Five books from Miguel Rio Branco

Anyone who has spent some time wandering through baroque churches in Latin America will find a similar weight and intensity in Miguel Rio Branco's photographs and installations. Steeped in Catholic imagery with a fascination for the violence and bloodletting, his constructions are dark and visceral metaphors of life lived under oppressive forces.

An artist associated with the Magnum photo agency (Miguel's Magnum status for twenty years has been as a "correspondent"), he has created several fine books relating to his photos and installations. In 1998, Aperture dedicated a monograph to Rio Branco and it is a fine introduction to his work. Since most people know of that book I thought I'd take a look at a few of his other lesser known titles.

Rio Branco's second book was Dulce Sudor Amargo (Bitter-Sweet Sweat) published in 1985 by the Fondo de Cultural Economica in Mexico City.

It now fetches strong prices when found. Fairly typical of a 1980s design and layout but it contains many of Rio Branco's finest 35mm color work from the mid-1970s and early 80s. Notably is the inclusion of his work from Salvador de Bahia's decaying Marciel neighborhood in which Rio Branco photographed the barrio's street life and prostitutes.

Interestingly, Steven Soderbergh in his film Traffic duplicated one of Rio Branco's photos from this series on film. (The similarities are so strong I would be surprised if Soderbergh denied the influence). The photo describes a couple embracing and the point of focus is a scar on the man's shoulder while the prostitute's face appearing in the upper right corner remains unsharp.

The photographs in Dulce Sudor Amargo hint at the metaphor and image pairing that Rio Branco would later pursue - distancing himself from straighter documentarians.



The next book in my collection, Silent Book was published by Cosac & Naify in 1997. This was featured in Parr / Badger II and in my opinion it is his best to date.

A collection of square images that start Rio Branco's intense descent into the baroque. His color palette, always intense, intensifies until the hues bleed and taint the entire photo. A large percentage of the individual images are from a boxing facility in Rio de Janeiro. Within the blue and green walls and rings, the boxers blur into muscular apparitions. The images are sequenced and edited to draw direct comparison to religious imagery and in some cases, seems to imply life imitating the more grotesque themes of paintings from the likes of Caravaggio.

Silent Book is an artist book of the finest order.



The next is also from Cosac & Naify from 2001, Entre Os Olhos, O Deserto (Between the Eyes, The Desert) is an artist book version of an installation slideshow from Rio Branco.

This work is much less dark and ominous than Silent Book or the books to follow. I had seen the installation of this work in New York, a three projector triptych slideshow of images that fade into one another in Branco's style of free association.

Mimicking that installation, Entre Os Olhos, O Deserto is mostly a series of fold-out triptychs of disparate images that start to link through form or tenor. Image after image of close-ups of eyes, both human and animal, change Rio Branco's world into imagined spaces filled with a tension between beauty and danger.

Entre Os Olhos, O Deserto is beautiful and compelling but as an object it is difficult to operate. The tightness of the binding due to the small trim-size yet thick page count makes opening the fold-outs a chore. I find this effects my willingness to participate and engage with the work fully. It comes with a DVD.



The next book, Gritos Surdos, is from an installation in Portugal at the Centro Portugues de Fotografia in 2002.

Starting off with green neon skulls and smashed car windscreens, the images overlap and crossfade using many of Rio Branco's known images. Sex and sensuality have been a theme in his installations before but here he employs pixelated images from porn films that, following on the heels of the the other dark imagery, wind up looking like modern visions of hellish suffering.
This book, like Entre Os Olhos, O Deserto, comes with a DVD.



The last book to mention is from the French publisher Textuel, Plaisir la Douleur features not only Rio Branco's photographs and installations but his photomontages and paintings as well.

The endpapers flow rivers of blood and the first recognizable image is of a golden halo hanging on a wall. Disturbingly Rio Branco starts the body of the book with a close-up of a horses eye that is so dark, the actual eye is described as an empty, blind hole that weeps oil-black tears. It is an image of suffering and punishment but considering the grotesque visions that follow, it might be an enviable existence.

In his photomontages, Rio Branco constructs fanged monsters and, in a rare moment of being obvious, a modern day Eve and snake scenario. Although these are separate works with a listing in the rear of the book, when sequenced together they bring to mind several religious themes such as the torture and flaying of Christ. Rio Branco seems to take masochisitic "pleasure" (plaisir) by showing pain through the seductive use of his color palette much like the old masters.

All of Rio Branco's books mentioned with the exception of Dulce Sudor Amargo are printed with the images surrounded by black pages so all color seems even more vibrant. The books generally have interesting design but handle carefully -- one flaw is usually with the binding. Silent Book, Entre Os Olhos, O Deserto are susceptible to the signatures separating and loosening through moderate use.

Miguel Rio Branco can be relentless. He throws imagery at the viewer and recycles his photographs to suit new needs. The installations are often projections onto physical objects -- metal, mirrors and glass -- all of which bend and distort to create a real and imagined world where the viewer may not know where one ends and the other begins.

Portrait Louise Anna Kubelka by Friedl Kubelka

What would a life portrait look like? There are many interpretations of what could be meant by that but in Friedl Kubelka's case, it was to make a headshot photo of her daughter every Monday from the first day of her daughter's life until her 18th year. This act of "Monday photo," as her daughter Louise came to call it, is part ritual, part performance, part obsession.

Friedl Kubelka: Portrait Louise Anna Kubelka published by Fotohof in 1998 presents this work in its entirety.

Arranged in grids of 52 photographs and starting in 1978, we see the passing of 18 years and how it shapes a young woman's face as in a time-lapse film. The framework of photographing Louise's head in close-up against a neutral background accentuates the seeming difference in her moods although photography is too slippery a liar for a true reading.

At sixth months old, Louise seems to show an amusement with the camera, like most, she tends to smile when the lens is pointed in her direction. By the fourth year she her face relaxes into into expressions that seem to serious for such a young age. Perhaps a reflection of her mother's verbal direction ("neutral background, close-up of face, look serious") her "seriousness" seems to be something she grows into as she ages into her teen years.

By 9 or 10 Louisa seems to be shaping her own identity and self-representation apart from her mother. Her hair styles vary and blank spaces appear in the grids where a Monday photo was missed. By the last year, the 18th, only 12 images appear in the first few months until finally the ritual is broken.

In some ways, this work is a display of a coerced collaboration that even Louise has questioned. "I have asked myself whether my mother had the right to use me as an object in this way." But she adds, "Had she waited until I had been able to make that decision for myself, my life portrait wouldn't exist." She later mentions the fictional nature set by the parameters. "When I look at this child in the process of growing up, I see a person who is too serious. Although I know my mother wanted to avoid the artificial cheerfulness of common photographs, I think she should have depicted me true to my respective moods."

This book was produced as a catalog to accompany a show at the Galerie Fotohof in Austria and it does a great job in presenting the work in a huge over-sized form which is necessary to full see the grids and the individual photos. It is cleanly designed and includes a short essay by Annette Michelson and a short text from Louise looking back on her experience with the project.

Photo albums often have the effect of piecing together the time-line of a life in fits and starts that skip vast spans of time. This project is about the tight flow of time but more importantly for me, it is tainted with melancholy once the gaps in the grids start to appear. The bond implied by the structure shifts as most parent / child relationships will, and the silence of those gaps make it apparent that Louise has created a life apart from her mother. This series seems to be one mother's way to resist that change. An act of anticipated desperation presented as art.

Buy at Fotohof

William Henry Fox Talbot by Geoffrey Batchen

For one of the guys who invented photography, William Henry Fox Talbot is only represented in my library by way of one object. It is a portfolio of a dozen loose gravure plates which was published by Electra Editrice in 1980 and frankly, my Talbot portfolio has been viewed many fewer times than the Edweard Muybridge or Lewis Caroll editions that I own from the same series. With the rapid advances to the medium it is often hard to look back and get excited by an image of a wall that has barely registered onto paper or a piece of lace that was laid directly onto some light sensitive paper but a recent book from Geoffrey Batchen on Talbot and his practice energizes these early stepping stones of image making.

The invention of photography is shared by several from Johann Heinrich Schulze, who as far back as the 1720s discovered that silver nitrate darkened with exposure to light, to Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphry Davy who in the early 19th century were making photograms but weren't able to arrest the development process. Joseph Nicéphore Niepce made the first known photograph in 1826 at the same time that Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot were working out their own photo processes. Daguerre's announcement of his method of making a positive image on a silver plate took a bit of the wind out of Talbot's sails as Talbot had worked on his experiments in silence years many years before any public awareness of his advances.

What puts Talbot ahead of the others for me is his patented process that allowed photographic illustrations to be included in books. His Pencil of Nature (1844-46), a description of his process illustrated with 24 original prints is considered to be the first photo book.

Batchen's book William Henry Fox Talbot published by Phaidon is a fine tribute to this early pioneer.

With the possibilities open in those early years, Talbot shows himself to be truly curious to a wide variety of descriptions; from portraits to still lifes and from photomicrographs of crystals and plants, to pictures that foreshadow photography's ability to still motion. One interesting example is his "A Cascade of Spruce Needles" (1839). Essentially a contact image of spruce needles but their arrangement implies a pattern of falling needles.

In the 1830s, Talbot would leave home-made cameras lying around his estate during the long periods required to make even the thinnest of exposures; his wife Constance referred to them as "mouse-traps." These mouse-traps caught low angle views of tree groves and rooflines that are barely record onto the paper negative and are represented in the final image through a wonderful haze of chemical imperfection.

William Henry Fox Talbot as a book is a nearly perfect package for these great specimens. The paper is beautiful, the printing is extremely well done, and the final touches of the cover tip-on image and clean design add a modern elegance. The most enjoyable trait is Batchen's caption paragraphs that accompany each image.

Talbot deserves to be noticed especially by book-lovers. He invented the form. If you can't have the Pencil of Nature then this may be the next best thing.

Book Available Here (William Henry Fox Talbot)

South East by Mark Steinmetz

My copy of Mark Steinmetz's book from 2006, South Central, is getting a bit worn. His collection of skillfully made photographs of Knoxville residents and roadside discoveries doesn't sit on my shelf long enough to gather much dust. He is a photographer whose work asks to be revisited - and for the observant - it offers up a little more with each viewing.

Mark has a new book from Nazraeli called South East and this book could be seen as adding another chapter to his exploration of people and place.

The first thing one notices about South East if you've seen South Central, is that they follow the same exact size, design, and construction. They are twins. The similarities do not end with these physical attributes but extend to the photographs too. Not to be mistaken for a suggestion of repetition - I could look at stacks of Steinmetz's photographs for days and not tire - but this is a continuation of the tenor of South Central.

Again Steinmetz brings us up close to the strangers he meets and photographs during his walks through Athens, Georgia and other southeastern towns; a girl with her hand to her cheek looks coyly into his camera looking through a thick mane of hair; a black man stands awkwardly near a parking lot while the world is bulldozed behind him; a young man falls asleep in some overgrown shrubbery and re-emerges on the facing page twenty hard-lived years later as a weather beaten Rip Van Winkle.

I had described some of Steinmetz's photographs before as describing people in transition (5B4 May, 15, 2007). His subjects decide to sit at a roadside or in spaces that wouldn't normally invite relaxation, yet they don't seem as concerned with discomfort as we may be. In one a young man lays writhing on a thin stretch of sidewalk between two spans of asphalt for reasons unknown. In another, a boy decides to sit in the weeds along a roadside and puff into a white balloon.

Through someone else's camera, these descriptions may seem forced or even contrived to the point of self-consciousness but Steinmetz's descriptions do not rely on obvious ploys to gain acceptance. As Peter Galassi writes in his introduction, "Indeed the hallmark of Steimetz's work - the quality that makes us trust his testimony - may be the unblinking constancy with which his photographs solicit grave interest in particular people without claiming unearned intimacy or insight."

As in South Central, animals play an interesting role in South East. They both belong and don't belong. Most are strays that, like the people around them, find their stomping grounds where others do not frequent. Also, they stand apart much like the photographer himself who belongs (Athens is Steinmetz's hometown) yet he is always an outsider as his camera and painful attention to detail are working beyond the notice of his subjects. A very young girl in a flower dress steps into a large pair of adult sized white shoes unconcerned with what the viewer will inevitably see as a set of phallic bicycle grips standing upright next to her feet. Again, Steinmetz doesn't hammer you with small details like the bike grips. They are present but left out of the spotlight for us to discover over time. As is the figure of a man that appears in the background of that same image. As is the tapestry of of wood and fiberglass screening that makes up the porch the young girl stands in front of. There seems to be little left in the frame that doesn't imply meaning.

South East, like South Central, is a full experience and both books together offer the fruits of unique talent who exists beyond the glitz and glamour of much of today's contrivances. They show just how extraordinary and meaningful the ordinary world can be if you have trust and allow it to reveal itself to you.

Buy online at Nazraeli

Book Available Here (South Central)

Aaron Siskind and Louis Sullivan: The Institute of Design Photo Section Project by Jeffrey Plank

In the early 1952, Aaron Siskind and his advanced photography students at the Institute of Design undertook a group project to document the architecture of Louis Sullivan. By 1954 they had photographed over 60 buildings and from the hundreds of photographs taken, 126 were chosen by Siskind for exhibition at the Institute. A new book from William Stout Publishers called Aaron Siskind and Louis Sullivan: The Institute of Design Photo Section Project presents the story and work behind this monumental achievement in architectural photography.

I am writing about this book because I am quite surprised at how much I have enjoyed its company. The draw was Aaron Siskind's name, whose photography I have liked since art school, but upon receipt of the book - and knowing nothing of this project beforehand - I was initially confused to find it mostly filled with the work of his students and not the master himself. One might expect work that the work of his students would be obviously of lesser quality but I find a pleasant surprise with quite the opposite here. Siskind and his students for the most part blend into one vision that is hard to discern one from the other. James Blair, Asoa Doi, Len Gittleman, Leon Lewandowski, Alvin Loginsky and Richard Nickel contribute work that together amounts to a great portrait of Sulivan's constructions. One student that stands out as exceptional and an equal of Siskind in terms of architectural work is Richard Nickel.

Nickel became a student at the Institute using his GI Bill benefits after a stint in the army. His talents were quickly recognized by Harry Callahan and Siskind and he was put in charge of the project. Nickel's obsession with Sullivan would eventually lead him to discovering 38 unknown commissions that Sullivan had undertaken.

The project was in full swing at a moment when many of Sullivan's buildings were being demolished and this pushed Nickel's and the others to work quickly to document the changing face of Chicago. Becoming a passionate spokesman for architectural preservation, Nickel would often get into clashes with demolition crews and developers as he was photographing the buildings. In 1972, his final act was to unknowingly enter the demolition site of Sullivan's 1893 Stock Exchange Building intending to salvage some ornament work from the wreckage. The trading floor collapsed around him and he was killed. Nickel, in the short span of not quite two decades, proved to be an exceptional architectural photographer.

The exhibit mounted in 1954 on eight large-scale panels in an auditorium in the Institute was the largest on Sullivan to date. Even though the project was meant to be a "complete visual documentary," the exhibit included only 35 of the buildings. The arrangement was not one of chronology or building type but with concern to more photographic relationships among perspectives, scale and an avoidance of repetition. The demolition of many of Sullivan's buildings would mark this exhibition and project as a unique accomplishment that could not be repeated.

Aaron Siskind and Louis Sullivan: The Institute of Design Photo Section Project is cleanly designed and beautifully printed and I appreciate the quality of construction. Jeffrey Plank, the Associate Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Virginia authors an extensive and informative essay on the photo project and exhibition.

Aaron Siskind and Louis Sullivan: The Institute of Design Photo Section Project

Three books by Ernesto Bazan

The first issue of Doubletake magazine from the Center for Documentary Studies at DukeUniversity featured a suite of photographs by Ernesto Bazan made in Cuba in the early 1990s. At the time I was impressed by what I saw as energetic and smart street work made even more seductive by my increasing interest in the world that exists outside of the United States. Photographers like Gilles Peress, Carl DeKeyzer and Larry Towell (with whom Bazan has a lot in common photographically) were increasingly on my radar. Dekeyzer's Homo Sovieticus and Towell's El Salvador were two in particular that I spent a good deal of time with and I found a common denominator with the few images of Bazan's that kept him on my list of photographers to keep an eye out for.

A few years later while in Paris, I found a copy of Passing Through for the equivalent of around 4 US dollars. Passing Through was published by Peliti Associati in 1992 and as the title suggests, the book is a collection of Bazan's photographs made in many locations. New York, Mexico, Cambodia, Pakistan, Haiti, Turkey, India, China, Tunisia, Japan, and Bazan's own Palermo. The locations and people are described in his signature grainy black and white style that embraces blur and unsharpness. The best of which handle the elements with a grace and lyricism - the unsuccessful seem forced and exhausted by all of their energy spent on cliché.

Although I like the collection, it does, like many books structured in similar ways, suffer from the randomness that comes with a "greatest hits" assemblage. The randomness is minimized by the title, Passing Through, which conveniently gives reason for the continent skipping where one page we are in Haiti and the next, a place called Shiprock in the United States.

What I like about the book beyond many of the photos is the size and sequencing of the images which lends to a graceful flow. The design handles the photos by running most of them across the gutter. Thankfully the designer has shifted the pictures left and right depending on where the division would land and the binding allows the book to sit flat when opened so the gutter becomes less of a distraction.

I haven’t seen listings for Passing Through on ABE or Amazon but there are listings in France through the FNAC chain of stores although for a rather inflated price of 32 euros.

In 2004, the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University held a small show of large-scale digital prints by Bazan called Italiani d'America. These photographs are from Bazan's earliest extended project photographing the Italian American community in New York. Accompanying the show, a small catalog was published containing ten black and white photographs.

This show and catalog contains the best of the images from this extended project and one aspect that is more noticeable here than in Passing Through is a tendency towards heavy handedness in Bazan's printing. He or his printer excessively dodge and burn while manipulating the prints and the result is an unevenness that shows the printer's hand (so to speak). People's faces are dodged almost pale white while the surrounding tonalities sink into pits of black. This kind of manipulation is common to photographers like Christina Garcia Rodero and Sebastio Salgado who insist on unnatural looking darkening of skies where printer's "halos" appear around the figures. For me this always removes me from the photograph and gives more attention to the process which, as a professional printer myself, is simply poor technique.

This catalog was not for sale but given away free at the show. The ten photographs are printed on long sheets of card stock which are assembled as an accordion fold. This accordion folded horizontal booklet is housed in an outer folder of tan cardstock with printed titles that adds elegance to the whole package.

Bazan's latest book is the self published BazanCuba. Where Passing Through was of a photographer on a stop and go tour of the world, Cuba is Bazan settling into 14 years of life on the island of Fidel and the embargo.

In 1992 Bazan first visited Cuba on a package tour entering through Mexico and return visits would eventually lead to his finding a wife and starting a family there. His afternoons of photographing and teaching photography workshops would draw him to discover the streets and people of the island that probably could have only been obtained through vast amount of patience and persistence. The result is 118 photographs in this thick, one foot square book.

Cuba, like India, has stood as a rite of passage for many documentary photographers although most choose color as their descriptive choice - Cuba's light is strong and color saturated. Bazan however has gone to the opposite extreme. His photographs are devoid of light and his dark grey-scale tones reduce the natural color scheme down to dense blacks and white that, at its brightest, is rendered chalky grey. His choice of amplifying dark tonalities turns the island into a phantasmagoria of weathered characters and worn buildings where any stray highlight seems hard pressed to stay unsmudged.

In one, a man carries a clear glass bottle of water on his shoulder that traps the image of decrepit buildings across the square like a ship in a bottle - a visual treat set amongst ruin. In another, a man carries on his head a pig on a platter while three young girls, one with a hoola-hoop play in the background. Others have Bazan's camera weaving through the streets and upon unspecified ritual that seem trapped in the dark corners of a cellar. Figures emerge from the black and the density of tone is in stark contrast Bazan's apparent enthusiasm for the place - perhaps metaphor for the inability to break the human spirit and perseverance during the "special period," Fidel's euphemism for the embargo. This is his Cuba, Bazan's Cuba. A fiction posing as a documentary that tells us we should love what we are seeing as he obviously does.

Like Passing Through, in the best pictures, metaphors are strong and the photographs interesting beyond their visual energy and in the worst, he drags us through the same tired clichés that immediately come to mind when we think of Cuba. Do we really need another low angle photo of a bunch of men playing dominoes? Or an old woman smoking an over-sized cigar? Or a portrait of a guy holding floppy tobacco leaves? Thankfully he somehow avoided including sugar cane cutters.

Bazan seems to experiment with lenses wider than the 28mm and the results splay the perspectives which almost always contain someone looming into the frame at an absurdly close distance. These have so much distortion and attention getting manner of the lens that it leaves me further from the subject. Those photos seem to be about less the subject and more about the photographer proving levels of comfort with the subjects. I have had a problem in the past with some of Eugene Richards’s mannerisms and in Bazan I would point to the same thing.

BazanCuba was self-published by Ernesto's new book publishing arm called Bazan Photos Publishing out of Brooklyn, NY and some of the design of this title highlights the pitfalls of working on self-published projects. Namely my biggest critique would come with the use of text and the typography. Bazan starts the book with huge quotes justified into clunky blocks to type that cross the gutter in extra long lines. The first by Rilke is quite possibly the worst, illegible, headache-inducing use of type I have seen. Rilke's quote is about how art does not follow usual measures of time, and ends with 'Patience is everything' - an appropriate quote considering photography's elusive nature but unfortunately who ever set the type here is testing everyone’s patience. The next pages have the same treatment given to quotes by Robert Frank, John Szarkowski and Raymond Carver - although much shorter that the Rilke, all could have been left out entirely. Those quotes are followed by pages covered with contact sheets. In my opinion, this is where the book should have started.

For Vicky Goldberg's essay at the back called Cuba: A Love Story you will need to keep the bottle of Tylenol handy for that too. The line length is far too long and the spacing between lines is so tight for the font size that I literally gave up trying to follow along after several attempts to get through the essay.

Bazan's also includes several pages of diary-like entries reproduced in his scrawling handwriting - he begins with, 'I look at my contact sheets. A feeling of utter depression seizes me. I sense a huge loss within me. And what's wrong is that there is nothing I can do about it. I want to cry in the silence of the empty room. A reminder of how difficult it is to take a damned good picture. I can only accept the verdict as a sentenced prisoner. EB.' The biggest pitfall when working on your own book is you don't have a strong editor hanging over you that would tell you when you are embarrassing yourself. ‘Verdict as a sentenced prisoner’??? Bazan's handwritten texts do not get any less embarrassing in their tenor. 'When I see beautiful photographs, my heart smiles.' 'I had strongly desired Cuba, as if longing for a woman that you meet only once and can't get out of your mind. I’m almost certain to have lived there in another life' Vicky Goldberg even gets into the spirit relaying a story about a young Bazan, 'At age seventeen, he had a dream in which he clearly heard the words, "You need to be a photographer." The next morning he announced to his parents that that was what he was going to do.' All of this after he starts the book with a quote from Raymond Carver stating, 'Everything is important in a story, every word, every punctuation mark.' Like Carver, Bazan needs the help of a great editor.

The other criticism I would point to is his insistence on the excessive dodging and burning in the prints. In BazanCuba it is out of control and has to be seen to be believed. Personal vision sure, I am certain that is his choice, but the manipulation just builds walls between me and the work. (Note: I took most of my comp scans from Ernesto’s website and they are a lot more open and less manipulated than what you will find in the book.)

Good books are hard to make yet I hate to see 14 years of hard work degraded simply because of the package and some poor design choices. The key to success was with the very quote that starts the book; I sense that somehow Bazan himself overlooked the part that reads, 'With deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born.' That would have helped, along with a aid of a good book designer.

BazanCuba will be for sale via Internet and through some specialized bookstores starting in July, 2008 at $90 per copy + shipping.

www.bazanphotos.com

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)