Processo Grottesco and Yellowcake by Thomas Demand

One year ago this month, Thomas Demand exhibited his work Grotto at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. This large scale work is the final photograph of his mammoth reconstruction that took two years and 900,000 layers of 32 tons of cardboard to complete. The Fondazione Prada has facilitated the publishing of a two book, slipcased edition called Processo Grottesco.

I enjoy Demand's work immensely probably much in the same way that I enjoy dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. You know it is a contrivance but you allow yourself to live within this new reality for a moment - a moment that is taunted by logic and real order.

That being said Grotto treads dangerously into territory that is what I have come to call the "Crewdson effect." The "Crewdson effect" is, as the productions get larger, their sheer enormity starts impeding on the viewers ability detach from the process and just experience the emotion or a meaning of the work. When I look at Gregory Crewdson's recent work I mostly see his process and scale, and my mind is swimming with thoughts like, "wow, he put tons of lights way back there in the background." So much so that I care little about anything else (which, since he has been essentially making the same image over and over again with the same meanings, I guess is OK). It's kind of like the art version of arena rock. The euphoria induced has less to do with the music than the energy of the huge crowd and light show.

Grotto, in relation to Demand's other works, steps aside from his usual reconstructions of pre-existing images referring to controversial socio-political events. The grotto has appeared throughout art history and architecture since the 16th century with artificial grottoes being created to serve as gardens, baths, and chapels. The grotto reconstructed by Demand is based on a natural formation in Majorca, Spain that was featured on a postcard.

Processo Grottesco features the final photograph of the cardboard construction as a three-page foldout followed by over 450 pages of source material in postcards, photos and production stills. The book design is unique with a section of pages that are cut in to so that one can flip through the postcards on the top pages while comparing them to the details of the finished work on the lower ones.

Interestingly, the source material cites examples far from the typical images of caverns and into sources as seemingly distant as Dadaist studio creations by Schwitters (Merzbau 1923-42) and room decor from the 16th century.

The second book in the slipcase is Yellowcake and it is Demand's pictorial representation of the now infamous Nigergate scandal that led America into its current illegal quagmire known as the Iraq War.

In the evening of January 1, 2001, the Nigerian Embassy in Italy was ransacked but the only stolen items appeared to be a Breil watch, some perfume and blank embassy letterhead paper. Later, documents written on that letterhead would be sold through various sources claiming to be authentic correspondence between Niger and Saddam Hussein about the sale of hundreds of tons of weapons grade "Yellowcake" uranium to Iraq. The documents were laughably false as quick internet searches revealed (the main protocol agreement of the sale between Iraq and Niger bears the signature of a Nigerian Foreign Affairs Minister who had retired 11 years before the date on the documents!) yet they went on to become the center "smoking gun" of the administrations justification for letting Osama Bin Laden off the hook and pursuing Saddam Hussein. We all remember those 16 words, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Office supplies of file boxes, post-it notes, generic industrial desks, file folders and the detritus of the common space take on an air of corruption. The scene of the crime isn't splattered with blood but instead looks as innocuous as the office of a CPA. Our reality of the materials common to an aisle at Staples has been turned on its head.

The book Yellowcake presents 9 interior views of the Nigerian embassy reconstructed in paper and photographed. Where the Processo Grottesco is a traditional vertical format book, Yellowcake is designed like a large hardcover, silver-edged notebook - bound at the top and utilizing lined white paper for the title pages. It includes essays by Carlo Bonini, Alex Farquharson, and Robert Storr.

Like the Serpentine Gallery catalog on Demand I wrote about last year, the elegance of the presentation is a huge draw. I think the content is full and justifies the extravagance but some may be hesitant to drop the expected $140.00 for this set. It is from Prada afterall, but since it's a book, it is a shame that there won't be a knock-off showing up on Canal Street.

Processo Grottesco

Buffet photobook website by Andrew Phelps

Since I’ve been a bit under-productive lately you might want to spend some time at Andrew Phelps’s new blog called Buffet. Buffet lists interesting books, special editions and other “photo delicacies” that might be tempting to add to your own shelf.

Andrew Phelps is the talented photographer behind many fine books including Higley published by Kerher (2007) and Nature De Lux published by Verlag Anton Pustet (2004). He is also the author of Baghdad Suite (2008) which was reviewed here at 5B4 on March 14^th.

(http://andrew-phelps.blogspot.com/)

Autoland: Pictures from Switzerland by Nicholas Faure

As a child of the suburbs, memories of my life seem to be split 50/50 with time spent looking out a car's window at the landscape sliding by. Car culture throughout the world has changed the way we see our surroundings and as a child my observations of highway overpasses, tunnels, drainage ditches and signage as landmarks were imprinted into my consciousness in strong fashion. That imprinting quadrupled when I became a skateboarder and I would spend a few fleeting moments studying the roadside ditches for potential as terrain to skate while flying by at 60 mph in whatever car I happened to be in. Much of the best terrain for my first passion of skating was found in Arizona within what could be considered "autoland" territory - places where the landscape and architecture is entirely designed solely for car travel. Highway planners had no idea that they were paving a playground that would spark endless amounts of creativity from teenagers and twenty-somethings. They are places that seem un-natural and dangerous for a human to occupy outside of an automobile. These are places where the only cars that are parked, are cars that have quit running. Although it may seem very odd to admit to such a thing - I have very fond memories of time spent in this landscape which is probably partly why I like Nicholas Faure's Autoland that was published by SCALO and the Museum fur Gestaltung in 1999.

Faure's auto landscape is Switzerland and that country's highway planning and construction projects that now attempt to provide safe environs for some 3.3 million automobiles. Highway projects in Europe can have a slightly sinister tenor as one of the noted achievements of National Socialism and Fascism was the creation of picture perfect roadways and, in turn, Faure's extensive project can also be seen as Switzerland 's reinvention of itself through public highway systems.

These roadways cut huge swaths through the land whose benefit is connection of place and where excessive land appropriation is a consequence. This "good with the bad" was echoed in the statements of a Swiss government minister who remarked, "[These projects] will form great furrows in the countenance of our native soil and profoundly modify vast areas of it." This new order is pictured through Faure's vision through landscape photographs of the surroundings adapting to the often violent change that is called upon out of "need."

Using a large format camera and color film Faure fills Autoland with 211 photographs and I see the extreme amount of work presented in proportion to the frequency at which we all experience these landscapes. Excessive as it may be I don't find Autoland many images that do not seem worthy of being present.

The other reasons I recommend this book are because unlike many of SCALO's other offerings, Autoland is superb in its design and the type of materials used. The paper is a thin stock with a slight texture that adds to the softness of Faure's color palette. The coverboards are debossed with line drawings from two of Faure's photos and if you are lucky, your copy will come with the belly-band that covers the bottom half of the cover. Martin Heller contributes a fine essay that appears at the end of the book.

The American highway used to conjure romanticized dreams of "going west" and now nausea as the landscape has turned into endless strip malls and big box stores - landscapes that do not attract your want to look but seem to repel. Europe seems a touch more enlightened with form over function designs of the immediate surroundings of the roadbed that bring to mind a national pride in craftsmanship and design. Either way it is a landscape not meant to be seen static but in passing. What Faure has achieved, is stilling these areas for our scrutiny. Some immediately offend - some slip by with hardly our notice - all have become a part of our daily flow of perception as we motor from point A to B.

Autoland

Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith by Jason Eskenazi

Jason Eskenazi's Wonderland, A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith is the culmination of ten years worth of work describing aspects of contemporary life behind the Iron Curtain. Taking a page from literary fairy tales and children's stories, Wonderland is structured - less as a documentary project - and more as a metaphoric journey into the quirky landscape of the former super power as it shifts from a communist empire to a wild mix of deeply rooted traditions holding out against creeping influence of the west.

Eskenazi, a Guggenheim fellow, opens the book with an image of a woman's back as she pensively looks out an apartment window overlooking Red Square. The flowery patterns of lace curtains hang over our protagonist as a reminder of innocence or perhaps idealism as the real world outside draws her attention. The sequence quickly evolves into the traditional storyline of a fairy tale - a young child is thrust into the world to fend for herself in an almost hallucinatory state, losing her innocence in an unsheltered world.

As the photographer, Eskenazi steers her journey to reflect the changes taking place within the empire. The agrarian culture seems to be far outdated while the more modern industrial infrastructure collapses. The women change from timid peasants covered head to toe in traditional worker garb into miniskirt wearing, hyper-sexualized beings. The only structure that seems to remain strong is with the military where men exercise and wear crisp uniforms but to defend what? An ideology or an empire now split into individual states?

Lingering remnants of statues, now headless, the slaughtering of a goat, and a barber shaving a man's neck are brilliantly sequenced to remind us that the head is now coming off and the state is dissolving into the fantastic. Our protagonist experiences war, poverty, drug addiction and rape while ballerinas and princesses appear in working in factories or wandering through dingy stairwells.

The style of Eskenazi's photography follows the lead of the likes of Gilles Peress -- an accomplishment considering the plethora of bad photojournalism that is far too wrapped up in visual geometry and gymnastics at the expense of deeper content. Eskenazi has learned to make compelling photographs that have the strength of both form and content.

Although my description may make it seem like a complete downer, Wonderland isn't a harsh book on the surface a'la Nachtwey or Richards. The deeper meaning may be dark but like a children's story, it is delivered with the rhythm of adventure into a landscape of the mysterious.

Published by De.MO and funded in part by the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, Wonderland has a handcrafted feel to the design that follows many of De.MO's other publications with an uncovered book-board cover and exposed spine. My only real criticism would lie with the trim size. At only around 5X7 inches, it seems like larger work forced into too small of a package. A small criticism but noteworthy.

Stalin had once said "We were born to make fairy tales come true." When the wall finally fell it was clear that the fantasy had not been realized to what was promised. As he writes, Eskenazi explored through its remnants "searching for metaphors but realizing, too late, that I had brought my own when I first arrived. And now that it's time to leave, I sit for a few moments on the edge of the bed to assure safe travel, as the Russians do, just before I lock the door, unable to return to what perhaps never was."

Wonderland

Precious Metals and Overseas by Roger Palmer

Throughout history man has used markings on walls to communicate. Whether they are important as the drawings in the caves of Lascaux or as seemingly insignificant as a Stop n' Shop sign or quickly scrawled graffiti, our world is permeated with markings that denote its cultural heritage. Roger Palmer, an artist I have just recently discovered, has explored this territory through exhibitions and books of photography and wall drawings.

The first book I discovered is called Precious Metals published by the Cambridge Darkroom in 1986 and was prepared to accompany an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery.

Precious Metals is a project Palmer worked on while spending a month in South Africa in 1985. Working without any predetermined meanings he wound up creating photographs that referred not only to the physical landscape but alluded to its shifting history. The final work as presented in Precious Metals are photographs that are paired with short texts of facts about diluted or extinct civilizations that were a part of the history of the landscape.

Not unlike an anthropologist, Palmer examines the evidence within the landscape, but his images do not give rise to facts - but to the thoughts of the viewer concerning cultural shifts brought on by European colonialism. The visual "evidence" or "facts" he points his camera towards are metaphors and not the relics of the civilization under examination.

For one pairing, the text reads, "Territorial codes were strictly respected by neighboring groups. Natural landmarks such as a clump of trees, an old spring, or a dry river bed, demarcated the boundaries of adjacent hunting territories." This sits next to an image of a barren landscape punctuated with a wheelbarrow in the foreground, a small portion of wall from a destroyed structure and off in the far background an abandoned Chevy.

For another, his humor as an outside observer (and most certainly of European descent) is present. For the work titled Dorper Sheep, the text reads, "The Dorper is a cross between the Dorset Horn and the Black-Headed Persian. It is bred in the western cape as a hardy, drought resistant sheep able to raise its lambs on natural grazing in arid conditions." this sits next to a photograph of an abandoned car which is seen from a time of day when the facing side is in hard shadow. The next text reads, "For the Black-Headed Dorper, the ideal is a white sheep with black confined to the neck and head. Some black spots are permissible on the body and leg. In the case of the White Dorper, pigmentation is acceptable around the eyes, under the tail, and on the udder and teats." For this accompanying photograph, Palmer photographed the same car at a different time of day when the sunlight was hitting the side facing the viewer.

As the work progresses through Precious Metals, the horizon line of the landscape becomes filled with modern tract housing and the texts shift to descriptions of the natural elements of light and wind common to this arid land. Palmer takes us to the edge of the development but almost like we are forbidden to enter (or warned against it) he leaves us at a dividing point where the dirt road becomes paved.

As mentioned before, this is really a catalog for the exhibition but it was made to contain the complete work in book form. It is softcover and suffers a bit from some of the black areas of the reproductions blocking up. It is accompanied by an interesting interview between Roger Palmer and Pavel Buchler.

My curiosity with Precious Metals made me seek out other publications by Palmer. One that is currently available called Overseas was published by Fotohof Edition in Austria in 2004.

Overseas seems to be a culling of many of Palmer's photographs that also address colonial influence. Here we see some of the individual photos from Precious Metals (minus the texts) dropped within a sequence of 80 that seems more global in scale. Palmer starts his sequence with a landscape in the Skiddow Forest of a wall marking the boundary between clear grassland and a fog obscured world. Palmer places us in the shoes of an early colonist who arrive, first in one ship and later in many. Throughout the book, the image of ships reappear to remind us that we are passing through - always an outsider.

Along the journey, Palmer points out the markings left behind - some familiar, some foreign. Many of which, Palmer uses the cropping of the photographic frame to turn what might (in the real world) be something familiar into something foreign. He mixes our language and "theirs", often photographing through reflective surfaces, to create hybrids that confuse. His view of the world is not of a melting pot but of clashing cultures holding firm against the diluting effects of time.

Palmer ends the sequence with an image that mirrors the first - a line of industrial buildings (the wall) is partially thrown into a haze of dust (the fog) thrown up by a passing 18 wheeler truck.

In one sense, Overseas can be compared to Lee Friedlander's monumental Letters To The People in its subject and style of photography (Palmer is less the formalist than Friedlander) but the overall tone is not one of the celebratory as Friedlander's attitude. The markings of Palmer are polluting and destructive where Lee's are affirmations of life no matter how ugly or crude.

The book itself is in a traditional horizontal format with a design of one photo per right-hand page and a caption list in the back. Ivan Vladisslavic contributes a story called City Center (Street addresses, Johannesburg, fifth cycle).

Overseas takes time for it to sink in. Many will see Palmer's use of 35mm black and white film a detriment considering the fetish for clarity and color of today's trends. I see this work sitting on the creative line between Lewis Baltz and David Goldblatt - distant cousin it may be, but an important contribution and fine thought provoking collection.

Book Available Here (Overseas)

Edges by Harry Gruyaert

Deep into Summer the heat sets in and drives everyone to the edges of their continent for a few days at the beach. In the 1940s Weegee had a packed Coney Island where there must have been a photo to be taken with every step. Some of Diane Arbus's early successes were taken at Coney as well in the 1950s and let us not forget Robert Frank's fourth of July evening spent drifting among the beach sleepers. Tod Papageorge hit the LA beaches with his 6X9 in the late 70s and Martin Parr staked a claim in color at Brighton Beach, England in the 1980s. The first photograph I ever made that I considered a success was made on a beach in the summer of 1988.

While the work mentioned above mainly focuses on the human element, others like Harry Gruyaert draw inspiration from the landscape and the qualities of the light that can be found there. Gruyaert, one of the quieter of the Magnum photographers, has been photographing on or near the water's edge for a number of years and his new book called Edges from Mets & Schilt features many of these images.

All photographs are fundamentally about light but Gruyaert's 35 years worth of work has described some of the more remarkable of its natural occurrences. Working often on the beaches of France in small format and Kodachrome, he draws our attention to dramatic storm fronts moving inland where sun and rain clouds clash to offer otherworldly vistas; or, points us to skies so tranquil that it appears as clean as a studio photographer’s seamless. In either case, it is the subtle shifts of color that sieze our attention. A blue sky at first glance reads as a pure tone, but on further notice the viewer senses an almost imperceptible pink lingering in the atmospheric haze that seems to become stronger, revealing itself the longer you look.

Many of Gruyaert's photographs hold this subtle description and it is that which I return to these photographs. Without it, Gruyaert would be short changed by the strong romanticism felt in these photographs. In some of his other work from an earlier book Lumieres Blanches published in 1986 by Photo Copies, he showed an attraction to vivid color mixed with surreal juxtapositions. Some of that sensibility is at work here too but to a much lesser degree.

Gruyaert's edges are two fold -- one is the division between land and water, the other is the horizon line and division between water and sky. Both are the focal points that eventually lead to our discovering the other information in his precise frames.

A third more subtle "edge" (one that photographers will quickly pick up on) is that of natural and artificial light. Gruyaert often photographs where there is a mixing of different color temperatures from various sources. Halogen, tungsten, neon and setting sun often find their own sections in the same photograph but without competition. All are given equal weight and Gruyaert is able to strike the right balance between them.

As a book, Edges is a remarkable accomplishment. The design requires the viewer to flip the pages vertically as it is a horizontal book bound at the top edge. Although operating a book in this manner feels a bit awkward, I find the design refreshing and saves the book from feeling generic. Its oversize format (10 X 15 inches) allows the photographs to be reproduced at a perfect scale for the subject. The printing celebrates the originals and looks exquisite.

In looking through this book several times I have found a melancholy air to many of the photographs. It is as if, stuck on land, Gruyaert's camera yearns for the horizon and beyond. Perhaps that is why there is often a ship in the far distance sitting at the edge of our vision -- a ship venturing into open water, whose passengers look towards land and see Gruyaert's visions in reverse.

Buy online at RAM

Alexander Rodtschenko and Aleksandr Rodchenko

I want to dispel rumors of my recent death. I am not dead. I've been squeezing in extra days of work before I have knee surgery (You're all supposed to give a collective "Awww...poor Whisket). 5B4 will pick up its pace in the second half of the month while I am laid up and pumped full of Vicadin.

I know what I am about to say will alienate many but after not working for almost all of June and then agreeing to work three days in a row has drained me of all inspiration to write this week. People who work day after day -- you have my sympathies.

So, in celebration of "the workers" I will summon the stamina to briefly mention the new catalog Alexander Rodtschenko (German spelling) from the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin.

Rodchenko I have spent some time on before with his book design collaborations with Vavara Stepanova. His photography, however, is now the center of discussion in his multi-disciplinary career that involved sculpture, painting, collage, set design and even clothing design. Rodchenko started to use photography for collage and within a few years concentrated on the "photograph" as a simple element of design. By the early 1920's he saw the other traditional studio arts failing to provide artistic results appropriate to the time.

Acquiring a Leica and the freedom that came with the small format and rolls of 36 frames, he started photographing in a manner that explored his now characteristic eccentric viewpoints. As he wrote in 1928, "When I present a tree taken from below like an industrial object such as a chimney, this is a revolution in the eyes of the philistine...In this manner I am expanding our conception of the ordinary, everyday object."

In this new catalog several pages are given to a few of Rodchenko's two thousand some photos of the building of the "White Sea Canal" that later appeared in an issue of USSR in Construction. This was a canal built by prisoners that also served as the "re-education" of antisocial types to turn them into useful members of the collective. This essay could be set as an example of Rodchenko's blind-spot of always looking towards the greater good while overlooking the fact that the toiling masses were not participating willingly but under a scheme of terror where some 200,000 prisoners died. The final printed essay, of course, shows "workers" and not "prisoners" with airbrushed smiles willingly doing their service for the greater good.

The catalog is divided into sections according to subject and discipline starting off with collages primarily made in the early to mid-1920s. These constructions are amongst my favorites of Rodchenko's work with their diversity of imagery, broad shifts in scale and the freedom of arrangement. In the early days of Rodchenko's photography pursuit he, like any photographer, becomes a collector and archivist of images but his application of cutting and pasting reduces his photography down to objects.

This catalog is nicely put together with tons of illustrations (several of which I hadn't seen before) and the printing is good but I think the Museum of Modern Art catalog from 1998 is better in terms of production. Unfortunately the essays are not translated from German but what do I expect from a German catalog. Published by Nicolai.



For a good book on Rodchenko's photography there is also Aleksandr Rodchenko: The New Moscow published in 1998 by Schirmer Mosel.

After Rodchenko was expelled from the group of artists known as the October group, he was commissioned to take photographs of Moscow. His wife and collegue, Vavara Stepanova compiled a sequence of 89 of the resulting photos which was prepared to be a book but it was never published. Of course the tenor of the book is the positive social and political changes in the city.

A 1998 edition of this unpublished book was prepared for a traveling exhibition of vintage prints organized by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. It claims to be the complete sequence but it has only 81 photographs so I am not exactly sure what they mean by "complete". What I do like about this book is the paper stock and printing. For a change, Schirmer Mosel, (whose books all seem to pretty much look the same) chose to use a paper stock that is a heavy matte with a decent tooth. The printing looks like a faux-gravure with very rich black tones (that occasionally block up but I can over look that).

Margarita Tupitsyn, the art historian who seems to contribute fine essays to all books on Russian artists contributes an introduction.



The last book I will mention (not really a whole hearted review, just a mention) is called The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives. This is a catalog from a show in 1980 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

I like this title less for the illustrations, which are all in varying degrees of lousy quality black and white, and more for the good essays from a whole slew of authors. I am sure there are a whole host of books on the subject but I find the structure of this one good for starting anywhere you open the book. It also features a cool cover design which drew my attention from the get go.



Ok...one last lazy mention (not a review). If you are interested in reading Rodchenko's writings on art, his letters, diaries and such you should check out Experiments for the Future published by the MoMA in 2004. It can be gotten for around $12.00 hardcover as it has been remaindered.

Special thank you to Ed Grazda for lugging a copy of the Nicolai catalog back from Germany.

www.nicolai-verlag.de

Book Available Here (New Moscow)

Book Available Here (Avant-Garde in Russia)

Book Available Here (Experiment for the Future)

Ballnachte 1934-1950 by Jakob Tuggener

From the moment technologies allowed photographs to be translated onto the printed page, artists have explored how this new medium could amplify the resonance of their work. It would be a safe bet that the idea to put together a book often comes after much of the photography is done and the project has already taken shape.

For Jakob Tuggener, the interest in handling photographs on the printed page came early -- before a majority of his pictures had been made. For Tuggener, the individual print was not a conclusion but the starting point for the arrangement and order of images to correspond with one another. This investigation led to his collecting his photographs an arranging them into albums perhaps inspired by Werner Graff's Es Kommt der Neue Fotograf! or of the image handling of the illustrated magazines of the day.

In 1934, Tuggener started to photograph society parties and balls in Zurich. As he wrote in 1934, "...The mannequins have come out of the shop windows. Against their white skin the blue of the gemstones shimmers, twinkling on black cloth like violet sparks. The perfumed trails waft behind them intoxicatingly remote. (...) Velvety shoulders glow in alabaster light, phosphoresce the walls, and at times the flash in the mirrors..."

From the tenor of the photographs and surely from the words above Tuggener was not out to make critical comment of the upper classes "decadence" during the years engulfed by the Second World War and its after effects of high unemployment and economic hardship. Tuggener is clearly consumed by what he sees, "Life at night is radiant, everything is its own center. This of course is the magic; everything becomes itself and vivid through its inner light."

Tuggener's fascination might have stemmed from a desire to leave behind his firmly middle class roots and be accepted by the upper echelon but there are clues in his photography that signify that those lines are not easily crossed. Any photographer by way of their being "at work" during a party is enough to signify a difference in status that might "lower" them to the level of the kitchen help or floor waiter but Tuggener also shows himself by how he photographs. As Ute Eskildsen writes in an essay on Tuggener's Ballnachte photographs, he photographs women from the back so often that this can be read as a pictorial concept. Within this concept may be the not so hidden metaphor for "the inaccessible space of the wealthy."

Tuggener made eight maquettes for his Ballnachte photographs and all are pure photobooks with no text -- "We are corrupted by illustrated magazines and by reading; we are helpless when it comes to looking at a picture without the aid of text. And thus a picture can be explained -- however not experienced -- through a text. The soul lies deeper, there where no word can penetrate. This realm is much larger than the periphery of reason."

Tuggener stopped photographing on the Ballnachte project on April 17, 1950 and none of the maquettes were ever realized into printed books. In 2005, SCALO released Jak Tuggener Ballnachte 1934-1950, a long overdue printed version of Tuggener's first maquette of the ball photographs. It follows Tuggener's word-less vision that is dense with information and expressionistic with his use of extreme croppings and sudden doses of large film grain.

The book is printed well and comes with an additional booklet laid in that contains essays by Ute Eskildsen and Martin Gasser which are informative if against Tuggener's wishes of pure visual experience.

Book Available Here (Ballnachte 1934-1950)

The Americans: Spanish and Mandarin editions

I, for one, never tire of hearing about new releases regarding Robert Frank but knowing that some readers may be a little burnt out on all Robert Frank project all the time, I’ll keep this post short.

I want to direct your attention to a couple entirely new translations of The Americans that will bring this great work of art to new cultures. In the past there have been German, Italian, French and English editions and now I bring good news to my in-laws as there is a Spanish edition, Los Americanos, co-published with La Fabrica in Spain and Steidl. La Fabrica are the same publisher who I wrote about in regard to their fine book Man Ray Unconcerned but Not Indifferent, as well as the Conversations with Contemporary Photographers series. Off the press of Steidlville it features the same fine printing as the English edition but with translations by Marcos Canteli. Curious note is that the belly band with this edition mentions that The Americans has sold more than 700,000 copies since its first release in 1958.

The other new edition is a Chinese version in Mandarin with translations by Zhao Yuan and Bian Ge. Either this came about because Robert was just awarded a prize in China or Steidl is going after the 1.3 billion person audience. Maybe they can double that 700,000 number. I was surprised to see a Chinese version before a Japanese one. Robert is big in Japan after all.

Either way I would like to see The Americans top The Family of Man as the book that breaks out of the photobook ghetto of only being owned by artists and other photographers.

www.lafabricaeditorial.com

Buy online at Steidlville

Fig. by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have create a fascinating museum in their book Fig. published by Photoworks and Steidl in 2007. It is a museum in which categorization occurs through varying degrees of separation between each object. Appearing to be in the documentary mode, Fig. weaves a web-like path between the objects and those links are only limited to Broomberg and Chanarin's imagination. Luckily for the readers, Broomberg and Chanarin show little restraint in reining in their minds.

Broomberg and Chanarin are the duo behind much of the photography from Colors magazine. Neither has a studied background in photography but instead combined degrees in Sociology, Art History, Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Their previous work and books have taken them shifting from conceptual work and the constructed into the realm of documentary and back again. Fig. proves to have been as much a research project as a photographic one and charting the course for this book was most likely a complicated affair.

Fig. is constructed with 95 images (“figures”, hence the title Fig.) that are linked through short pieces of text. Each caption/text provides to the readers what most captions do -- they reveal what the object is and in turn give a short explanation as to why the reader should be interested. Thus Fig. is really a book of words -- words that can't entirely be trusted as they take giant leaps to link each object. Their individual caption construction may be factual but their sequencing is pure fiction.

The result engrosses our attention and delves into the fantastic. Mermen (male mermaids) and the oldest waxwork from Madame Tussaud become a part of a "museum" that also holds discarded passport photos from Rwanda and descriptions of office spaces reserved for moments of state emergencies. A leaf blow from a tree near the site of a suicide bombing in Israel follows a photo of a termite hill in South Africa whose inhabitants "commit suicide" when the nest is threatened by spontaneously exploding. The links are tenuous and the driving force is an imaginative exuberance whose basis is the pure curiosity of subjects and making connections that create an unflagging sense of wonder.

Fig. was designed by SMITH (Stuart Smith's London-based design firm) and the package is near perfect. The trim size sits perfectly in the hand and the presentation of the work is elegant.

Broomberg and Charnarin prove to be excellent guides in which to chart a journey that obeys no map or compass. For me there is such a feeling of wonder from following this chain of objects that I wish Fig. contained not just 95 but 9500. With Fig. as an example, I could follow Broomberg and Charnarin's imagination to the margins of the margins and connect dots that no one had ever thought existed.

Buy online at Steidlville

Josef Sudek Volume 1: The Window of My Studio

I owe my readers a small apology as the postings this month have been few and far between. I've just had too much on my plate these past weeks to dedicate the time and energy to writing as frequently as I have in the past. I also figure I can occasionally let your bank account catch up especially after tax season but that is a poor excuse.

After a couple postings on Josef Koudelka I thought it appropriate to stay in Prague and mention its photographic poet, Josef Sudek. A new multi-volume series of books from Torst collects his works under the titles of: The Window of My Studio, Portraits, Still Lifes, Advertisements, Saint Vitus's Cathedral, The Ancient Forest of the Beskids, Rothmayer's Garden, and Labyrinths.

Sudek had a small studio with a courtyard in Malá Strana, Prague and it was the views through it's windows that provided Sudek with decades worth of subject matter. The first volume in this series, The Window of My Studio presents 76 photographs made over the longest period of the artist's life from 1940 until his death in 1976.

For Sudek, the window didn't just provide a source of inspiration for photographs but it was also a refuge of sorts. Through the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during Second World War and later under the Communist regime, the window -- as Anna Farova mentions in her essay accompanying this book -- became "a source of reassurance" for Sudek. It was a metaphoric link of outer and inner worlds and seemed to represent both the stillness of those times and the subtle changes that occurred in those fixed frames.

When seen within this context, the viewer tends to overlook the repetition to the frames and instead concentrate on the varying degrees of distortion that the frost and water on the panes of glass creates. The "mourning tree" that sits just outside in the courtyard in turn becomes a maimed stand-in for Sudek and gives reference to Sudek's loss of his arm while serving the Hungarian army during the First World War. Awkwardly angular, the trunk of the tree zigzags upward until it releases into a shock of off-shooting branches that quickly defies order.

The other window in the studio looks out on a block of apartments which brings an element of the city to this series. The glow from lights in the apartment widows outside of Sudek's inner world becomes a source of beauty with the approach of evening. This far-away window light gets scattered and refracted through the droplets of moisture and turns into ill-defined highlights that ornament the darkened frames.

The Window of My Studio has a design that feels at times more like that of a catalog than a true showcase for the work. It plods along with some wonderful pairings and other spreads that fight the flow of the book. The other difficulty here is with the reproductions. Although some get very fine treatment, others do not fair very well. I think this is due to the publisher attempting to mimic the color tonalities of Sudek's carbon prints, along with a poor choice of paper stock. To be fair, this is a common difficulty with many books of his work other than the older titles that were printed in luscious gravure.

Although I am at odds with some of the design and production, this series of books shows promise in presenting a complete study of Sudek’s work much like the Harry N. Abrams box-set did for August Sander a few years back. That set isn’t without its flaws either but it has become a source that I feel I couldn't do without. By the end of this series on Sudek -- that feeling may be very similar.

Torst

Book Available Here (Window of My Studio)

Book Available Here (Portraits)

Book Available Here (Still Lifes)

Book Available Here (Ancient Forest of the Beskids)

Book Available Here (Advertisements)

A Bird (Blast #130) by Naoya Hatakeyama

My posts tend to be rather long (which I think is a good thing) but there are times when I'd simply like to be brief and spotlight some books I feel I've been neglecting. There are many fine titles that I think are interesting and worth your notice but when I sit to write about them, the words don't come easily. So as an exercise in brevity I am going to start to throw a few short posts into the mix and hopefully I can do so without short changing anyone's book -- or you, the readers.

Recently I picked up the book A Bird (Blast #130) from the Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama. Since this book is simply a sequence of 17 photographs of an explosion throwing earth into the air I thought it would become stale very quickly but much to my surprise it hasn't. Of all of Hatakeyama's work, the blast series is the most interesting to me. The limeworks photographs and his other industrial work do little to grab my attention like a good slow-motion explosion that throws earth at your face can.

A Bird (Blast #130) is great because it is so much about the unpredictable nature of photography to hold something and allow the discovery of beauty. In this sequence, the camera is static and the first two frames describe a rocky plateau overlooking a body of water. The ground looks leveled as if being prepared for some construction to begin. White patches of fine sand dot the level ground. The sky is shows signs of an oncoming storm and against the grey of a cloud, a small silhouette of a bird appears flapping towards the camera.

By frame three, the ground erupts into puffs of white from the sand patches and the earth starts to rise. Frame four, the whole plateau becomes an undulating wave as chunks of rock are frozen by the camera shutter -- the bird reacts by changing the direction of its course. On and on, the dirt, rocks and dust are thrown into the air until gravity once again slows its progress and pulls it all back to earth leaving the last remnants of rock to disappear into a dust cloud. After the dust settles, the bird is seen high-tailing it out of the area. (BIRD coincidentally means Blast-Induced Rock Damage but that has nothing to do with the book's title).

This would be a seductive sequence just based on the fact that the camera has slowed the fascinating transformation caused from the blast, but what keeps me responding to this work is the way that the explosion itself created such a beautiful form that fills the static frame. It is really luck falling on the side of the artist. There would be no way to predict the shape of the explosion, nor the coincidence of the bird appearing and flying in the perfect patch of sky as if an actor hitting their mark. I have seen many of Hatakeyama's blast photographs and none seem to transcend the fascination with the explosion like this one does. Surely that is why this deserves its own book.

A Bird (Blast #130) is finely printed and designed and was published in 2006 by the Taka Ishii gallery in an edition of 1000 copies.

Buy online at ICP Bookstore

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book

Those of you in London should set a little time aside before the end of the month to visit the Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book exhibition currently on view at the Victoria and Albert museum. This is an exhibition of mostly contemporary artist books made within the past twenty years by artists who have been pushing conception and design of book craft. I will not be able to see the show but I do have the exhibition catalog which I wanted to tell you about.

I didn’t have much information before I received a copy so my immediate impression while opening it was with its elegant and beautiful construction. This “book” has an outer protective shell of heavy cardboard that unfolds to reveal a cloth covered box that has a nice typographic composition of the names of the artists debossed into the cover. The names are blind stamped (not foil stamped or inked) so they barely register against the creme color of the Brillianta cloth. What does stand out immediately is the blood-red hot foil stamped title.

The top cover of the box sits snugly closed over a bottom tray that does not allow the two linen boxes to meet when closed -- instead they stay slightly separated to allow a bit of the red inner tray to peek out through a crack, thus repeating the blood motif in an interesting yet simple design construction.

Once the cover of the box is removed there is a set of 41 loose folded leaves, each of which are dedicated to one or two books from each of the 38 artists featured in the exhibition. These folded leaves are wrapped in a linen cloth to assist lifting them out of the box undamaged. The leaves are printed on heavy weight 250 gsm matte paper and the printing is exquisite.

As I mentioned before each of the leaves is dedicated to one artist who is named on the front page and whose book is shown over the other 5 pages. (Each leave is basically a long sheet of paper folded folded twice to create three pages to a side -- six pages front and back).

The list of artists featured comes across as a who’s who of the twentieth century’s most famous. Bacon, Balthus, Baselitz, Beuys, Bourgeois, Buren, Bustamente, Cai Guo-Qiang, Caro, Chillida, Clemente, Dubuffet, Francis, Giacometti, Hirst, Iliazad, Kapoor, Keifer, Koons, Lecuire, Lewitt, Lichtenstein, Long, Matisse, McCarthy, Miro, Motherwell, Noguchi, Parr, Phillips, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rego, Roth, Ruscha, Tapies, Tuttle, and Vital.

Most of the books featured, with the exception of a few, are very limited edition pieces. There is a facsimile suitcase full of reproductions of miscellaneous papers found in Francis Bacon’s studio (called Detritus) that is in an edition of 25. A unique book from Cai Guo-Qiang of drawings made with gunpowder mixed with paste that has a tempting string dangling from its edge that when pulled ignites the book. One of Damien Hirst with the pretentious title: I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now. A book by Anselm Keifer which stands vertically at 7 foot tall with pages made of lead covered cardboard called The Secret Life of Plants. Martin Parr’s contribution is of his Benidorn Album of 40 photos in plastic sleeves. Picasso’s Deux Contes is a book of 4 dryprints with a text by Ramon reventos that is housed between two carved pieces of wooded board bound by maroon fabric ties.

I could go on as much of this is pure eye candy for designers and alternative binding techniques etc -- but after a looking through all of this great material I started to realize just how thin the information about each book really is. All that is written about the individual books is simply their technical specifications (size, material, printing technique etc.) and almost nothing is written in regards to the content. ‘OK,’ I thought, 'the illustrations will show enough to get a sense of each book.' Think again. The illustrations show very little of the books actually. Most include a couple of images of the content/artwork, a photo of the cover or case of the book, and then much space and energy is given to extreme close-ups of the edges of the pages or a bit of embossing that -- although they look great -- they do little to inform.

This is the major missed opportunity with Blood on Paper. It is as if the producers of the book became so tied up with the elegance of the presentation that they took their eye off the informative aspect of this catalog. It wouldn’t have taken much to make this near perfect either. That is a real shame because each of the folded leaves is approximately 11.5 X 11.5 inches -- which is a lot of space to have available for illustrations. I might have suggested including many more photographs of the interiors of the books instead of just one or two photos that really just amount to being graphic elements.

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book is co-published by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Ivory Press, the company behind C International Photo magazine/books and other limited edition artist books by artists included in this exhibition and catalog. Elena Foster and Rowan Watson are the curators of the exhibition and each offers a short introductory text to this catalog.

As many of you know I love books on artist books and it is really difficult to not enjoy most of Blood on Paper. The packaging and even the strong smell of the ink that wafts from the box entices me, but when it gets down to the bare essentials, I need to be able to see the blood we have heard so much about.

Ivory Press

Book Available Here (Blood on Paper)

The Refusal by Jo Longhurst & Bird by Roni Horn

One thing that I enjoy is when I find connections between the works of different artists. Many of you have had the same experience where you are looking through a book and one image or a set of images triggers you to run to the book shelf to find its compliment in another artist.

This recently happened to me while looking through Jo Longhurst’s book The Refusal from Steidl. Immediately it brought to mind a book by Roni Horn called Bird so I thought it was a sign that these two stand alone books be reviewed together.

The Refusal is an artist book/exhibition catalog that is primarily about the un-natural breeding of English Whippet dogs and the relationship between humans and domesticated animals. In her essay On looking and being looked at, Longhurst speaks of the detachment a breeder can feel in choosing a young dog, ‘A proper show Whippet is bred to be looked at. The breeders hope to produce the perfect dog, focusing on body form and fluidity of movement.’ This essay is set at the end of a book that describes the clinical detached view of these animals alongside others where the viewers are prompted to feel an attachment through the animals gaze.

Longhurst employs various strategies in the presentation of this work. The clinical images are presented as grids (rather expected) but others are presented cropped into circles which dot the page either like petri dishes (they are presented after the clinical sidelong photos that immediately bring to mind genetics) or like tondi paintings from the Renaissance. Another series of traditional square photos direct our attention to the aforementioned gaze as the dogs look towards and away from the camera.

It was when I came across a spread of straight-on portraits of four dogs who are staring directly into the camera that instantly brought to mind photos from a recent catalog from Roni Horn called Bird which was published on the occasion of a show at the Hauser & Worth Gallery in London.

Initially it was the formal similarities that drew these two bodies of work together but as I kept looking from one to the other I found them sharing other traits as well.

Horn’s book continues her fascination with Iceland but this time through its birds. Here she has photographed the backs of the heads of many Icelandic fowl and they are presented as pairs on the facing page spreads. In some ways this also continues Horn’s strategy of making two nearly identical sculptures and exhibiting them together but this time the work is infused with a humor that is refreshing for her. I find myself giddy with how funny and absurd the shapes of the bird’s heads are at times. (A similar humorous quality is found in the faces of the birds depicted in the Doubt Box). Add to this a seductive palette of color from the feathers and their patterns and I find myself captivated with interest.

The same happens with Jo Longhurst’s side-long portraits of the Whippets. On a two page spread the book designers present 24 identical photographs of the dogs that show off the elegant drop of their chests, tuck of their stomachs and flow of their hind legs. With this repetition the viewer is invited to notice differences which in this case the most noticeable is that the tails of the dogs in proper “dog show” posture, wind up tucked between their legs. Humorously the tails end up becoming comic phalluses that stand erect or droop towards the ground.

Both of these books challenge my view of photography in that I want to say that it is the object itself that wins out and that the photography is a passive partner. It is known by my readers that I like to "see" the photographer at work in making the photographs just the same as a great novel is as much word choice and structure as the "story." Much of the photography here strikes me as mere documents that stand second to the message. Longhurst's work is the exception as many of the circle photographs are elegant and varied but the main thrust seems to fall into the former category. It may take me a while to accept this approach to the medium but these two titles make trying to read this new kind of book a fascinating task.

Bird is hardcover, approximately the size of an LP record and contains 20 photos. The design is elegant and simple, allowing the square photos to be reproduced at a large scale. Bird includes an essay by Philip Larratt-Smith called Hornithology: Nature's Question Mark which is a wonderful mix of fact and metaphor that has a similar flavor to Horn's text that accompanies the work in Another Water. Bird is co-published with the Hauser & Worth gallery and Steidl.

The Refusal is softcover, small and oblong and is a catalog that accompanies an exhibition of the work at the Museum Folkwang in Germany.

Buy The Refusal at Steidlville

Buy Bird at Steidlville