months in a rural cabin in Massachusetts, the pictures are charming, informal and relaxing, a far cry from the elaborate artifice and vague menace of much of Crewdson’s oeuvre. As far as it’s possible to tell, all of the black and white images were made outdoors, by a crew of one, with minimal resources expended in training, rehearsing, enhancing or adjusting the fireflies themselves. This makes the experience of moving through the images a strange associative journey; one might relive the sound, humidity and smells of youthful summer nights (if one’s youth was spent in firefly country, as mine was). Or the images might resurrect the work of Frank Gilbreath, with its purposeful dashed filigrees of light, or Robert Adams’ Summer Nights, or deep-ocean scenes of luminescent creatures from National Geographic. The insects’ light traces begin, in some of the pictures, to merge with stars, star trails (if the exposure was long enough), or the contrails of light left by passing planes. Crewdson’s signature control over the image is only hinted at by sequences of different exposures in the same locations, and a few experiments with jars and a conical net/tent, which allows the fireflies to strut their stuff in more geometrically-contained spaces. Perhaps the pictures work as well as they do for me because I can feel the photographer’s excitement, his curiosity about what will happen when he opens his shutter, sits back and allows the show to unfold. As for the romance of the fireflies themselves—well, all we mammals can really know is the languid wait, the brilliant flare-up and the swift fade of the afterglow. PHIL HARRIS
DonovanWylie | The Maze ESSAY BY LOUISE PURBRICK.
Granta, London, 2004. Designed by Donovan Wylie, Liz Jobey, Bernard Fischer. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 112 pp., 60 four-color illustrations, 11¼ × 9¼ $45.00 The Maze takes its name from the prison opened just south of Belfast in 1976 to house Republican and Loyalist prisoners during the apex of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. The book depicts the abstraction of space into a
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Plate 2, Untitled, 1996, from Fireflies, by Gregory Crewdson
Alexander Zhukov and Pavel Lipatov, Esso, Kamchatka from Motherland, by Simon Roberts
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An image from Steriles, phases 1-3, from The Maze, by Donovan Wylie
Standing in the Snow, Lithuania, 2005, from Baxt, by Andrew Miksys
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series of identical, punitive repetitions; these images testify to the bleakness man can impose on man when Divide-and-Conquer becomes the rule of the day. Louise Purbrick’s essential essay, “The Architecture of Confinement,” explains that previous to the construction of “the Maze,” both Republican and Loyalist prisoners were housed in Long Kesh prison camp, where inmates were allowed freedom of association. During this period, inmates were assigned special status as political prisoners as opposed to regular-grade criminals. At the Maze, all of this changed. With its cellular structure, prisoners were isolated from one another, and Republicans and Loyalists lived side by side. The structure of the prison sent a clear message: you are all the same, and you will be anesthetized by a relentless inculcation of sameness. As a book, The Maze is organized around the various types of containment structures at the prison. The first set of images depicts “inertias,” sections of no-man’s land between the prison’s outer wall and inner barbedwire fence row. The inertias are broken up occasionally by walls, which get closer and closer as Wylie moves his camera down the middle of the space; the viewer becomes a prisoner running along the inertia, where the repetition of walls, wires and watchtowers proves that there is nowhere to go. The areas of the prison called “steriles” served a different function, but they look and are photographed by Wylie in the same manner; the viewer may not know that they are different types of structures were they not labeled as such. Eight images of the prison’s roads create the same effect; the monotony of the grayness makes it impossible to discern a distinct location within the prison. As Wylie writes in the book’s introduction, “The pattern of such a journey [through the inertias, steriles and roads] is one of constant, relentless repetition on a vast scale. ... The result is a feeling of complete disorientation. I photographed the Maze over a period of twelve months and this feeling never went away.” In the center of the book, the viewer lands in the H-shaped cell blocks. Wylie places his camera in the center of the two arms of one of the H-blocks and shoots towards the center, creating a panorama of images that is printed on fold-out pages, immersing the viewer in the architecture of oppression. The last 24 images of the book show the interiors of all the cells in H-5, B Wing; the curtains and wall colors vary slightly, but the camera stays in the same place, emphasizing similarities rather than difference. History reveals that the Maze’s policy of oppressive equivalence did not, ultimately, achieve its goal. These
photographs mark a place, now deserted, where rebellion helped gestate peace. MARY GOODWIN
Andrew Miksys | Baxt TEXT BY ANDREI CODRESCU.
Arök Books, Seattle, 2007. Designed by John Hubbard and Andrew Miksys. Clothbound with gold foil stamping. Trade edition of 1000; 75 limited editions (with slipcased book signed by Miksys and Codrescu and 8x10 color print) and 100 limited editions (with slipcased book signed by Miksys and Codrescu). 112 pp., 49 color illustrations, 9 × 11 $50.00 / $500.00 / $200.00 In this series of 49 environmental portraits, Andrew Miksys explores the living history of the Lithuanian Roma, known in English-speaking countries as Gypsies. “Baxt” is the Romani word for fate, destiny and fortune; the Roma in Miksys’ portraits possess a baxt that is rich in family and tradition but also in hardship. Miksys offers an insider’s view of these Romani communities, in which stunning juxtapositions of color often co-exist with equally staggering poverty. While the faces of the Roma pictured here remain largely impenetrable, the spaces they inhabit act as entry points to this closed world: hallways, kitchens and bedrooms are multilayered compositions of wear-and-tear, provisional decoration, ephemera and pictures that define the Romani present but also build up over time to depict past hopes, glories and struggle. A portrait of Stalin or other artifacts from the Communist era occasionally surface in the images, but the insularity of poverty has built a wall around the Roma. There is a mix-and-match feeling to the clothes and home decoration; the items that adorn the people and homes seem to be there because baxt brought them along and not because they were chosen. Despite the impoverishment in which some of Miksys ’ subjects live, there is also dignity and pride. Eyes address the camera, sometimes laughingly, sometimes with clear sadness. Miksys has rephotographed a few of his subjects over the years. Manuela first appears as a little girl in 2001, all dressed up in a white dress and furry boots and a look of reluctance. Several years later, in 2006, Manuela is pictured again, staring aggressively at the camera as she models a form-fitting dress and fuzzy slippers in her bedroom. The images in Baxt give a strong sense of the physicality of Roma life. Miksys’portraits build a communal picture of a people who continue to cope with poverty and discrimination and live to meet the viewer with a gaze of determination rooted in survival. MARY GOODWIN
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Jim Jocoy | We ’ re Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy. SF/LA 78–80 INTERVIEW BY THURSTON MOORE. PROSE BY EXENE CERVENKA. INTRODUCTION BY MARC JACOBS.
powerHouse Books, New York, 2002. Designed by Doris Voigtländer. Printed by Artegrafica, Verona. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 280 pp., 263 color illustrations, 5¾ × 8¾ $29.95
Ron Galella | Disco Years FOREWORD BY MICHAEL MUSTO. TEXT BY RON GALELLA. INTRODUCTION BY ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST.
powerHouse Books, New York, 2006. Designed by Douglas Lloyd and Gustaf Torling, Lloyd (+Co). Printed by Oceanic Graphic Printing Inc., China. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 200 pp., 170 duotone illustrations, 9¾ × 12¼ $65.00 It’s the end, the end of the 70s It’s the end, the end of the century —The Ramones, Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio? Music photography (and the phrase, come to think of it, is oddly paradoxical, one that seems to defy the laws of nature, if not physics, kind of like saying “aural seeing”) is a no-brainer. A portrait of a rock star or a disco queen or a groupie or a well-coifed scenester is inherently more dramatic, more actively in motion, more viscerally palpable than, say, a still life of three apples, or one of those cheesy, naked-mom-with-baby books that comes out every year, or a photo of a tire. Often the reaction to a music photo is “Wow, that’s cool,” as opposed to “Wow, the composition of this photo is well balanced and I derive great intellectual pleasure from it.” But as such, music photography appears to be less thoughtful, an easy target and less a cerebral exercise than an accident of just shooting tons of film. Really, if you hang out with a band for a week and constantly snap photos, at some point you’re accidentally going to get a shot of someone smashing a guitar, and it will look great and iconic and you’ll make a lot of money selling posters of it at the mall and end up in one of those Rolling Stone’s Top Rock Photos of (fill in the decade). So is that art? This is not a question that really needs to be answered, thank God, and besides, one assumes that if you’ve picked up this magazine, you’ve pondered the question of the nature of art a thousand times, arguing with your friends over pints of some obscure pale ale made by one-legged trappist monks or something like that. (Though, sigh, if you really want to go there, do the following: Go to the library. Check out Aristotle’s Poetics.
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Read it—you’ll be fine.) It is a handy question, however, to keep in the back of one’s mind upon examining the subject of music photographs. Why? Because at the very least, the books examined in this article are finely wrought—whether accidentally or not—documents of some very important subjects concerning modern American society, specifically manifested in two very different—but more or less simultaneous—musical/cultural reactions to the end of the 20th century: punk and disco. Let’s start with We ’ re Desperate, Jim Jocoy’s book of punk rock photography. Even a casual flip through the book, with its bright colors and the gorgeous trashiness of both its subjects and their background surroundings, produces a second question: “What is cool?” Like the What Is Art question, the What Is Cool question has hung like a cloud of cigarette smoke over our society for as long as anyone can remember. At first What Is Cool may seem a superficial query, one concerned only with the outer trappings of individuals, or faddishness, or a corporate construct. But to really look at What Is Cool through the filter of Jocoy’s book and others like it is to dig into common themes of American culture and, as such, to draw conclusions about the ol’ standby, What Is Art. To begin, We ’ re Desperate takes its title from the band X’s song of the same name, a seminal staple of the punk rock era, whose lyrics in part read, “Every other week I need a new address/Landlord landlord landlord cleaning up the mess/my whole fuckin’ life is a wreck/we ’ re desperate/get used to it,” as three or four loud, choppy, sloppy guitar chords buzz like angry, drunken bees. It’s the sort of youthful nihilistic acceptance of bleak conditions that punk rock was known for. In fact, the punk philosophy not only accepted such things, it celebrated them as a reflection of the hopelessness of existence. And that’s cool. Why? Because punk— at least during the years that Jocoy captures—celebrated the bleak, the diseased, the self-destructive, because true punk heroes did not fear death. And to be unafraid of death is to be unafraid of anything, and what a freedom that must be, to be unfettered by social norms or constructs and their attendant neuroses. What a freedom it must be to just not give a fuck. That’s just about as cool as it gets. This is no more noticeable than in Jocoy’s Polaroid of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, white-knuckling not one but two cans of Budweiser, his pasty naked chest zig-zagged with dozens of red slash marks, razor cuts from his own hand. Vicious represents the extreme, the extreme in a complete implosion of feeling; he doesn’t give a damn
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Cover and page spreads from We ’ re Desperate, by Jim Jocoy
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Cover and page spreads from Disco Years, by Ron Galella
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MORE BOOKS TO CHECK OUT
White Nights by Morten Andersen
Vintage Rock T-Shirts by Johan Kugelberg
about what happens to his body, whether it bleeds or starves or dies (in fact he died soon after the photo was taken). It’s tragic, yes, but doesn’t some part of you crave that sort of liberty? Every few pages Jocoy’s subjects—both famous and anonymous—sport a variation on the Ramones’ simple, timeless theme of tight jeans, black leather jacket, T-shirt. It’s a uniform of sorts, but really it’s a baseline from which the subject is free to personalize, with color, tights, belts, shoes, eye makeup, caked blood, whatever. Still, it evokes a basic Platonic form of punk, that of the Ramones’ self-destructive attitude and streamlined, straightforward songs whose fearlessness defied the apocalyptic feel of the 80s, all the way into the turn of the century. And then, there was disco. Gorgeous in its sweeping, grandiose denial, its patrons famously crawling through Studio 54 and other spots, all chronicled in Ron Galella’s Disco Years. While the punk kids hawked loogies at the Grim Reaper, the 54 denizens clearly dreaded death, trying desperately to wield it off with gold-plated coke spoons and an armor of tight clothes. Part of this was simply age—with a few exceptions (e.g., Muriel and Margo Hemingway, Christi McNichol), the disco crowd was old enough to have mortgages, children, second marriages, careers, fame, money—reasons to stay alive, or at least reasons to avoid its opposite. In an odd twist, the reaction of the disco-ites to their fear was, like the punks, to submerge themselves in decadence. The difference was that decadence’s glittery urgency. And, in Galella’s grainy, black-and-white photographs, you can see it in the gritted, coke-grind smiles, the freakishly intense eyes in snaps of Grace Jones and Liza Minelli—Aren’t we having fun? We ’ re having fun,
Everyday is Saturday by Peter Ellenby
Punk Love by Susie J. Horgan
right? OK, admittedly, it looks fun, too, much more glamourous than the filth-laden bathrooms of Jocoy’s photos. For one thing, more than anything, Disco Years features a lot of naked people. An anonymous, wellendowed man painted entirely (penis too!) in glittery gold; a topless waitress serving drinks; Ali MacGraw flashing a tit, then deciding to just keep it out for subsequent photos. Why not? Even without the nudity, the lecherousness is palpable. There are numerous shots capturing short, balding men dancing expectantly with gorgeous young women, folks humping each other, tongues inserted sloppily into drunken mouths. And so much excess! In one shot, patrons eat sushi that rests on the body of a nubile, naked young woman. The over-the-top theme ran the gamut from who could show the most tit, to who boasted the smallest G-string, to who had the most caked-on mascara. It was a gilded age, roughly a hundred years later than the first one, with everything from the human body to drug paraphernalia literally coated in gold. What is it about the ends of centuries that prompts such extreme responses, such indulgence and nihilism, whether that indulgence and nihilism manifests in a slovenly debauchery or a spastic hedonism? Why are we so drawn to both, or at least to images such as Jocoy ’ s and Galella’s that capture the fearless and the fearful? If producing those images is a no-brainer, to go back to our original question: Is it then art? One answer is, people have been obsessing over questions like this for centuries and we’ll never really know. A second answer, one that no doubt the subjects of both We ’ re Desperate and Disco Years would give, is perhaps more relevant: Dude, who cares? Let’s just rock. JONANNA WIDNER
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David Goldblatt | Photographs INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN PARR. ESSAYS BY LIONEL ABRAHAMS, RORY BESTER AND ALEX DODD. EDITED BY MARTIN PARR.
Contrasto, Rome, 2006. Designed by François and Debbie Smit, Quba Design and Motion. Printed by EBS, Verona. Clothbound with tipped-on photo-illustration. 256 pp., 176 color and black-and-white illustration, 11½ × 10½ $60.00
David Goldblatt | Hasselblad Award 2006 TEXT BY MICHAEL GODBY. INTRODUCTION BY GUNILLA KNAPE.
Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007. Designed by François Smit. Printed by Dr. Cantz'sche Druckerei, Ostfildern. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 84 pp., 45 four-color illustrations, 12 × 10¾ $40.00
From the Particulars series in David Goldblatt: Photographs
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As I sat in the Library of Congress with a stack of books by David Goldblatt— On The Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), In Boksburg (1982), The Transported of KwaNdebele (1989), The Structure of Things Then (1998), David Goldblatt: Photographs (2006) and David Goldblatt: Hasselblad Award 2006—I silently coveted them. The opportunity to look at these books together afforded the chance to view the totality of his work, each of them speaking on the politically and socially unsettling times of apartheid in South Africa, and to the struggle of the photographer to publish his profound, socially minded projects. Many of his books were published during apartheid and are now out-of-print. Goldblatt’s photographs are subtle but powerful, exemplifying a sensitive eye for capturing the literal and metaphorical shades of the social reality of his environment. It is work that is both art and document. Goldblatt himself is not black or colored nor Afrikaans, but rather a first generation South African, his parents having fled Lithuania as a result of religious persecution. Family values of tolerance and equality shaped his informed and critical perspective on South African society during apartheid. Throughout the various projects, Goldblatt focused on the day-to-day reality of this society, whatever the skin color or milieu, which resulted in an analytical and percerptive commentary on apartheid at all levels. In the text by Neville Dubow in The Structure of Things Then, Roland Barthes is quoted, “ultimately photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive.” This statement points to Goldblatt’s effectiveness in arousing contemplation in the viewer rather than forcing an emotional reaction via an overt political message. There are black-and-white photographs of gold mines and miners, and the divided people of Soweto and Johannesburg; photographs from the middle-class white town of Boksburg showing the civility and homogeny of a segregated suburbia that functioned with the help of a black population that wasn’t allowed to live there; grainy and jolting photographs of the grueling commute from KwaNdebele to Pretoria and back again; his fantastic series of details of individuals and what they can represent, from his project called “particulars”; a large collection of photographs from The
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Structure of Things Then on the physical and ideological constructs that shaped South African society under Apartheid; and finally Goldblat t ’ s color work depicting these same constructs and environments in post-apartheid South Africa and the ongoing interactions of the now “mixed” spaces. Even with the strength of Goldblatt’s work, he initially had a hard time finding publishers. Once published, his first two books barely sold, the material being considered too contemporaneous with the social issues of the time. On the Mines and Some Afrikaners Photographed are now hardto-find collector’s items with the latter back on the market as a reworked version of the original, retitled Some Afrikaners Revisited (Umuzi, 2007). Since 2000, in fact, more than six new books have been published on his work, including two retrospective books, Fifty-One Years (2001) and David Goldblatt: Photographs (Contrasto, 2006), as well as Particulars (2003), which won the book prize at Arles in 2004. Of these three, the only one in-print is the most recent, David Goldblatt: Photographs. Corresponding to the traveling exhibition curated by Martin Parr for Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles last year, this retrospective book provides an overview of Goldblatt’s work from the early stages of his career to the ongoing “Intersections” series, many of which were recently published in a book of the same name (Prestel, 2005). As a whole, the book is disjointed, but its strengths lie in the size and selection of the images, which, along with Rory Bester’s essay “One Book at a Time,” provide a visual history lesson that exposes the shadows of apartheid even two decades since its dismantling. The images are timeless and his vision over the decades is unwavering. Last year, at the age of 75, Goldblatt was awarded the 2006 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. Undoubtedly, he deserves to be considered a true master of photography along with other recipients of the award, including figures like Cartier-Bresson and Salgado. David Goldblatt: Hasselblad Award 2006 (Hatje Cantz, 2006) contains a comprehensive essay on the life of Goldblatt by Michael Godby of the University of Cape Town. The book presents only Goldblatt’s most recent unpublished color work and triptych series from 2004 through 2006. As such, this volume is the perfect companion to David Goldblatt: Photographs; together the pair provides a complete picture of Goldblatt’s powerful imagery of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. LARISSA LECLAIR
Lady Gray, Eastern Cape. 5 August 2006
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Klaus Staeck | Pornografie EDITED BY H. C. SCHMOLCK.
Steidl, Göttingen, 2007. Printed by Steidl. Paperback. 392 pp., 295 black-and-white illustrations, 8 × 10 $45.00 In 1971, the year in which Malcolm McDowell donned a bowler hat and a white jumpsuit and had his eyes taped open to receive a flood of startling and violent imagery in the famous aversion therapy scene of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Klaus Staeck published Pornografie. It is easy, now, flipping through Steidl’s 2007 reissue of the book (made from the original offset film), to imagine one’s own eyes leaping and quivering as McDowell’s did on witnessing a prolonged onslaught of power and aggression. But in every other sense, Staeck’s work is altogether more terrifying than Kubrick’s: each page is full bleed, the grainy newsprint texture appears like a repressed memory, the thick black ink smells like guilt and the procession of images reads like an indictment of voyeurism. It’s a masterwork which offers no qualifications, apologies or moralizing. Pornografie begins with a series of images of riots and continues in loosely identifiable groupings such as war, bodies, men in power positions, torture tools, macho advertisement, and relentlessly on through almost two inches of thick paper stock. Staeck’s work, in 1971, was a seminal moment in the appropriation and use of media imagery, but not so much has changed: it still sits, in 2007, with the weight of much more than its 392 pages. ZANE FISCHER
Broomberg and Chanarin | Chicago PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM BROOMBERG AND OLIVER CHANARIN. ESSAY BY EYAL WEIZMAN.
SteidlMack, Göttingen, 2007. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 112 pp., 60 color illustrations, 10 × 13 $45.00 I remember Apache Attack Helicopters flying through San Francisco in 1990. It was the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War and the rumor was that the Bay Area’s combination of density and elevation change was similar to that of Arab cities the United States was considering assaults on. The need to not simply train, but to rehearse war in realistic environments has only increased since then. An entire
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From Chicago by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
town in southern New Mexico, called Playas, has become a training center for terrorist attacks, where troops can storm libraries, baseball fields and suburban homes. But it all started in Chicago, a fictional Chicago, unrelated to the American city, in the Negev Desert in Israel. There, according to Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Israeli troops have created a faux Arab stronghold in order to rehearse and plan such events as the invasion of Beirut, the Intifadas and other military activities. The images are astounding: a cartoon city full of real violence, where buildings that look like 3rd-grade theater sets are strategically demolished and cardboard cutouts are reigned in under heavy, suppressive machine gun fire. Chicago is a sizeable book, stacked with color plates and as the narrative leaves the fake city and displays images of camouflaged bombs, bizarre settlements and the tourist attraction known as “mini-Israel,” a portrait of a society living within an illusion is provocatively asserted. ZANE FISCHER
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Page-spreads from Pornografie, by Klaus Staeck
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SURVEY OF NEW BOOKS
Charlie Crane | Welcome to Pyongyang INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS BONNER. EDITED BY BRUNO CESCHEL.
Chris Boot Ltd., London, 2007. Designed by SMITH, Karl Shanahan. Printed in China. Photo-illustrated paper over pillowboards. 144 pp., 65 four-color illustrations, 7¼ × 9¼ $35.00
Nicholas Righetti | The Last Paradise: North Korea INTRODUCTION BY ORVILLE SCHELL. EDITED BY LESLEY A. MARTIN.
Umbrage Books, New York City, 2003. Designed by Alain Robert Studio. Printed by Artegrafica Srl, Verona. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 128 pp., 55 color illustrations, 9¼ × 7½ $35.00
Philippe Chancel | North Korea TEXT BY MICHAEL POIVERT AND JONATHAN FENBY.
Thames & Hudson, Inc, New York, 2007. Designed by Niki Medlik. Printed by Sing Cheong, Hong Kong. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 208 pp., 129 color illustrations, 12 × 10¾ $50.00
Mark Edward Harris | Inside North Korea FOREWORD BY MARK EDWARD HARRIS. TEXT BY BRUCE CUMINGS. EDITED BY STEVE MOCKUS.
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2007. Clothbound with photoillustrated dustjacket. 192 pp., 150 color and black-and-white illustrations, 9 × 12 $35.00 FOUR HALF-KOREAS North Korea is the new Cuba, with the most aggressive of photographers and adventure tourists agitating to get there before Starbucks. Its arrival as a destination for the hardcore is heralded by four recently published photobooks—enough to put a blip on anyone’s radar. One by one the diehard commie states, shuttered since the 1950s, have been letting in daylight. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Albania and the U.S. re-established diplomatic relations in 1991, and by the end of the 90s the borders of China, North Vietnam and Cuba had become porous to visiting capitalists. But North Korea has remained remarkably resistant to such penetration by Westerners. In photography, access is everything. “Seeing the unseen” has been a major category since the invention of the medium. In the mid-19th century, when hardly anyone outside the locals had seen a sphinx, Frith and his cohorts got us up close. Since that time, nearly everything has been inspected by photography: pygmy tribes and polar penguins, snake-handling Christians and Klan
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rallies, death-row inmates and the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the insides of our bodies and the surface of Mars. The more closed it is to common folk, the more a subject draws the intrepid photographer who thrives on a challenge. Such is the lure of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea; we in the West still can’t get at it. The Last Paradise admits its subject is inaccessible. Nicolas Righetti presents the only vision he was allowed to see, a political Disneyland. The machinery is underground. Any visitor lucky enough to have received a visa is assigned a tour guide without whom he or she cannot wander. Tour guides in such regimes were, in the past, assumed to be secret police; those in North Korea are graduates of the Tourism University. They are trained in hosting but still serve that earlier purpose, to prevent independent thought or action. Unaccompanied visitors are restricted to stay within 100 meters of their hotel. Foreigners are escorted only from their hotel to places of interest and back: the Children’s Palace, the Triumphal Arch, the birthplace of Kim Il-sung, and the Museum of International Friendship. Righetti returned to North Korea four times to make the photographs in this book; each time he was assigned the same tour guide, Han, who gave him the same schedule for his stay, kept him to the same itinerary, and told him the same narratives. Asked about it, Han shrugged, “People rarely come back.” Righetti shows us what Kim Jong-il wants us to see. Kim is the Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army and the General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea. It is nearly impossible—and quite risky—for a visitor to see anything not part of his plan. For a photographer, the situation is a sow’s ear; with The Last Paradise, Righetti makes it into a purse. It’s a purse that is crazy-quilt patchwork, if not entirely silk. Quotes and facts are scattered among cellphonecamera crude and super-saturated photographs, printed to the page’s edge. Text is white against eye-bleed green. The book’s surreal afterimage—and the reader’s headache—probably comes close to replicating the experience of having been there. If you can’t penetrate a repressive regime, this book seems to be saying, at least you can have fun with it. In Welcome to Pyongyang, Charlie Crane also embraced, or at least didn’t resist, the country’s limitations on visitors. He presents clear and precise photographs (many of them, sadly, run across the book’s gutter) of tidy, organized and eerily unpopulated spaces interspersed with August Sanderesque portraits of people whose expressions give up nothing. The book
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From Welcome to Pyongyang, by Charlie Crane
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SURVEY OF NEW BOOKS
suggests that Crane’s handlers followed exactly the same script as Righetti’s Han, but Crane serves us his thoughtful ironies cooler and more distant. The photographs are orderly and spare—as relentlessly as the subject itself. The book, like Righetti’s, is of modest scale, about 9x7 inches. Other than the eccentricity of its padded jacket and the metallic printing of its title, it is—like the photographs inside—calm, tidy and organized. The overall suggestion is that of a place immobilized and silent. There is not a hint of motion. North Korea, with photographs by Philippe Chancel, shows us more and shows it bigger than either Righetti’s or Crane’s book. This package is 11x12 inches and 208 pages, well printed and conventionally designed. But even though the book appears more ambitious than the aforementioned two, it extends only slightly our sense of where a photographer might be allowed, and it is a more typical production. Many of Chancel’s photographs look candidly populated, making Pyongyang seem more like Brigadoon than Chernobyl. Some of the photos are extremely populated. He inexplicably fills 21 pages with uniformed throngs marching before a full 150,000-seat May Day Stadium—we can only assume he was stuck in his seat for a very long time—and there are numerous classrooms, auditoriums and lobbies along with the ubiquitous museums. He includes two photographs with different images on the same television in the same hotel room. A window reveals both photographs to be made during daylight hours and you can feel the frustration of the photographer caged like a circus animal. We see the streets in use, some shots grabbed from a car, but mostly the outdoors seems to exist only at a monument or outside a museum. The book’s real prize is a half dozen shots of what appear to be regular folks in the subway and one of a group of workers erecting scaffolding. We still can’t peek into people’s lives. The book’s glowing introduction invokes Susan Sontag and stretches to make parallels with the work of Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth. A more apt comparison might be made with the photographers of National Geographic, trying to tell a story with well-composed photographs. Inside North Korea, by Mark Edward Harris, lets us see more than just Pyongyang, the capital. It gives the impression that the visitor got away from his handlers, at least for a few minutes at a time. Of the four books, his
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seems to be the most revealing. At the same time, however, it makes a disappointing package, a conventional picture-story book. The photographs are competent, as one would expect from a widely published editorial photographer. The book is well enough designed and printed, the writing is clear and comprehensive with profuse factoids. But it is simply an ordinary book about an extraordinary subject. Harris tries it all; he gives us landscapes and portraits, close-ups and vistas, bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, black-and-white and color. He supplements photographs from the limited-access interior with views across the border from China and South Korea. It is a significant effort. As a book, however, it ranks alongside Wildlife
Page-spreads from The Last Paradise, by Nicholas Righetti
with a Camera and A Young Player's Guide to Baseball: nice pictures, no metaphor. The most remarkable part of the book is the fact that Harris is American. Only about 1500 Westerners visit North Korea annually. Americans have the lowest likelihood of receiving a visa, especially after President George W. Bush proclaimed the nation to be among those forming the “axis of evil.” Righetti is Swiss, Crane British, and Chancel French. Somehow Harris managed to see more than they did. Maybe access isn’t everything after all. JIM STONE
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From North Korea, by Philippe Chancel
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FEATURES
Where We Live On a trip out West, gallerist JEN BEKMAN stops by the Getty and finds herself entranced by photographs of one of our most basic needs: the need for shelter.
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WHERE WE LIVE WAS THE UNEXPECTED highlight of my recent trip out West, to attend Photo LA. I wasn’t even aware of the exhibition and my Friday evening excursion to the Getty was wedged into a very busy few days. Wandering the galleries with two friends, I coaxed them into the exhibition for what was meant to be a quick peek on our way out of the museum. What a fortuitous detour! Suddenly we were in the midst of an amazing, if somewhat specific, history of American photography. I couldn’t contain my excitement as I wandered from room to room. I’ve never before had an opportunity to review such a broad swath of significant works in person. Even the biggest names in the exhibition—Robert Adams, William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld among them—might not be household names beyond the photography community, but the photos in the exhibition are familiar to most Americans. This is a show that captures America: its barbershops, its lawnchairs, gardens and storefront churches; its well-traveled roads and everything that lines them; gas stations and diners and neon and barns, most of them creeping towards decrepitude; its vistas and landscapes, from cities on out to its loneliest stretches of desert. And Americans as well: individuals, families whole and fractured, our homes and our cars (of course, our cars!). I was caught off guard by what an emotional experience it was for me. Part of the excitement was seeing the prints in person, often big and always beautiful. These were delicious prints, not pages in books I’ve pored over for years. But most surprising was the feeling of, well, patriotism that took hold and grew inside me as I went from room to room. Never before have I felt so proud to be a part of this nation as it was laid out before me. It’s not the chest-beating pride that’s advertised with ribbons on SUVs and keeps us in this war, and it’s not the flash of celebrity and conspicuous consumption that are so defining in these times. It was far more dignified and quiet than that. It’s about honoring the everyday and the people who populate it. It’s about elevating the mundane enough to know that it represents some privileges and opportunities we often overlook, and at times have lost entirely. The images in Where We Live were culled from more than 450 photographs that have been donated to the Getty by Nancy and Bruce Berman. Bruce Berman is a movie guy and the collection, which is diverse but coherent, makes that apparent. There is a cinematic and narrative quality shared by so many of the photographs. I’m not talking about a blockbuster, big-budget kind of movie narrative; rather, these images have an indie art-house film feel. They form an ensemble cast, with few people you’ve ever heard of. The plot meanders, sometimes going nowhere. The narrative of the exhibition is a subtly constructed tale, and the ultimate satisfaction is gained not from the escapism of your typical action-adventure flick, but rather from spotlighting the unexpected beauty and drama found in the everyday and situating your individual experience in the context and commonality of others. The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is terrific,
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John Divola, N34°12.325’W116°01.374’ #1, 1995–98
ALL IMAGES IN THIS ARTICLE COURTESY OF THE GETTY PUBLISHING TRUST
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Alex Harris, Amadeo Sandoval’s Kitchen and Bedroom, Río Lucío, New Mexico, June 1985
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George A. Tice, Petit’s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, November 1974
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Mitch Epstein, Flag, 2000
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Sheron Rupp, Trudy in Annie’s Sunflower Maze, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2000
with more than 150 photographs and several essays that draw out the subtle continuities of the works. The book is large and shaped like a record album, a small detail which brings an appropriate degree of nostalgia to it. My one quibble is the cover; listed as a hardcover book, it’s not quite that. I’ve only had the book for a few weeks and the flexibind cover is already a bit misshapen. Granted, it’s been well handled—there’s not a person who sets eyes on it who can resist picking it up and thumbing through it repeatedly—but I worry how it will stand the test of time. Interestingly, my concerns about the book’s durability are the absolute opposite of my feelings about its contents. It’s an amazing survey and artifact of what it has been, and is, to be American. The value is sure to be enduring. Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection. Numerous contributing photographers. Text by Kenneth A. Breisch, Judith Keller and Colin Westerbeck, with an essay by Bruce Wagner. Edited by John Harris. Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2006. Designed by Jim Drobka. Flexibind with photo-illustrated paper over boards. 227 pp., 170 four-color plates, 11¼ × 11 $49.95
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This page: Leda and the Swan, 1946. Plexiglas. Next page: Negative Cat, c. 1926. Gelatin silver print
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THIRTY YEARS AGO LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY still exerted considerable sway over the practice of art photography. Beginning in the late 20s and for the next fifty years his boundary-pushing techniques offered inspiration and guidance to anyone rebelling against the dominant “straight” tradition. The many students, or students of students, who read his proselytizing books (such as The New Vision or Vision in Motion) or had enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, or the New Bauhaus (later School of Design) when he was in Chicago from 1938 until his death in 1946, advanced his risk-taking legacy themselves. Henry Holmes Smith, Carlotta Capron, Ray Metzker and Ken Josephson are a few who directly or indirectly took sustenance from his example. Today his presence is harder to discern. Collectors highly value his vintage prints and have pushed his prices well into six figures. But his politics (utopian socialist) seem quaint in the present environment; and his celebration of denatured abstraction and the latest industrial technology—“we are all equal before the machine,” he liked to say—is more apparent in digital video and computer graphics than the latest art photography, with its pronounced shift in recent decades back to large cameras and a realist aesthetic. Among artists, his reputation has suffered from being associated too closely with his role as an educator and with a few darkroom tricks. Other than Adam Fuss, Todd Watts and first-year art students, does anyone make photograms anymore? Two recent books offer a welcome chance to reevaluate what he still means to us. One is a catalogue for a handsome show, organized in 2006 by the Tate Modern and exhibited in New York at the Whitney Museum, in which he was paired with his Bauhaus contemporary Josef Albers. Both were dynamic teachers who took divergent paths as personalities and pedagogues. Moholy’s constructivist penchant—the vertiginous angles, designed to liberate the eye from a fixed perspective, and the promotion of mechanical means for making art—derived in part from his brushes with Dada. Albers was less a boisterous radical in outlook, more of a somber and systematic Goethean figure. Moholy made few if any distinctions between his painting and film-making, photography and graphic design. His aim was to use every means at his disposal to revolutionize vision for the modern age. His 1926 photo of a cat took a household subject and with a simple tone reversal turned it into a surrealist jungle creature. He photographed his own sculptures, which he called light-space modulators (Leda and the Swan from 1946 is a good, late example). Essentially formalist studies, they nonetheless served to erode barriers between academic genres, following in the anti-traditionalist spirit of the Bauhaus.
Considerable Sway: The Visionary Art and Practice of László Moholy-Nagy Two recent titles add depth to the already potent vision of the legendary educator, theorist and Bauhaus artist. By RICHARD WOODWARD
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The show filled in some tantalizing blank spaces in Moholy’s career. The essay by Terence A. Senter discusses the anomalous London years in the mid-30s, after the middle-aged artist, a Hungarian Jew, had left Germany and become an émigré again. Supporting himself in advertising, he took quite conventional photographs—he collaborated with the poet Sir John Betjeman on An Oxford University Chest and with Bernard Fergusson on Eton Portrait—that seemed to repudiate his avant-garde past. Moholy had the perpetual refugee’s knack of adapting to whatever circumstances he needed to survive. It was during his British period that Moholy did some of his first color photography, the subject of an illuminating new monograph from the Bauhaus Archiv. Most of his experiments with this new process date after 1938, however, during his Chicago tenure. Geared to be classroom material (the originals exist mainly as 35mm Kodachrome slides), it is mined here by the art historian Jeannine Fiedler to study his developing interest in color and offer a history of the school and his methods during these years. She notes, for example, that a photo of wooden objects on a tabletop for his basic design course reflects an adaptation to World War II shortages when metal was scarce. Some of his most brilliant pictures—a menacing view of icicles hanging from a roof, seen from underneath, with electric wires slashing across—were found in the streets of the city but look like his former studio-constructed photocollages. His series on traffic at night, made by standing at the intersection of Randolph and State with the shutter open, are years ahead of Ted Croner’s and William Klein’s nocturnal exercises. Moholy was always in many ways a painter with a camera, exploiting the medium for its unique ability to capture light and draw lines that the handheld brush would never imagine on its own. He believed that the color processes at the time so distorted reality that the only choice left to the artist was to “go beyond nature.” The text is marred by a few clumsy, not to say inaccurate, translations from German into English. (For example, the German text is correct in attributing a proclivity for “decollage” to Aaron Siskind; whereas the English translation credits Harry Callahan. see p. 67.) This doesn’t negate the fact that Moholy’s New York billboard detail from 1940 is an amazingly prescient image, anticipating abstract expressionism and nouveau-realisme. In following the career of Moholy-Nagy, both books are helpful not only in reintroducing us to his protean artmaking but also in tracing the history of art education in the 20th century. What they can’t do easily is revive his restless spirit. Once upon a time, the chief desire of young artists was not to have gallery representation but to experiment ceaselessly with their craft.
Photogram No. II, 1929
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(top) Icicles and wires, Chicago, 1938 (bottom) New York billboard detail, 1940
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World. Edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume, with contributions by Hal Foster, Hattula MoholyNagy, Terence A. Senter, Nicholas Fox Weber and Michael White. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006. Designed by Atelier Works. Printed by Mondadori, Verona. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 192 pp., 170 color and 20 black-and-white illustrations, 9 x 10¾ $60.00 Color in Transparency. Photographic Experiments in Color 1934–1946. Photographs by L á szló Moholy-Nagy. Essays by L á szló Moholy-Nagy, Jeannine Fiedler and Hattula Moholy-Nagy. Steidl, Göttingen, in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, 2006. Clothbound with photoillustrated dustjacket. 248 pp., 100 four-color illus., 8½ x 10¾ $65.00
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COLUMNS
SINCE SUMMER 2004, Mary Virginia Swanson and Darius Himes have presented, in a column that appears in each issue of photo-eye Booklist, detailed steps that outline the process of having a book of photographs published. Entering the third year of this acclaimed column, they now turn their attention to the practice of publishing a limited edition book along with the trade edition. The market for collectible photography books and prints has never been better. Many publishers produce photography books in deluxe editions, hoping to capitalize on the marketplace. Over the next three issues, the authors will survey the field of publishers who produce these gorgeous, limited editions. The current installment will focus on two boutique art publishers—Nazraeli Press, founded by Chris Pichler, and Twin Palms Publishers, founded by Jack Woody. Both of these publishers have years of experience and clout in the fine-art photography community. The second installment will look at two distinctive publishing houses that cater to extremely high-end books, whereas the last column will feature several artists who have self-published limited edition books.
Publishing the Photography Book: Limited Editions, Part I The ongoing column about publishing photobooks. MARY VIRGINIA SWANSON and DARIUS HIMES
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INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS PICHLER Nazraeli Press was founded in 1989 by Chris Pichler, whose appetite and sensibility for photography was cultivated at Arizona State University in Tempe in the mid-80s. To date, Nazraeli Press has published some 250 titles on photographers and artists, including eminal volumes on Frederick Sommer, Todd Hido, Robert Adams, Michael Kenna, Joseph Mills and Terri Weifenbach. Nazraeli Press collaborates with Pichler’s wife, Maya Ishiwata, a gifted and knowledgeable Japanese exhibition coordinator and artist rep, bringing first monographs to light on a whole generation of younger Japanese photographers, including Masao Yamamoto, Toshio Shibata, Miwa Yanagi, Emi Anrakuji and Tomoko Yoneda. Their limited editions are impeccably designed and produced, often selling-out upon arrival on our shores. Pichler shared his thoughts with us earlier this month. DH & MVS: What determines whether you decide to do a limited edition in conjunction with a trade edition? CHRIS PICHLER: If an artist’s original prints are particularly expensive, and/or limited in terms of edition size, it can make sense to offer a smaller print, in a larger edition, together with a book. This allows people who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to afford a print, to own one. In other cases (such as Michael Kenna’s book Hokkaido), we offer a special edition print of an image that has not been made available through galleries. Special editions provide a great way for an artist to experiment with different sizes or printing methods. DH & MVS: How much does an artist’s sales track record matter in that decision? CHRIS PICHLER: Not very much at all. If a special edition feels right for a particular book, we feel confident that it will find its market. DH & MVS: How do you determine how many copies to produce? CHRIS PICHLER: We determine this together with the artist, based on what we feel the market demand will be, being careful not to interfere with work being done by the artist’s galleries. DH & MVS: Are production costs considered separate from the costs of the trade edition? Does an artist “donate” prints for the
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limited edition, or are they reimbursed somehow? CHRIS PICHLER: We keep separate accounting for special editions. We typically pay for production of the clamshell boxes, and ask the artist to pay for production of the prints. DH & MVS: How do you determine which image to use? Do you and the artist use a popular image or do you offer a selection? CHRIS PICHLER: In most cases, we offer just one image, though in a few cases, we have decided that it makes more sense to offer a selection of images to choose from. We don’t usually choose a popular image just for the sake of doing so. For the special editions of Todd Hido’s books, in fact, we have always chosen images that were part of the series being featured in the books but that were not represented in the books themselves. They were images that easily stood on their own, and that added something to the overall object, rather than simply duplicating something that was already there. DH & MVS: Do you try to pre-sell limited editions to galleries and bookstores since there are so few? CHRIS PICHLER: Yes, we try to spread them around as much as possible, geographically. In a number of cases, limited edition books have been sold out before they were actually completed. We list special editions in our catalogue and website, and market them the same way we market regular edition books. DH & MVS: Which were your most successful limited editions? CHRIS PICHLER: “Most successful” in terms of sales would be difficult to answer, because so many have sold out very quickly. Some of my personal favorites in terms of use of materials and images would include White Casket [Miwa Yanagi], Between the Two [Todd Hido], Memories of a Dog [Daido Moriyama] and High Fashion Crime Scenes [Melanie Pullen]. Visit Nazraeli Press at: www.nazraeli.com
(top to bottom) Todd Hido, Between the Two limited edition print image Between the Two cover image
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(opposite) Robert Stivers, Sanctum, limited edition print (above) page spread and cover of Sanctum
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INTERVIEW WITH JACK WOODY Twin Palms Publishers and Twelve Trees, established nearly 30 years ago by Jack Woody, has published some 100 titles on photographers and visual artists, with significant monographs on such seminal figures as William Eggleston, Lise Sarfati, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Anthony Goicolea, and Jeff Burton. They have also published first monographs by artists George Platt Lynes, Joel-Peter Witkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, F. Holland Day, Duane Michals, Robert ParkeHarrison, and others. Their first limited edition with a print was published to accompany the book, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist’s Landscape, photographs by Todd Webb. It sold out in a first edition of 50; the second edition of the book, which had been so popular, was accompanied by a dye transfer print of paintings in her studio, and that also sold out. Jack Woody, founder and director, spoke with us about their approach to limited edition books. DH & MVS: What determines whether you decide to do a limited edition in conjunction with a trade edition of a book? Jack Woody: Usually the artist’s reputation is an issue when deciding to invest in producing a limited edition. Philip-Lorca diCorcia and William Eggleston are obvious choices, but younger artists like Anthony Goicolea and Simen Johan are unknowns, particularly since we were publishing their first books and there was no precedent for how their work would do in the marketplace. We ended up doing a limited with an original print for both artists. Anthony’s sold out immediately and Simon’s has been slower, as would be expected with a lesser-known artist. DH & MVS: How do you determine how many copies of the limited edition to produce? Jack Woody: These days I feel the market is pretty saturated. We often publish a signed and slipcased edition of 100 along with a smaller edition of 25 or 50 that comes with a print. We also make a few APs [artist proofs] that are then split between the artist and us. DH & MVS: Are production costs considered separate from the costs of the trade edition? Does an artist “donate” prints for the limited edition, or are they reimbursed somehow? Jack Woody: Our production policy is to split all costs with the artist, including printing of the photographs for the editon. After costs, we split the profits. DH & MVS: How do you determine which image to use as the limited edition print? Do you and the artist use a popular image, or do you offer a selection to choose from? Jack Woody: Choosing a print for a limited edition can be problematic. We prefer the artist to do something original for the edition but if that is not possible we choose a print with the artist, usually avoiding some of their more iconic images which are often sold out or sell for substantial amounts of money in a gallery or auction house. DH & MVS: Do you try to pre-sell limited editions to galleries and bookstores since there are so few? Jack Woody: We usually list the limited edition for sale on our website and in our catalogue. My attitude about selling anything is that if you stay in business long enough you can and will. This goes for limited editions too; they all sell out. Visit Twin Palms at: www.twinpalmspublishers.com photoeye.com 59
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The Reverend and Margaret’s bedroom, Vicksburg, Mississippi, from Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth
THE OLD & RARE SURVEY With the publication of influential surveys of photobooks in recent years, ERIC MILES pauses to reflect on the nature of collecting. This second of a two-part essay explores the methods and ideas behind building a collection.
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AS THE HISTORIAN ROBERT DARNTON HAS suggested, the catalogue of a personal library can function as a “profile of a reader,” permitting us to “inspect the furnishings” of its owner’s mind (History of Reading, 162), even if said owner has not read all of the books in his collection. The flaneur and the physiognomist, whom we met in our last installment of The Old & Rare Survey, represent fairly distinct styles of collecting. “Though certainly related, we can think of each as characterized by a particular sort of gaze. The flaneur wanders with a certain ‘purposeful aimlessness’ through the byways of culture [...] while the physiognomist, ever eager to discern meaning via surface appearance, is often seduced by production value, never losing sight of the material qualities of the books in her collection.” For photobook collectors, the seductions of production value have multiplied exponentially over the past decade. Because the demand for them exists—the Platinum or Classic Series, the museum or deluxe edition, each in very limited supply—publishers tread a fine line between making work affordable and craftily playing on the self-image of the collector as a connoisseur of rare luxury goods.
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The production of popular photographic titles in multiple editions at different price points is not new, however; in Europe, even as far back as the 1920s, publishers of photoillustrated books produced editions that might be priced several times higher than trade editions. There are other ways of thinking about limited editions, though. In hindsight, the accidental “limited edition” would happen when midway through a print run, materials might change; or again, it occurs when a book is translated into another language. Certain editions from this fertile period in the history of publishing are now exceptionally rare; just try to find the Norwegian edition of Blossfeldt’s seminal Urformen der Kunst. Another sort of connoisseur—let’s call him the “completist”—wants it all: every edition, every dustjacket, slipcase, bellyband and bit of publisher’s ephemera. For public and university libraries, up until roughly the 1970s, such accoutrements were merely discarded. Protecting such material from indelicate hands and rescuing them from the ravages of time is certainly one imperative of such a collector. Euphoria awaits the completist upon the discovery, say, of a heretofore unknown bellyband on a rare Polish Renger-Patzsch edition. With the exception of certain artist’s books or publishing anomalies, books are not unique objects. This inherent contradiction is what makes signed books so desirable. And here we’re not even talking about far less accessible non-Western material. But as Walter Benjamin has reminded us in innumerable ways, the true connoisseur of modern life is just as interested in junk as in luxury goods. Paradoxically, the material facts of even the most luxuriously produced photobook can be altogether more mundane than the metaphorical worlds it has the potential to open up for the reader. As scholar John Plotz explains, “Books however, unlike other collectibles, are always being endowed with this double life: once opened, they reveal in their interiors a passage to another world entirely.” Due to their predominantly visual nature, this is probably more true of photobooks than any others. But the two are not at all necessarily related. In the argot of the book collector, a reading copy is an example of a title that in terms of condition is almost beneath contempt—missing or very tattered dustjacket, perhaps a loose hinge or backstrip—yet it still has the 62 photo-eye Booklist
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potential to unlock the world. While a beat up copy of Life magazine from the late 1930s, is more a reflection of the vision of its picture editors and designers (i.e., not an example of the fine arts of book design, printing and binding), it nonetheless can evoke the Depression era in a manner quite similar to noteworthy photo-documentary books of the period such as You Have Seen Their Faces or American Exodus. Of course, one’s love of the books themselves is only part of the story. Most collectors are, in varying degrees, also investors who dream of buying low and selling high, of finding that copy of The Decisive Moment at a thrift shop for a few bucks. Since for most of their history photobooks have been a mass medium first and fine art second, they hold out this hope much more so than for artworks whose value hinges on originality, on a closer proximity to the hand of the artist. Doing so, however, means that other collectors (or dealers or scholars) must recognize the “worth” of what they’ve so painstakingly accumulated. Sometimes this recognition happens fairly quickly, and anticipating it can be fairly easy. For example, the true first edition of Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, published just three years ago on the heels of his success in the Whitney Biennial, now fetches in excess of 500 dollars. In most other instances, however, appreciation is a much slower process that is also dependent on the growth of the market. In other words, for books to increase in value, collectors must increase in numbers, relative purchasing power and, perhaps most importantly, knowledge of what belongs in a collection. Approaches to collecting photobooks can be broadly categorized, as I’ve done here. Much depends on one’s personal interest in the book qua object: whether it is a fetish for perfect dustjackets, publisher’s ephemera, or variant editions, an interest in printing, typography and book design, a penchant for the “civilized voodoo” of signed books, or a love of the luxurious object. But for many a connoisseur of visual culture, the passion for photography in its myriad printed forms is defined instead by its documentary function, by its insistence on recording—and in many cases defining— contemporary life; the book itself is merely a container for images. Whatever your predilection, to collect photobooks is, as Susan Sontag has famously said, “to collect the world.”
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Consulting and Project Management on Photography Book Publishing “Joanna is terrific, both as an agent and as a publicist. I wouldn’t consider publishing a book without her.” —Jack Parson, photographer “It’s simple. If you’re a photographer who needs an exceptional agent or publicist, hire Joanna.” —Byron Wolfe, photographer In a profession that many of us are justifiably cynical and skeptical about, Joanna stands out as someone with genuine integrity, commitment and interest in helping her authors and photographers in the best way she can. —Nick Brandt, photographer “Joanna’s performance made a very real difference in our book’s sales and marketing. She has the right experience and industry contacts to help photographers with their special concerns, from finding the right publisher to contract negotiations, and later to active book promotion and packaging. She’s one-of-a-kind, and sorely needed.” —Mark Klett, photographer
PROJECT REVIEW PACKAGING PLACEMENT PROMOTION Now taking orders for the Guide to Photography Book Publishing, coming January 2007. See website for details www.hurleymedia.com photopub@hurleymedia.com 505.982.4006
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Repose, by Mona Kuhn.
photo eye Bookstore, Gallery, Auctions, Magazine, Juried Online Galleries, Online Photography Book Resource, Website Management and Hosting & (coming soon!) the International Guide to Photography
www.photoeye.com 370 Garcia Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 tel 505.988.5152
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SEBASTIÃO SALGADO Chinstrap Penguins (Pygoscelis Antartica), Deception Island, Antarctica, 2005. Gelatin Silver Print
SEBASTIÃO SALGADO Genesis: Part I May 26–Sept 1, 2007 2525 Michigan Ave. #A7 Santa Monica, CA 90404 310 453 6463 fax 310 453 6959 info@peterfetterman.com
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Luzarra, Italy, 1993, Stephen Shore, from The Nature of Photographs.
EDITOR’S CHOICE Each season yields scores of books worthy of note. Our editor, DARIUS HIMES, chooses one title from among the many that stands head-and-shoulders above others.
I WANT TO THANK STEPHEN SHORE. And then, I want to thank Phaidon. The reason? For bringing back into print the invaluable book, The Nature of Photographs. This is far and away my favorite book of the season. I dare say I’d like to make it required reading for all students and would-be serious photographers. I don’t really make many requirements for the readers of this magazine, but I might have to change that policy in this case. The Nature of Photographs contains, essentially, Shore’s lecture notes for a class that he teaches to incoming freshmen at Bard College. The course? How to read photographs. It’s not the content of photographs—what we generally call “subject matter”—so much, that Shore is concerned with, but rather the underpinnings of what he calls “photographic seeing.” Shore takes the reader by the hand and lays bare, in straightforward, no-nonsense language, the multiple levels on which photographs operate. More than that, he presents, in digestible paragraphs and a cogent, steady voice, the unique elements of all photographic art. “This book explores ways of understanding the nature of photographs; that is, how photographs function; and not only the most elegant or graceful photographs, but all photographs made with a camera and printed directly from the negative or a digital file. All photographic prints have qualities in common.” He then goes on to elucidate those various levels with concise paragraphs printed one or two to a page, followed by an image that either illustrates or exemplifies the paragraph in question. The book is very simple, in that sense, and can be read, cover to cover, in about an hour. Four chapters detail the conceptual foundation for the work: the physical level, the depictive level, the mental level, and mental modelling. The photographs reproduced—only five images in the whole book are Shore’s—span the history of the medium, from Talbot to Tacita, Atget to Avedon. And at $29.95, it’s the cheapest semester-long course at a stellar four-year liberal arts college you’ll ever take. Thank you Mr. Shore, and cheers, Phaidon. The Nature of Photographs. Text by Stephen Shore. Phaidon Press, London, 2007. Designed by A2/SW/HK. Printed in China. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 136 pp., 20 color and 60 black-and-white illustrations, 9¾ × 8¼ $39.95
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