PICTURE BOOKS curated by Lynette Letic Ingvar Kenne Peter Happel Christian Lee Grant Daniel Shea Jackson Eaton Irina Rozovsky
C CP
PICTURE BOOKS curated by Lynette Letic
When I first began thinking about how I would curate the artists I wanted to feature for this exhibition series, I realized that all the photographers I was looking at had produced at least one publication of their work, whether it be a monograph or a photobook project, self-published or widely published. I also noticed that each series of pictures was prompted by some form of travel. Made locally and abroad, these projects were the products of a road trip, a question, a commission; a desire to record and remember. Considering the two – books and travel – I decided to feature a selection of images by three Australian and three American based photographers whose projects have culminated in the form of a photobook. Each unique in their form, function, size and contents, with some more recent than others, this selection of photobooks demonstrates a diversity in approach and interests, while celebrating the traditional monograph, as well as the more recent photobook forms.
Irina Rozovsky Untitled from ‘One to Nothing’ 2011
Lynette Letic is an emerging photographer based in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Photography majoring in Photojournalism from the Queensland College of Art. Lynette’s photographs have been featured in various group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and published in publications such as Common Ground, Excerpt Magazine and The Argus. She is also the editor of the Queensland Centre for Photography’s Lucida Magazine and an Editorial Board Member of the upcoming issue of the Australian Photojournalist.
www.lynetteletic.com
INGVAR KENNE Australia
Chasing Summer: Journal from a Global Motorcycle Journey One spring day in 1994, with only 1000 kilometres driving experience and a friend, Ingvar Kenne embarked on a two year roadtrip on motorbike. Driving westwards from his home town of Göteborg in Sweden, he crossed five continents and had countless encounters with people during his travels. These photographs are a selection from the culminating book of the trip titled Chasing Summer, published ten years later. Although the idea of the book was not already thought out prior to his return, it developed soon after Ingvar printed his way through all the negatives and began to narrate the journey and sequencing. Taxonomic in format and presentation, a frank quality in the subject’s relationship to the camera is prevalent in the portraits.
“I don’t seem to rest with any body of work until it has found itself into a book. An exhibition has never concluded it – I have always kept honing projects even if they have been shown, until they take the form of a book. It is the ultimate destination, where I feel that I have had an internal discussion long enough between myself and the work – through layout and sequencing, etc. – that when it is printed, there is no more for me to say. And I can finally move forward, onto something else.” – Ingvar Kenne
Ingvar Kenne was born in Sweden in 1965 and is now based in Sydney. He studied photography at the University of Gothenburg and had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Boras, Sweden in 1992. In 1992 Kenne published his first monograph – On the Side (Tidens Förlag, Sweden). An exhibition also toured over a two year period. He then embarked on several journeys around the globe. The culmination was an around the world trip by motorcycle, resulting in his second monograph – Chasing Summer (Bird Press 2004). Kenne’s work has been included in exhibitions globally, and he has exhibited consistently in Australia since 2001. The National Portrait Gallery acquired his portraits of Lee Lin Chin, Meryl Tankard, Collette Dinnigan, Michael Chaney and Baz Luhrmann in 2006. Kenne’s photographic portrait of his sons Cormac and Callum won the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2009.
www.store.ingvarkenne.com
Katerina Belkina Weighing Up 2010.
PETER HAPPEL CHRISTIAN USA
Half Wild “So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.” John Muir (1901, c. 1909) “During the summer of 2011, I removed three large shrubs from my front yard during a landscaping project. In the process of pulling the root balls from the ground, a rusted animal trap popped out of the dirt. With Muir’s words in my mind, I began to recognize the latent wild character of my residential landscape. Could this familiar landscape, now a terra incognita, captivate me in the way one might view a pristine valley from a mountaintop? From there, I went into the wilds of my Midwestern surroundings, the parks and gardens of towns as Muir put it, in search of the sublime as both an object of nature and as an artifact of human action.” – Peter Happel Christian
Borrowing its title and inspiration from Our National Parks, written in 1909 by John Muir, Half Wild is Peter’s first monograph. Featuring photographs made between 2010 and 2014 in California, Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, the book is a meditation on photography, Peter’s surroundings, and the image legacy of the American West. Playful in format, sequence and colour, the book functions as a sort of trail guide, presenting dichotomies between the suburban Midwest and Yosemite National Park, still life and landscape photography, image and text, meanwhile, disrupting any meaningful distinctions.
Peter Happel Christian is an artist based in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He grew up in Eastern Iowa about an hour west of the Mississippi River and spent five years living in the American West which had a deep impact on his perceptions of history, nature, location, experience and representation. His expanded studio practice explores the experience of nature, time, and perception at the intersection and overlap of photography, sculpture and performance. Peter earned an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2003 and a BFA from the University of Iowa in 1999.
www.peterhappelchristian.com
Walden Pond: A Reduced Plan. 1846. Thereau, Henry David. From Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1854. Ticknor and Fields. Boston Image: Courtesy of the Walden Woods Project
LEE GRANT Australia
The Five Happinesses “One happiness scatters a thousand sorrows” “According to traditional Chinese thought, the most important goals in life are the five happinesses – good luck, prosperity, longevity, happiness and wealth. These lie at the heart of all aspects of Chinese life and culture…” – Lee Grant In late 2013, Lee Grant was commissioned to spend three winter weeks in Beijing, as part of a collaboration between Canberra based production company Wildbear, and Beijing TV. On her visit, she was assigned to make photographs of the city, whilst Beijing TV filmed her experience; the co-production was a television documentary based on the sister city relationship between Beijing and Canberra. Photographing its citizens and the landscape, Lee met people from
all walks of life – working class steel workers, upper class artists, a twelve year old Chinese movie star – and gained access to locations such as people’s homes and Tiananmen Square, in turn, discovering not only the city, but the country for the first time. The Five Happinesses is the culmination of photographs Lee made during her time in Beijing, and is her second monograph after Belco Pride (2012). The fabrics that were used for the covers of the books, each a unique pattern, were hand-picked and brought back by Lee from Beijing.
Lee Grant is an Australian photographer who lives and works in Australia and Asia. She is best known for her exploration of migrant identity against the backdrop of Australian suburbia. Her often formal, colour-portraiture examines identity integration and inhabited landscapes. In doing so, Lee frequently divulges the changing cultural face of Australia. She uses photography as a means of transcending language barriers, revealing aspects of identity, displacement and belonging otherwise in danger of going unnoticed. As a Korean-Australian Lee’s work is in part autobiographical – a means of navigating and interpreting her own identity and heritage, as well as an instrument to inform and inspire broader audiences.
www.leegrant.net
DANIEL SHEA USA
Blisner, IL Based on a fictional mining town in Southern Illinois, Blisner, IL draws on the past and present in order to trace the industrial history and post-industrial fallout of the once prosperous Southern Illinois town. A pseudo-sequel to Blisner, Ill, the book serves as a historical document “from which to draw information at the present day site”, while toying with the mechanics of documentary modes of representation through the photobook form. More modest and minimal in its presentation and design – compared to its precursor, which was more playful in the art book format – Blisner, IL interacts with architecture and surface as the outward subject, while embracing many of the conventions of the photobook genre. Clever juxtaposition and narrative sequencing allow the work to be read in a myriad of ways, encouraging interpretation and contemplation upon post-industrial Illinois and its attempts to memorialize or maintain the veneer of a formerly prosperous moment.
“Photographers often talk about making the distinction between wall work and book work, and I generally make that distinction as well when I’m beginning a project. However, I never intended for either book to be really read as a traditional photobook either. Ideally, each is considered as its own work, the book is the finished piece, the medium is the message. I chose to work in book form for some conventional reasons. I like the constraints of sequencing, rhythm, and tactility it provides, but more importantly, it was important that the book was literally read, and spoke to how history is (and increasingly, was) recorded in this format. The Blisner books play with all of those things.” – Daniel Shea
Daniel Shea (b.1985) is an artist based in New York City. Following a BFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2007), he gained an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, in 2013. He has been a resident artist at Light Work (Syracuse) and Columbia College Chicago’s Digital Artist-In-Residence program, where he published his first book. His second book, Blisner, IL, was published in London in 2014. His work will be featured in an upcoming survey of contemporary photography published by Aperture, New York. He has exhibited internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Vava Gallery (Milan) and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. He is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery.
www.danielpshea.com
JACKSON EATON Australia
Better Half Two love stories told in unison, Better Half is a project that presents Jackson’s earlier series of photographs – Were Never Married – of himself and his then-girlfriend in South Korea, alongside more recent photographs of his father and his now-wife in Perth, Australia. Published as a hardcover book, the first half features photographs of Jackson’s father and his wife, who he met in Seoul in 2010 and married in Australia soon after. We see the couple lounging on the side of a pool, embracing in front of a television set, Jackson’s father standing on a roof in South Korea, until we reach the middle, where the last image is mirrored and the story reversed, but with another man – Jackson – now the male protagonist of the series. We retrace our steps through the photographs we’ve just seen, but of Jackson’s former relationship, documented between 2007 and
2009. Reaching the end of the book, we deliberate the re-enacted stills from Jackson’s past. Part autobiographical, part performative, Better Half reads as a visual confrontation to a familiar intimate experience. A simultaneously innocent and incorrect déjà vu, the mirrored love stories work well together in the format of the photobook.
Jackson Lawlor Eaton is a *single, *white, *heterosexual, *mid 30s, *middle-class, *cis-male, *artist currently living in Melbourne, Australia. He trained in Psychology but abandoned his graduate studies to pursue a career in art. Eaton’s work questions ideas of privacy, intimacy, amateurism, selfhood, networked technology, photography and masculinity. His recent project Better Half was featured in Primavera 2013 at the MCA, collected by the Art Gallery of WA, and published by Pearce Press. He won the Iris Award for portrait photography in 2013, and is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Art degree at Monash University. Eaton is a founding member of the art initiative some.center.
www.jacksoneaton.com
IRINA ROZOVSKY USA
One to Nothing “It seems as if the past here is much greater than the present.” – Irina Rozovsky One to Nothing depicts an Israel we do not see on the news. These images go beyond politics: they do not defend a side or critique the conflict. Here, Israel is seen in the unexpected light of empathetic neutrality, as a mythological backdrop to the age long struggle between man and the dusty, sun bleached landscape of his origin. The score to this existential battle is locked at 1– 0, with no finish line in sight.
of politics. She made photographic sense of her surrounds through renderings of daily moments in Israel. A loose, subtle, and openended narrative, One to Nothing describes a historic tension with unusual observations. The book, published in 2011, serves as a poetic travelogue, and is Irina’s first publication.
Traveling through the country in 2008, Irina considered Israel’s history and its present, the power of religion, and the inevitability
Irina Rozovsky (born in Moscow, raised in the US), makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. Her work has been published, exhibited, and awarded internationally. She is an assistant professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and currently lives in Boston.
www.irinar.com
THE BOOKS
Chasing Summer:Â Journal from a Global Motorcycle Journey by Ingvar Kenne 2004 Published by Bird Press Hardcover / 102 pages / 22.5 x 26cm Essay by Paul Theroux
Half Wild by Peter Happel Christian 2014 Published by Conveyor Editions Hardcover / 112 pages / 5.75 x 8.25 inches Essay by Liz Sales Design by Elana Schlenker
The Five Happinesses by Lee Grant 2015 Published by Jungle Books Hardcover / 88 pages / 19.5 x 15.5cm Distributed by Books at Manic
Blisner, IL by Daniel Shea 2014 Published by fourteen-nineteen Hardcover / 196 pages / 18 x 25cm Essay by Walter Benn Michaels
Better Half by Jackson Eaton 2014 Published by Pearce Press Hardcover / 74 pages / 25 x 19cm Essay by Robert Cook
One to Nothing by Irina Rozovsky 2011 Published by Kehrer Verlag Hardcover / 64 pages / 8.5 x 8.5 inches Texts by Jon Feinstein, Ilya Kaminsky
C CP
Queensland Centre for Photography
Emerging Curators Program
PO Box 5848, West End Q 4101, Australia admin@qcp.org.au
PICTURE BOOKS Curator: Lynette Letic July 2015
www.qcp.org.au www.lucidamagazine.com www.qcpinternational.com
Cover image: Ingvar Kenne Tom & Brandy (detail) 2010
Director: Camilla Birkeland Executive Officer: Belinda Kochanowska
Š copyright 2015: QCP and the artists
The QCP Emerging Curators Program showcases the work of international and Australian photo-media artists in an online exhibition catalogue. The program aims to foster connections between the national and international art communities and the QCP, presenting work produced by innovative photo media artists to curators, academics, students, the viewing public and Australian artists.
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