The Cows by Larry E. McPherson

Most of the books that I have written about contain within their photographs an implied metaphor or meaning that provokes the viewer into different frames of mind. One of the pleasures in looking at work for me is to tease out these meanings that derive partly from the work and partly what my own history enables me to see in the work. There are other photographs that excite but with an innocence steeped in the purest pleasures of looking and examination of a subject clearly and interestingly described by an artist and camera. Larry E. McPherson’s The Cows published by Steidl is such a book that I enjoy for just these reasons.

In 1972, while early into a road trip, McPherson drove past a small herd of Guernsey cows near the Illinois and Wisconsin border and like many photographers who are led by instinct, he turned his car around and returned to make some photographs. This nudge from his instincts led to him befriending the farm owners and return trips over the following five years to walk and work among the pastures littered with cows.

As McPherson mentions in his introduction titled City Boys; “…photography has the same power to catch what is at once strange and familiar.” For him, these photographs represent a celebration of “the pastoral experience of his youth” but do so aided by photography’s descriptive twisting of literal description. For that, McPherson is what is commonly referred to as a “photographer’s photographer.” In the best of these images we can see McPherson’s choice of where to stand and what to include in his frames informed by a person who has an understanding yet curiosity about constructing new and complex photographs of the “familiar.”

In the cover image, the world cooperated with McPherson to such a degree (from the cow’s posture to the position and slices of sunlight) it would have been very easy to make an image that failed to be more interesting than the subject itself. Instead, McPherson infuses simple gifts within his description that reveal themselves to those paying attention. A metal chain around the cow’s neck sets a highlighted outline of the curve its shoulder. His vantage point sets light against shadow and triangulates the frame with a tree to the right and a truck to the left. In another image with a comic undertone, three cows stare at another whose head seems to protrude from the wrong end of his body. (This image for me is the pastoral equivalent of one of Winogrand’s street corner observations).

In several of these photographs, it is the sleekness of line and the warmth of the light that draws the most attention from the viewer. McPherson, concentrating on the physicality of bodies, turns some of his subjects into heat-swollen bags spotted with flies where the pull of gravity defies movement. My experience with cows has always been one where they keep their distance but McPherson moves amongst his subjects as if he was one of the herd.

Shot on Kodachrome positive film the images translate into deep shadow areas and clear brilliantly rendered midtones and highlights. The book’s printing is exceptional in capturing the color characteristics and richness of that film while still holding the necessary detail.

This is a book that is physically large but short in length. With a large trim size of 12 by 15 inches, the photographs are reproduced at approximately 8.5 by 13 inches giving them a large presence on each page. With only 21 images in the sequence, our visit among these docile creatures is brief but by no means is the book skimpy.

McPherson begins his book with a quote by Albert Camus from L‘envers et ll‘endroit; “…a work of man is nothing else than this long journey to find again through the labyrinth of art the two or three simple and great images upon which, once, the heart first opened.” This was McPherson’s calling to the pasture and what he presents before us in this book. Anything more would have been superfluous and simply missed the point.

Buy online at Steidlville

Broken Line by Olaf Otto Becker

Early forays into photography explored uncharted lands and gave image to the exotic. This altered the way we thought about the world and made it comprehendible and less abstract. Maps provided an early start but were often as mysterious and misleading as they were informative.

Now satellite photos map detail that even in this day and age seems almost frightening. On Google Maps I can locate the rooftops of the youth hostels where I stayed in Paraganj, New Delhi and I can see the exact spot where train tracks cross the main road on the way from Backi Jarak into Novi Sad in Serbia. (Though I wasn’t able to see roof of the home where I stayed because of cloud cover).

Our understanding of what the world looks like is subject to new imagery to refresh our mental picture. That “picture” is locked into our memory until a new image comes along and throws you a curve ball. Less and less of the world remains outside of our ability to mentally picture and catalog. Funny enough, like pixels that interpolate to their closest neighbor, areas of the world where I do not have a mental image handy become reduced to vast fields of monotone color. These mental images often do not even get us into the ballpark to visualizing the landscape. Being able to view the abstract images of satellite photos is not enough either, photographers need to descend to ground level and seize it with and film or pixel.

This is where adventure and photography intertwine when exploring rarely traveled territories. When Frank Hurley was hired onto the Shackleton expedition’s attempt to cross Antarctica, his still and movie cameras documented not only the 22 month fight for survival but the unexplored territory that threatened their lives. It is a similar primeval landscape that the contemporary photographer Olaf Otto Becker has chosen to record over the past eight years. Traveling alone up and down the coast of Greenland in a Zodiac inflatable boat and equipped with a GPS location device, he photographs the intensely beautiful meeting points between land and ocean.

The new book Broken Line published by Hatje Cantz late last year brings together 73 of his large format photographs in an extremely elegant presentation.

We do not often see images from these environs because it is a dangerous undertaking to make them. This is an inhospitable landscape where there are few inhabitants and vast distances between them should one need help. In fact, much of this landscape seems untouched until you remember that this is one of the locations mentioned while arguing a point about global warming. Because of that contemporary debate, these photographs take on the additional baggage from the politics of the time in which they were made.

Still, it is the monumental and expansive views that Becker offers that prod us into thinking of periods of history when man did not tread on earth. There is an unsettling stillness to these photographs as if the world has just quieted after a major calamity. Early on in the book, the sequence takes through images of fog-enshrouded icebergs where the landscape seems newly altered with its razor sharp edges and tall icy spires. Chunks of ice shaken loose from cliff faces float on the ocean surface as if evidence of violence.

There are two types of images in this book; ones that feel dangerous and others that give a false sense of security. That security has to do with land and water. When Becker sets his tripod on the floor of his inflatable craft and looks out over the water, we understand that we still in danger, that the unsteady landscape is in control of our fate. While the view from his camera is planted on terra firma, we have the sense that we have some how gained the upper hand (mostly, I think because of the confidence we have with our legs as being more adept to carry us away from danger rather than our arms and upper body). As odd as that might sound, there are few of Frank Hurley’s photographs from the Endurance voyage that give that additional twinge of danger similar to what I feel here even though that story is one of the participants being in a constant life threatening situation.

Occasionally, Becker finds a remote outpost where the evidence of a populace can be seen but in no image does a human being appear. They have recently abandoned their homes and even left the dead sled dog hanging by a rope from a high porch as if their rescue ship finally arrived and left in haste. Their belongings are strewn around the yard without regard for unsightliness like so many cars rusting on cinder blocks in poor rural areas of the United States.

Becker’s 8X10 camera records it all with lavish detail and a muted palette punctuated by unreal pastel pinks, greens and blues. His wide angle lens, aimed at the horizon, takes in expansive space that recedes off until icebergs or other earthly obstructions pleasantly obscure our view.

The book is beautifully constructed from its tipped-in cover photograph to the outline of the coast of Greenland debossed into the baby blue book cloth (it has already won a German Photobook Award for 2008). The trim size is large enough to keep a monumental scale to the photos and the layout honors them with a clean and unobstructing design. There are two gatefold images that unfold into three panel triptychs. The printing of Broken Line is quite an accomplishment as the color balance depends on a finely tuned palette where it would have been very easy to have bad color shifts. The fine nuances of pastel turquoise and pale blue colors of the actual light in these locations make some of images seem at first to be subjected to those printing casts until we see that it is the light at work, not a slip of the printer’s hand.

Gerry Badger penned a fine essay that places the work in the context of other land explorations and image making and as might be expected, describes yet another great historical photobook called The Arctic Regions by William Bradford. As he describes it, this beauty contained 141 albumen prints taken with a 46 by 30 centimeter view camera and contained a two part panoramic of a glacier that spreads the book open to 62.5 centimeters wide.

Christoph Schaden contributes a second essay at the end of Broken Line called Ways and Lines in which he relates some of Becker‘s adventure and survival technique. He creates an interesting argument combining survival strategy with those of artistic process. To be in danger may heighten ones awareness of their surrounding, thus changing the way you respond while working.

Since each photo is captioned by the date and coordinates from the GPS unit, these photos teeter between art and science. Becker navigated through the twists and turns of the coastline at a walking pace; apparently the only safe way to be among these glacier cliffs and formations. He photographed what he encountered with the subjective eye of an artist and unlike Hurley who half way through his ordeal with Shackleton had to smash two-thirds of his negatives and abandon his large cameras; Becker brought these images back for us to see what few will ever see first hand. The GPS coordinates sit underneath the photos almost daring us to follow in Becker’s wake and float to these exact locations to see what we can recognize from his previous report and make further notes of the change.

Buy online at Hatje Cantz

Book Available Here (Broken Line)

Frank Paulin: Out of the Limelight

Photography for me is a medium that seems to propel along like a car that is perpetually running out of gas. In fits and starts, surges of energy and inertia, I will have a year where I am one and Zen-like with the world and then the next year I am out of sync like someone who has spent all of their karmic savings in one moment. This is a year when I am out of sync.

This is not a phenomena that is entirely my own. If you look through any artist’s work you will see good and bad years of production. For photographers who venture out into the street in which to mediate their experiences, a bad year may mean always being one step away from where you think you need to be standing before your prey decides they need a Starbucks and betrays your intuitive moment. These difficulties in navigating the world compounded by its non-cooperation with your needs as an artist is the simplest explanation as to why there are not many photographers still working in that manner. Revelation requires spending lots of shoe leather and depending on how big the revelation, possibly even knee surgery.

I raise this thought because there was something going on in New York in 1955 and 56 that seems uncanny. Perhaps the stars were aligned, or maybe more appropriately, if you added up all of the ages of the dead photo-gods the total was 1955.56; whatever it was, New York cooperated with its street photographers in those years.

Frank Paulin was out there wading into the flow of sidewalk traffic (maybe even passing William Klein slugging his way through Times Square) and a new book by the Silverstein Gallery called Frank Paulin: Out of the Limelight sheds light on this relatively little known photographer’s work.

Paulin grew up in New York and Chicago and studied photography with the likes of Laszlo Maholy-Nagy and Harry Callahan in the mid-1940’s and later attended the classes of the legendary Alexey Brodovich at the New School. Like many of the photographers at the time, there was no commercial means to an end beyond pursuing his passion and keeping the spoils mostly hidden away in boxes. One of the few outlets to show this genre of photography was Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery in Greenwich Village which survived due to its coffee customers rather than print collectors. In 1957, Paulin had his first solo exhibition at the Limelight and even drew some admiring reviews from The New York Times and The Village Voice.

Getting back to the mysterious goings on in 1955-56 in New York City, of the 89 photographs in this book, more than half are made within those two years, and for me, they are the gems that make this book a welcome addition to my shelf.

The sequence carries us through resonant moments in the streets as day shifts into the neon lit Times Square night. It is then that the staple subjects of street photographers come out of the wood work. A blind accordion player, burdened by the weight of his instrument, plays for pennies while sailors on shore leave hope for female accompaniment only to find themselves unsure of where to look and feeling the rapid slip of time. Amongst the movie goers and couples figuring out how to navigate relationships, Paulin’s camera grabs at this world set against the movie marquees and the brightly lit theater entrances that once made Times Square seem to glow from the inside out.

The power of some of Paulin’s observations place him well with in the ranks of the more recognizable names who were also drawn to the same streets and corners where brief one-act plays change with the traffic lights. Those who have reveled in Louis Faurer’s Times Square images from a decade earlier will be left to wonder where Frank Paulin has been hiding all of these years.

Perhaps it is the slight tug of 1950’s New York nostalgia (for which I have no first hand experience) but when the sequence shifts us down south to Louisiana or briefly into Cuba, it is within just a few photos that I am homesick and longing for his return to the city again. These brief forays into different territory leave me surprisingly impatient. It isn’t that I think the photography is bad, it is just that the world does not cooperate with Paulin in the same manner as it does when he can work his subjects unnoticed. Although there are a handful of great images bracketing those white-hot years, the edit itself represents one of the great missed opportunities that keeps this book simply good as opposed to great. This could have been a stunning book of 50 photographs whose cohesiveness would have been hard to top.

The book as an object I feel is sadly the other missed opportunity. It was designed by the prominent graphic designer Massimo Vignelli but for the most part, I find it treads over the work instead of celebrating it. The major problem in my opinion is with the choice of format for the book. The elongated horizontal trim size is oriented to favor the majority of horizontal images but this always creates a difficult design problem when dealing with vertical images, of which, Paulin has plenty in the edit. So while the horizontals get the lion’s share of page real estate, the verticals seem far too small for the weight of their imagery and additionally, they get shifted to either meet the gutter or the page ends. The result is disconcerting expanses of white that seem to push the verticals even further into the gutter.

Max Kozloff lends a fine introduction and discussion of Paulin’s work and of the time period in the New York photography scene of the 1950’s.

The title, Out of the Limelight is apropos as it has dual meaning, referring both to Helen Gee’s refuge for young photographers, and by describing the common working life of most of artists then and now. There is little limelight for most. It is the passion and self discipline that sustains one during a process that amplifies your failures. Paulin was out there working and that fact has been well hidden for the past few decades. Thankfully now this book exists to wedge his place within the collective lore of what was happening in the streets of New York and Chicago in the 1950‘s.

www.silversteinphotography.com

Book Available Here (Out of the Limelight)

ICP Booksale Acquisitions

The New Year’s resolution I made to myself was to reign in my obsession and be much more selective as to what books I bring into the house. Well…that lasted less than a month and I place the blame entirely on the shoulders of the ICP library sale this past weekend. Even though a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, wound up buying four full boxes worth at a grand total of $1,200 - I escaped with 16 good/great finds that set me back a mere $350. As I mentioned in my announcement of the sale, the books were mostly priced to sell so the temptation was too strong for the desperately weak willed to put up much of a fight. Here is what comprises my foot tall stack of spoils.

The most exciting find was a copy of August Sander Men Without Masks: Faces of Germany 1910-1938 published by the New York Graphic Society in 1973. I have several other Sander titles but none in my collection have the lush tonality of this edition’s gravure printing. This is a thick book of 275 images divided into chapters of “types” of Germans as was Sander’s modus operandi. This is the American edition of a book published in Frankfurt in 1971 by Verlag C.J. Bucher. The design is much more playful than most of the Sander titles that I have seen. It reminds me a bit of the layout in The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson with some images appearing on full black pages.

I found a copy of Lars Tunbjork’s first book Landet Utom Sig: Country Beside Itself published in 1993 by Journal. This is Lars’ first take on looking at consumer culture and leisure activity in his native Sweden. Brightly lit, saturated colors form the blindfold convenient to living firmly within the grasp of unseen yet powerful marketing forces. Smile and enjoy a soft drink.

Dare I say that Andre Kertesz has always seemed dull and more or less ignorable for me and risking sacrilege, I do not own a single book of his work. From what I have seen, most of his later books that I could afford seem cheaply produced, poorly edited or fall into that tired category of The Monograph which for Kertesz means too many images. He is an artist whose work I think dilutes itself from poor editing, especially with the later work. I finally relented and picked up Andre Kertesz: Sixty Years of Photography 1912-1972 published by Grossman in 1972. I still think it is too thick with photographs but the gravure printing makes all of the difference for me in enjoying these photographs. The book starts off with a bit of a jumbled design mess but once the images start flowing, I can now see what all of you have been talking about.

The next very interesting find, a world away from Kertesz, was a copy of Sol Lewitt’s PhotoGrids published by Paul David Press/Rizzoli in 1977. This is 46 pages of nine-photo grids of architectural details from fencing, doors, windows, hopscotch grids, street grating, man-hole covers, floor titles, and other found material. Part archive, part minimalist and conceptual, this is the only book in my stack that stands out as an “artist book” in the truest sense of the term.

The next book was a curious find for me as I haven’t been bitten by the Japanese photobook bug like most other collectors but I did find Seiji Kurata’s 80’s Family: Street Photo Random Japan published by JICC in 1991. He is the same photographer who is now famously known for his book Flash Up which was featured in Parr/Badger Vol 2. This is 54 photographs shot on the street with his signature flash. Most are in black and white but there is an odd little selection of 24 color pages in the middle of the book that for me, spoils the mood. Maybe this is just because I want to see more of the black and white by owning Flash Up and cannot afford a copy. If anyone wants to send me one out of the goodness of their heart or to score karma points with the higher powers I’d even be willing to take a copy that is lacking the acetate jacket and the bellyband. I will now thank you in advance and be waiting for the UPS guy in-between bouts of smoking crack.

The next book is a fascinating example of what can be found and ignore at sales like this, Carleton Beals and Walker Evans The Crime of Cuba published by J.B. Lippincott in 1933. This gem was marked for one dollar and the surprising thing is that it was within the boxes of unsold items from last year’s sale. For photographers, this book is interesting because it may mark the first example of a photographer insisting on design, editing, sequencing and placement of their portfolio of photographs within a book of mostly text. Evans insisted on this editorial control and the result is 31 ‘aquatone’ photos appearing as a group in the back of the book instead of interspersed within the body of the text.

I have wanted to own a copy of Paul Strand’s Ghana: An African Portrait for a while but it is one of those titles that fell into my low priority bottomless well. Ten dollars was all that it took to finally raise the priority to ownership. This is the 1976 hardcover edition published by Aperture that was nicely printed by Sid Rapoport. Not quite as good as Strand’s work from France but several wonderful portraits and still-lifes will keep this from one getting too dusty.

Buying the next book cost me dearly with the respect of a friend; a hardcover copy Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 in excellent condition. Inspired by an assignment to shoot on the set of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and published in 1979 by Simon and Schuster, this book represents Mark’s best work before her decision to gloss over her documentary work with commercial appeal. I may risk comparing apples to oranges but for all of the discussion of this book’s frank portrayal of confinement and mental illness it pales in comparison to Forman’s film or Wiseman’s Titicut Follies.

A signed copy of Jane Evelyn Atwood’s Nachtlicher Alltag (Daily Nightlife) published by Materialien Zur Fotografie in 1980 ripped three dollars out of my pocket. This small paperback contains a series of photos of prostitutes and dominatrix in Paris as they service or wait for clients. Most are fairly straight forward portraits where the subject acknowledges the camera but the best images are caught on the fly and contain small fleeting gestures and body language within the heavy shadowed and stark lighting of the hallways these sex workers occupy. This book is not the best example of printing as much of the shadow areas fall into murky voids of no detail. This copy also came with a six page stapled translation of the book’s German text that looks to have been typed by Atwood herself.

I find it hard to resist books on Bill Brandt although rarely do the more modern editions satisfy. A first edition of Bill Brandt Portraits by the University of Texas Press in 1982 has found a new home (next to a set of folded and gathered sheets that served as an unbound review copy of NYGS’s Bill Brandt Nudes: 1945-1980). Even though a publisher’s note states that this book’s printing was supervised by Brandt himself, I think it is of spotty quality. This may be due to the consistent use of the cheap glossy paper common with these books.

In the cheap bins I found a small six inch square catalog of Maxime Penson whose name I can’t recall ever hearing before. The photographs are from the Soviet Union in the mid-twenties to the early forties and are fine examples of documentary work from Uzbekistan with the expected propagandistic tone. This is book number three in a small series from Carre Noir Editions in Paris featuring lesser known Russian photographers. The printing leaves a lot to be desired; the strength is entirely on the 41 images, which for such a discovery, was an absolute steal at one dollar.

I also found Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917-34 by Susan Compton published by The British Library in 1992. This is a book that you actually read. It has lots of - you know - words. It does have many illustrations but few are in color mostly they are sooty textbook quality black and white.

The other ‘read-em’ I found is the account of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s life written by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called Experiment in Totality. Published as a second edition in 1969 by MIT Press (1st Ed 1950, Harper & Brothers) this will be on deck after I finish the other MIT Press book I bought last year, El Lissitzky’s An Architecture for World Revolution.

Those are the major finds from which I will draw much happiness but I also did bring in a few small but mentionable items.

The first is issue Aperture 16:1 which was purchased solely for the 20 great pages of John Cohen’s early Peru photographs from the 1950’s. While John was studying the weaving techniques of the Q’eros indians, he made photographs during his travels and these are among his finest work. I heard there may be a forthcoming book of this work so let’s keep our collective fingers crossed that it actually happens.

Lastly, I found two issues of Camera magazine. One dedicated to the subject of Coney Island with portfolios from Robert Frank, Lisette Model and Leon Levinstein, and the other issue contains an extended Diane Arbus portfolio. I rarely buy magazines like this anymore as I never go back to look through them but what was wonderful about Camera, is the gravure printing which was done by CJ Bucher in Lucerne Switzerland; the same printer that did the August Sander Men Without Masks book. A friend of mine told me that CJ Bucher used Camera as a kind of calling card to drum up business for their printing company.

With that connection I have come full circle so I will now figure out how to jockey another twelve inches of space out of my bookcases to accommodate these new arrivals.

Anyone else find anything good at the sale?

Editions of Mayakovsky by Grafik Archive Publishing

In this day and age with advances in digital printing and print-on-demand technologies, it is possible to design and upload a book to a printing company’s server and have the book arrive on your doorstep a few days later. What amazes me is that the systems that create these books are so automated that they print, bind, and probably even box and ship without the book being touched by human hands.

It is easy to forget the days before computers when a book’s type was set by hand, letter by letter, and it took several days for a very small run to pass through the press. One book that I recently discovered whilst pursuing my love of Russian design is a modern title that was entirely printed using those older technologies involved in letterpress production. Book Design of the Russian Avant-Garde: Editions of Mayakovsky published by Grafik Archive Publishing in 1999 is so beautifully made that it makes me wish that it was still practical to turn off the computer and handcraft books for larger audiences.

According to the publisher Lance Barton, Editions of Mayakovsky is homage to both letterpress printing and to the extraordinary design that was challenging the limits of that technology to meet the aesthetic demands of the designers. This book reproduces 45 cover designs from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s books of poetry and plays from 1917 to 1930 including two posthumous volumes of published conversations called Mayakovsky Alive.

Mayakovsky himself designed several of his own covers to remarkable effect. Many of the other well known designs were contributed by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Anton Lavinsky who designed the poster for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin lent his talents to a few titles as well.

Much care was given to reproducing colors in Editions of Mayakovsky that would be faithful to the original material but since 80 years has passed since these books were published, a bit of artistic license has been taken in printing to determine what the color may have looked like fresh off the Soviet presses. Regardless, it is the way the ink lays on the paper - overlapping and at times slightly off register - that adds to the enjoyment.

The cover of this book is in simple black cloth with a wrap around band with Cyrillic lettering. The body of the book uses various paper stocks ranging from thin translucent to very thick cardstock. Interestingly, the publisher chose to bind using a fukuro-toji or pouch binding construction to the individual pages. This technique was developed in the fourteenth century because older Chinese and Japanese papers were so thin that printing on both sides was not possible. In order to avoid having blank pages within those older books, printers printed consecutive pages on only one side of a long sheet of paper and then upon folding the page in half and binding on the open end, the illusion is made that the paper was printed on both sides. The letterpress similarly would not have allowed printing on both sides of the paper due to the physical impressions made when the drum of the press passes the paper over the plate and amount of ink used unless a much thicker paper stock was chosen.

For the Voice, the groundbreaking book collaboration between Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky which I have written about before is treated to a special addition of a sheet of perforated stamps showing the designs for twelve of the poems.

Grafik Archive printed 700 copies of Book Design of the Russian Avant-Garde: Editions of Mayakovsky, of which 500 were bound with wire and 200 are case bound in cloth. I have also heard that the special case bound edition comes with a clipping from one of the actual metal plates used in the printing and that the whole ordeal, if found new from the publisher, is wrapped in a letterpress poster of Mayakovsky. I found one of the case bound edition but my copy did not come with these special additional material. Then again, this only set me back $75.00 in mint condition versus the usual $200.00.

I am no technophobe, I love what is possible to achieve in design and printing using ultra-sophisticated computers and printing hardware but there is something lacking when a droplet of sweat can no longer fall directly onto the paper and leave a little reminder of the hands hovering above it. Through the impression of the letterpress, we see the physical evidence of decisions and craft - mind and hand.

Book Available Here (Editions of Mayakovsky)

Vagabond by Gaylord Oscar Herron

When a photobook enthusiast thinks of Oklahoma, Larry Clark's Tulsa naturally springs to mind. His photographs of his amphetamine fuelled friends living fast and dying young are hard to ignore - especially for 1971 - but a lesser known book was published in Tulsa a few years later that follows thoughtfully in those footsteps of rebellious spirit. Vagabond by Gaylord Oscar Herron is an artist book in semi-autobiographical mode containing photographs, paintings, prose and drawings from another unsettled youth from the Midwest.

Framing the book around passages from Genesis 4: 1-16 and the story of Cain and Abel, Herron dedicates the book to Cain (and to Bill Rabon, another Tulsa artist). Herron seems torn between the roots of his family in Oklahoma and his desire, perhaps like Cain, to wander the earth. Much space is given to heartfelt love and respect for the older generations and traditions while balancing a need to see himself as separate, critical and different. This is a book that is partially about the growing divide between younger and older generations and how Herron's view of the stewardship of the world spurs his rebellion.

Mine is a generation of Cain...A restless generation of sleeping gypsies...Vagabonds of the spirit with an aged lion as a shield.
Mine is a generation lost in the land of Nod...Nuclear children who inherited Cain and who just now begin to wake from a dream.
Mine is a generation between the silent womanhood of Eve, and the woman who begins to understand she's been carrying Cain and his mark in her womb, delivering him painfully again and again, to a God-damning world created by men who thought they were doing the right thing.
Her anger reflects the enmity between her gift and what she's been given in return.
Mine is a generation between children seen and children loudly heard.
Their anger reflects as well the enmity between their gift and what they've been given in return.
Mine is a generation that disposed of God and replaced him with nuclear energy and the temptation to clone.
Mine is a generation of vagabonds, who just now begin to wake from the dream.
Mine is a generation poised on the threshold of losing the mark of Cain.

Interestingly, war figures into Herron's narrative but not the obvious conflict of Vietnam. Herron served as an MP in Korea in the early 1960's spending a lot of time on R&R in nearby Japan. As a boy, war shaped some of his early memories.

When I was three, I remember being called outside to see the soft Tulsa sky being sliced by an armada of growling prop planes.
East to West, ace-hole to elbow, like maddened locusts, they covered half the yard in menacing high-speed shadow; I watched bewildered.
"Where are they going?" I asked.
"To the war," said my mother...
"To Hirohito's house," said my father.

Herron weaves his personal history through disparate photographs of different formats and other media that challenge the traditional photobook. This book sits comfortably next to Clark's Tulsa and Teenage Lust and Danny Seymour's A Loud Song in that respect with their unabashedly playful designs mixing text and image. (At one point, the content of Vagabond is tenuously wed to Clark's Teenage Lust as Herron photographs in the same prison in McAlester, Oklahoma where Clark would later serve time the same year this book was published.) More than those other titles, Vagabond is not easily identifiable as a photobook with its covers depicting reproductions of Herron's paintings. The title and author credit appear only on the spine.

Published by Penumbra in 1975, Vagabond was printed by Sidney Rapoport in New York who was a well known printer who developed a process called Stonetone printing. His press was responsible for printing the 1969 edition of The Americans, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, the Diane Arbus monograph, Looking at Photographs and others.

For as much as I like the book Tulsa for its honest portrayal of a dangerous and marginal lifestyle, I equally like Herron's tone of a marginal character expressing acceptance of himself, his history and his place within a world where the familiar and strange sit in close relation.

Book Available Here (Vagabond)

802 Photobooks from the M+M Auer Collection

How many great photo books would you guess have been published so far? Between Parr/Badger, Roth 101 and Open Book there are about 500 books featured collectively, but how many more were overlooked, unknown, or met the editing axe due to subjectivity? One thousand?

A new book called 802 Photobooks from the M + M Auer Collection brings a few more obscure titles to light. Michele and Michel Auer have over 20,000 photo books in their personal library and this selection of 802 is meant to show the variety of choice available above and beyond the other books of photobooks.

When I heard of this book, my first thought was “802 books? Great…the more the merrier, time to give the ABE search engines a workout” but upon seeing a copy, I am starting to think that after 500, there is a big drop off from the look of things.

I have to say from the look of things because one of the biggest drawbacks to this book is that it provides no information about the content other than a thumbnail photograph of the cover or a spread, the physical size and publishing info. So this is a judge from the cover, do your own research approach that may have you spending money simply due to a book’s cover image.

802 Photobooks is very small at only four by six inches but the two inches worth of pages gives it a decent heft. The printing is adequate even though the images are not much bigger than 35mm contacts.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy looking through this as much as many of the other books on photo books but I really do not see much of a point without the educational benefit of descriptions of the content. This may be the closest you get to porn for photobook geeks.

http://www.auerphotobooks.com

Buy online at Schaden.com

Recuerdo exhibition by Ed Grazda

This is to inform you all that one of my partners in crime, the photographer Ed Grazda, is having an exhibition of his work at Sepia International that will run from January 18th until March 1st.

Called Recuerdo: A Memory of Latin America 1972 - 1979, the exhibition offers over 50 vintage prints of mostly never before seen photographs in this large one-man show. An opening reception is on January 17th from 6-8 pm. Sepia International is located in New York City at 148 West 24th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues) on the 11th Floor.

Born in New York City in 1947, Edward Grazda studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Starting in 1972, he began photographing in Latin America. Later he concentrated on Asia, traveling to Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Burma, Pakistan, and India. During the past twenty years his primary focus has been on the people of Afghanistan. Grazda teaches photography at the Harvard University Summer School and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in New York. He has worked on the archives of Walker Evans and Hans Namuth.

The subject of three monographs, Grazda's work has also been published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Doubletake, The Christian Science Monitor, and Avenda-E-Afghan, an independent Afghan newspaper. His photographs are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The New York Public Library; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and others. Among his awards are grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and 1986, and by the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1986. He has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 1994, 1996, 1999, 2001, and 2003.

Manhattan Noon exhibition by Gus Powell

All of my friends are successful!

Gus Powell is also enjoying a one-man show of his work at the Museum of the City of New York. Called Manhattan Noon: Photographs by Gus Powell, it is on view until March 16th.

The midday meanderings of New Yorkers on their lunch breaks, famously captured by Frank O'Hara in his 1964 collection Lunch Poems, are the subject of Manhattan Noon, the first large-scale New York presentation of the recent photographs of Gus Powell. The exhibition features some 30 color images, taken by Powell during his lunch hour, that capture the city's inhabitants in, as O'Hara wrote, "the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon."

In the mid 1950's Frank O'Hara wrote a book called Lunch Poems. Each day he would step out of his mid-town office, walk his way to the Olivetti typewriter showroom, and bang out a poem about “the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon.” For the past few years I have worked behind a desk not far from where O'Hara once sat. After I was given O'Hara's book my lunch breaks started to get longer. Sliding out of the revolving door I found myself transformed into a hungry sailor with one hour of liberty from his ship. Some days the sidewalk offered a dramatic or romantic one act play; a pedestrian might fall, a couple might kiss . . . but most of the time I was looking at people who walked towards and away from me. The quiet gestures of strangers in daylight became significant, and the photographs I made became my lunch pictures. -Gus Powell

Gus Powell was born in New York and currently lives in Brooklyn. Gus's photographs have been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston, MoMA NY, and other national and international galleries. His fine art and editorial work has appeared in The New Yorker, DoubleTake, Newsweek, and the book Bystander: A History of Street Photography. In 2003 Gus was included in Photo District News' "New Talent" issue and his first monograph, titled The Company of Strangers, was published by J&L Books.

Buy Company of Strangers online at J+L Books

The Forgotten Village by Alexander Hackensmid

There are many books that I own and enjoy immensely but have trouble finding something interesting to write about besides giving simple praise and a recommendation. Sometimes, with a little digging and research, I come up with an angle that sparks waves of inspiration to write and other times, I give up and save you some pocket money. Recently I was just about to give up on one such title when I uncovered a whole host of interesting little facts that connect the dots with some history and unexpectedly provides a view of photography within the larger canopy of another artistic medium.

This unexpected treasure is a small book called The Forgotten Village published by the Viking Press in May of 1941. Originally a film of the same name directed by Herbert Kline and written by John Steinbeck, The Forgotten Village book is 136 film stills accompanied by Steinbeck’s text narration.

The story is rather simple: in a small Mexican village named Santiago, children are getting ill from contaminated well water and a young man, named Juan Diego, ventures to Mexico City to seek help from doctors and scientists. Upon testing the well water, the doctors discover parasites are the cause of the illnesses and a struggle between the traditional healing beliefs of the village elders and modern science takes place. Siding with the scientists, Juan Diego is subsequently banished from the village where he then he makes his way back to the Mexico City to study medicine and help modernize traditional thinking. “The change will come, is coming, as surely as there are thousands of Juan Diegos in the villages of Mexico.” And the boy said, “I am Juan Diego.” Cue dramatic music. The End.

The film was apparently made in semi-documentary style using real villagers as characters that “act out” the filmmaker’s message about a real problem afflicting many rural villages. Although I have not seen the film, I imagine it being comparable to Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico shot in the early 1930’s with a similar semi-documentary approach.

What makes the book for The Forgotten Village so interesting for me is the quality of the photography. The book is comprised of “stills” from the film (I do not know if they are individual frames taken directly from the movie film stock or, as is common with set photographers, the photos are made in the approximate sightline of the movie camera) but there are many images that stand so strongly on their own they transcend being a part of the greater film.

That quality of the images made me look to who the director of photography was on the picture and it turns out to have been Alexander Hackensmid. Hackensmid, whose name has many different spellings, was one of the leading avant-garde photographers and filmmakers in Czechoslovakia in the 1930’s. He later changed his last name to Hammid and for five years he was married to the legendary filmmaker Maya Deren. He also won an academy award for Best Documentary Short in 1964 for a film called To Be Alive! which was made to be projected on three separate screens at the same time. His earliest film, Bezucelna Protozoa (Aimless Walk) can be seen on YouTube.

As if that wasn’t enough, I looked into the director of The Forgotten Village Herbert Kline’s background and that opened up a few other noteworthy associations. In the 1930’s, Kline was a part of the New York Film and Photo League which in 1936 divided to form the Photo League that we normally associate with the likes of Weegee, Aaron Siskind, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Dan Weiner among many others.

He was one of the first Americans to go to Spain during the Spanish Civil War where he made a couple of documentaries, one called Heart of Spain in 1936 and one a year later called Return to Life which he co-directed with none other than Henri Cartier-Bresson. Oh…and almost forgot, Heart of Spain was edited by Paul Strand.

And one last tidbit to bring things into the modern age for all of us youngsters, in 1940, Kline directed a documentary about World War II called Lights out in Europe and a young twenty-seven year old Douglas Slocombe worked as a second but unaccredited photographer. Slocombe would later be responsible for the cinematography on all three of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films from the 1980’s. (He is also known for not once using a light meter in the shooting those films.)

Winding my way back to the actual subject at hand, besides the photography, The Forgotten Village book is constructed in an interesting way with continuous pairings of photographs across the page spreads. Many of these pairings have their own wonderful dynamics in their design and narrative flow. That, and the fact that the book is printed in gravure on a thick paper stock that has a nice tooth to it, giving it a slightly speckled flavor.

It is interesting to me how I process the images in this book as well. Knowing that they are individual photos pulled from continuous flow of 24 frames per second, it is often difficult to see them as still photos - as incomprehensible as that may sound - yet it is that stillness that is the seduction. It does take a certain mindset to fully detach this book from its projected counterpart.

The Forgotten Village is available cheap from several sources. Personally I wouldn’t spend more than $15-20 dollars but it is very well worth taking a look. For those interested in folks like Pierre Verger, whom I have written about before, will probably not be disappointed.

There is one other book that I own called M, La Maudit which is currently in cold storage (so I cannot share it with you right now) in the 5B4 Whiskets Center for the Understanding of Compulsive Behavior Research Library Storage Facility in Medford, New Jersey. M, La Maudit is a collection of film stills from Fritz Lang’s masterwork M. I bought this book in Paris on the strength of the individual “stills” as distinctive photographs separable from the film. Of course, that strength laid in the hands (or eye) of Fritz Arno Wagner who was responsible for the photography on not only M but Testament of Dr. Mabuse and G.W. Pabst’s Three Penny Opera and Kameradshaft and…

goddamn the internet…

Book Available Here (The Forgotten Village)

William Kentridge Prints and Cyclopedia of Drawing

Since there is a William Kentridge show opening at the Marion Goodman Gallery in New York City next Wednesday I thought I’d share two books that have been recent additions to my collection.

Kentridge, as most of you know, is one of the most world renowned artists working in South Africa today. I first saw his animated film Stereoscope when it was featured in MoMA’s Projects series and within just a few seconds of that 8.5 minute short, I was hooked. Unlike traditional animation that utilizes thousands of individual cells drawn and photographed one at a time to create the illusion of movement, Kentridge uses the same piece of paper and erases and redraws the slight variations in between the camera frames. The result leaves the smudges and faint history of the entire scene recorded while the image continues with the narrative. History and its inconvenient way of lingering and tainting is one of the many layers at play in Kentridge’s work.

He has created drawings, films, sculpture, prints using many techniques, puppet theater pieces and even produced a staging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute which had its American debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year. A major show of his tapestries is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 6th.

There have been several handsome books and catalogs published but one of note from 2006 is William Kentridge Prints from David Krut Publishing. This is the first book dedicated entirely to Kentridge’s thirty year history with printmaking.

The book is illustrated with over 180 reproductions starting with his earliest linocuts from 1976 when he was just out of high school to his 2005 Receiver series which are photogravure printed on handmade paper. Each series or edition featured is accompanied by a short text written by Kentridge that gives insight into his process and ideas. Looking through this book, it is the variety of ways that Kentridge has used the printed form that is a surprise.

It seems much care was taken in producing a quality and tone that is faithful to the original works as the reproductions are very good. Susan Stewart contributes a fine essay at the beginning of the book called Resistance and Ground: The Prints of William Kentridge. The book is available in both hard and soft cover.

The second book I have recently acquired is more in the form of an artist book. Published in 2004 by Art3 and the Ecole d’Art d’Annecy in France, Cyclopedia of Drawing is a series of drawings by Kentridge that acts as a flipbook.

Using pages from an American Technical Society reference book published in 1924, Kentridge creates each cell of his animation over mechanical and architectural engravings used to illustrate the fabrication of sheet metal and tinsmith projects. Kentridge has often used existing printed material from encyclopedias, maps and charts, indexes to create foundations that reflect knowledge, history or metaphysics.

In Cyclopedia of Drawings, Kentridge’s alter ego Felix jumps into the air and quickly morphs into a bird taking flight. After his brief stint as Icarus, he somersaults back to the ground and ends in a relaxing, almost comic pose. On each page, the diagrams and formulations from the technical book seem to be ‘proving’ the possibility of this remarkable feat while at the same time the page headers of SHEET METAL WORK and TINSMITHING humorously mock with their connotations of home-made construction and physical weight.

This book was published in an edition of 1000 copies, 100 of which were signed and numbered. I know of at least one other flipbook that was published in 1999 which I have heard animates a nude Felix as he scoops water up in his hat. The animation is supposedly drawn over pages from a Catalan grammar course book. Both of these have become very rare and very difficult to find. Originally priced at 28 euros, Cyclopedia of Drawing is now usually a couple hundred dollars. It is soft cover and approximately 6 by 8 ¼ inches with a strip of black binder’s tape on the edge. The reproductions are well done on a creamy yellow heavy paper stock common to technical manuals which is edged in red.

David Krut Publishing

Book Available Here (William Kentridge Prints)

The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards

One area of photography collecting that I have thankfully avoided is the world of photo postcards. Even with their hand tinted colors or exotic locals, it is always the endless possibility to find more at every turn through a dusty flea market that seems to me to be a bottomless pit of spending (much unlike photo books right?).

A few times I have been swayed. Once I found in a large box, several postcards on the subject of mining towns that had little cloth bags of ore attached to the card’s corner by a small length of string. At a quarter a piece, those were too good to pass up but admittedly, it was the tiny bag of ore and its contents that held my interest much more than the photo on the card.

Many books published in past years have featured collections of photographic postcards like Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards books or the older Prairie Fires and Paper Moons by Hal Morgan and Andreas Brown which looked at America through postcards made at the turn of the twentieth century. One recent addition to this genre is Steidl’s The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards.

The Stamp of Fantasy concentrates on examples of visual manipulations and inventive techniques that manufacturers and amateur photographers employed to create the ‘fantastic’ and surreal imagery that illustrated postcards throughout Europe in the early part of the century. Double exposure, montage, distorting optics, constructed studio sets and manipulation with pen, ink and paint all contributed surprise to this new mass-distributed medium.

Mostly meant for pure ocular pleasure, many of the examples reveal themselves (or the maker) to be somewhat disturbing in nature. In one 1905 example from an unknown amateur photographer in Germany, a man stands with his hands outstretched holding in his palms two plates, on each plate are copies of his disembodied head; all of which grin for the camera. The pages following have equally, if not more disturbing cards. One featuring a man whom, with bloodied knife in hand, holds up a decapitated head of another.

(Sorry for the interruption but all of this decapitation reminds me of two things that I need to mention; first, of hearing about a doctor named Beaurieux performing an experiment by shouting the name of a guillotined victim a few seconds after the head came to rest in the basket. He reported, “I then saw the eyelids slowly lift up…and the pupils focused themselves.” And secondly, anyone who hasn’t seen one of my favorite films of all time, Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep, will enjoy the results of the aforementioned experiment all the more when they see this film. I haven’t ruined anything for you by the way. Back to the book.)

Surprisingly out of the 345 illustrations I am drawn the most to a small series of postcards from 1903 from the Delarcade Editeur in Paris that straight forwardly depict items against a nondescript white backdrop. A pare, a broken woven basket, a man’s shaving razor and one that amounts to the most beautiful description of a man’s jacket I have ever seen. These were published under the series ‘Symboles’ and it is unclear to me as to what the deeper intent was in producing and labeling these cards under the heading of fantasy.

Other examples by Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Paul Citroen and Marcel Duchamp show how these new forms of communication were adopted by the avant-garde artists of the time. Brassai, speaking about the appeal of fantasy postcards on the Surrealists said, “The poetry of postcards attracted them as much as the surprising arcades of Paris.” Like most people who collect passionately, some were so bitten by the postcard collecting bug that odd values were attributed to them. The poet Paul Eluard once confessed to promising Georges Sadoul a painting by Salvador Dali in exchange for 200 of his finest postcards.

Clement Cheroux ends The Stamp of Fantasy with a wonderful essay that traces the rise in popularity of photographic postcards and how that, along with roll films, assisted in altering the trajectory of the medium away from the professional studio photographers and into the hands of amateurs.

The book was published to accompany a traveling exhibition that opened at the Fotomuseum Winterthur last October. It breaks the subject down into three major categories: Publisher’s Postcards, Studio Postcards and Amateur Postcards. The book’s design is a little cold for my tastes but the production values and quality of the content make up for that.

One other book that takes on fantasy postcards as a subject but in a limited scale is Robert Lebeck’s Angeberpostkarten published in 1979 by Harenberg Kommunikation. This small paperback presents 80 of the finer examples from the collection of Robert Lebeck. Lebeck may be a familiar name for many as he was once a photojournalist who worked for Stern magazine for over thirty years. He also co-wrote the book Kiosk: A History of Photojournalism (Steidl) which I wrote about in a very early posting here at 5B4 and will be the subject of a three volume set called Tokyo/ Moscow/ Leopoldville this year from Steidl.

I bought Angeberpostkarten over 15 years ago and it is an enjoyable collection of what may be the more typical examples on the subject of fantasy postcards. Many plates are given to the ubiquitous images of super-sized farm animals grazing among Lilliputian humans and fisherman fighting to reel in trout that are as big as Jonah’s whale. The better examples are of cityscapes where the attitude of excitement towards new technologies pollutes the skyline with flying machines and buildings. They provide the visual surprise of impossible utopias that promise daily adventure even if it is a quick trip out for a loaf of bread.

This book was a part of the Die Bibliophilen Taschenbucher series and is number 115. It is has a nice feel to it with its decent paper stock and reproduction glued to the front cover. The reproductions are good.

Even after seeing how much variation there is to enjoy in postcard collecting, I’m sticking with books on the subject. In these two (and I am sure many others) we can see the finer examples of visual playmaking sent to bring cheer through photography and short passages of personal text. Little did we know that later these seemingly innocuous forms of communication would provide, in the words of Salvador Dali, “an experimental base for the study of modern and popular unconscious thought.”

Buy online at Steidlville

Book Available Here (Angeberpostkarten)