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photo eye BOOKLIST
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the international magazine for fine-art photography books WINTER 2005
$5
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Signed Books
Joseph Mills The Loves of the Poets
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NAZRAELI PRESS • www.nazraeli.com 2006 Calendar by Michael Kenna To mark the 10th anniversary of our ever-popular Michael Kenna Wall Calendar, we are raising the bar for 2006. This year’s calendar was printed by a specialty team at Toppan Printing in Tokyo, which is also responsible for production of the artist’s elegant new monograph, Hokkaido. The calendar, like the book itself, is printed on an exclusive, uncoated, natural Japanese paper using “Daido black” ink. This process sets a new standard for sharpness, extended tonal range, and richness especially suited to Michael Kenna’s work. Our 2006 Michael Kenna Wall Calendar features 13 images of Japan, a number of which are published here for the first time. The print run is limited to 2,000 copies for international distribution; as always, early orders are encouraged. 14 x 18, 13 plates. Wire-O $24.95
é by Masao Yamamoto
Eduardo del Valle & Mirta Gomez Fried Waters
Masao Yamamoto’s gorgeous new monograph, é, provides an ideal forum for his exquisite installations of intimate, dreamlike photographs. Working from a Zen philosophy of “emptiness”, Yamamoto makes images that are essentially vignettes of nature and our intersection with it, ruminating over the passage of time and memory. His finished prints are miniature treasures— averaging 3 × 5 inches and smaller—that are toned, stained, torn, marked, rubbed and creased. One has an experience of looking at a group of found vintage photographs, telling a familiar yet unique story. Printed on uncoated Japanese paper in an oversized format, é comprises 59 photographs on 21 double-pages, including a double gatefold that opens to 52 x 16 inches. This is Yamamoto’s fifth title with Nazraeli Press; A Box of Ku, Nakazora, Omizuao and The Path of Green Leaves have all sold out. é is limited to 2,500 copies, with a special edition of 150 copies with 3 original prints, numbered and signed by the artist and presented in a clamshell box. Both editions are expected to sell out quickly; early orders are encouraged. 13 x 16,42 pages, 59 four-color plates. Hardcover $75.00/$750.00
Anthony Hernandez Everything
Interiors by Robert Adams Robert Adams recently came across a group of 24 pictures he made in Denver in the early 1970s. These photographs, which informed his later work, are published here for the first time. They offer new insight into the photographer’s way of seeing and thinking about the human condition, the profound influences of which are still being felt generations later. Interiors 1973-74 comprises 24 duotone plates printed on unbound sheets of heavy matte coated stock, presented in a cloth portfolio and limited to 1,000 copies. A special edition of 100 copies, numbered and signed by the artist and presented in a clamshell box, is also available. Advance orders are encouraged. Collated sheets in a custom-made cloth covered folder, 11 x 14, 28 pages, 24 duotone plates.
Katherine Adams Couturier Dreams
Cloth Folder $75.00/$250.00
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New Location for The Photography Show! 7th Regiment Armory • Park Avenue and 67th Street • New York, New York
February 10-12, 2006 The Association of International Photography Art Dealers From daguerreotype to digital, AIPAD members have consistently been at the forefront of defining fine art photography. The Photography Show, sponsored by AIPAD, has become an annual event essential to all who are interested in fine art photography.
The Photography Show ‘O6 sponsored by
Save the Date!
www.aipad.com
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PARIS
LOOKING AT ATGET
Photographs from a Time That Was
Peter Barberie
David Travis This charming tribute to the “City of Light” and the photography it inspired draws on the remarkable collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It includes works by Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Henri CartierBresson, and others. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago 74 duotones $24.95
A unique look at the work of Eugène Atget, one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose unequaled records of Paris inspired generations of later photographers. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art 14 b/w + 129 color illus. $45.00
THE JEWISH IDENTITY PROJECT
SHOMEI TOMATSU
New American Photography
Skin of the Nation
Susan Chevlowe
Sandra S. Phillips, Leo Rubinfien, and John W. Dower
With contributions by Joanna Lindenbaum and Ilan Stavans
This richly illustrated book is the first major Englishlanguage study of the work of the revered Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu.
Featuring ten photographic and video projects by emerging and mid-career artists, all commissioned by The Jewish Museum, this fascinating book presents a range of provocative discussions of the nature of Jewish identity in 21st-century America. Published in association with The Jewish Museum, New York 37 b/w + 138 color illus. $40.00 paperback with flaps
Won third place in the 2004 New York Book Show Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 131 duotone + 28 color illus. $45.00
THE ART OF FREDERICK SOMMER
THE PERFECT MEDIUM
Photography, Drawing, Collage
Photography and the Occult
Essay by Keith F. Davis
Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit
Interview by Michael Torosian Chronology by April M. Watson
“This weighty new compendium is a real knockout. Beautifully designed, and with a masterly essay by Keith F. Davis, this book is the summation that Sommer’s work has deserved but never received.”—photoeye.com Winner of the 2005 Golden Light Award Book of the Year Distributed for the Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation 133 tritones + 28 duotones + 52 color illus. $65.00
The mesmerizing photographic history of occult phenomena, from levitations and apparitions to spectres, ghosts, and auras, is the subject of this fascinating book. 280 color illus. $65.00
YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
yalebooks.com
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NOTHING DIGITAL ABOUT IT
JERRY UELSMANN’s dreamlike images, made by layering negatives in the darkroom, conjure up Rene Magritte’s paintings, Carl Jung’s teachings, and Man Ray’s photographs. With this personal selection of his most compelling images from the early 1960s to the present, rediscover the work of an acknowledged American master.
Visit our Web site at www.bulfinchpress.com
Bulfinch Press Time Warner Book Group
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RICHARD MISRACH: CHRONOLOGIES FRAENKEL GALLERY/D.A.P.
ED RUSCHA: THEN & NOW STEIDL
Clothbound, 15 x 12 inches 280 pages/ 135 color $85 ISBN 1-933045-28-0
Slipcased, 17.75 x 12.5 inches 148 pages/ illustrated throughout $175 ISBN 3-86521-105-4
EDWARD BURTYNSKY: CHINA STEIDL
COLLIER SCHORR: JENS F. STEIDL/MACK
GREGORY CREWDSON HATJE CANTZ
Hardcover, 15 x 12 inches 180 pages/ 80 color $85 ISBN 3-86521-130-5
Clothbound, 9.5 x 11 inches 96 pages/ Illustrated throughout $250 ISBN 3-86521-156-9 Signed and Numbered Edition of 1000 Copies.
Hardcover, 11.75 x 10 inches 242 pages / 130 color $60 ISBN 3-7757-1622-x
ARI MARCOPOULOS: OUT & ABOUT DAMIANI
EIKOH HOSOE: KAMAITACHI APERTURE
Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.75 inches 200 pages/ 100 color and 100 b&w $65 ISBN 88-89431-13-x
Boxed, 12.5 x 15 inches 132 pages/ 40 tritones $350 ISBN 1-931788-80-4 Signed and Numbered Edition of 500 Copies.
SEMINA CULTURE: WALLACE BERMAN & HIS CIRCLE SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART/D.A.P.
LEE FRIEDLANDER: APPLES AND OLIVES FRAENKEL GALLERY/HASSELBLAD FOUNDATION
THE AGE OF ADOLESCENCE: JOSEPH STERLING PHOTOGRAPHS 1959-1964 GREYBULL PRESS
BYGONE DAYS: 1907-1957 PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN PENOR AND FAMILY D.A.P.
Clothbound, 14.75 x 10.75 inches 212 pages/ 175 color $85 ISBN 1-933045-23-x
Hardcover, 9.75 x 10.25 64 pages/ 55 tritone $45 ISBN 1-933045-32-9
Clothbound, 11 x 14 inches 102 pages/ 128 duotones $65 ISBN 0-9727788-5-3
Hardcover, 9 x 11 inches 384 pages / 242 color and 250 b&w $50 ISBN 1-933045-10-8
H I R O S H I S U G I MOTO HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
Hardcover, 10 x 11 inches 368 pages/ 130 tritones and 45 color $85 ISBN 3-7757-1640-8
available at fine bookstores, museum shops, and online services. To view the complete d•a•p catalogue, please visit www.artbook.com
distributed art publishers BOOKS ON ART AND CULTURE
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photo eye
the international magazine for fine-art photography books WINTER 2005
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BOOKLIST
CONTENTS
Winter 2005
VOLUME 27 // ISSUE NO. 4
46
12
Detail from Blast, #5707, by Naoya Hatakeyama
Detail from The Perfect Medium, published by Yale University Press
10
About Our Cover
Renewed Topographics. A trilogy of Lewis Baltz’s seminal works. » BY AVIS CARDELLA
12
Survey of New Books
The quarterly survey of the best new photography books. » BY VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS
32 Fried Waters
Yucatecan salt harvesting opens the door to the nature of change. »AN INTERVIEW WITH EDUARDO DEL VALLE AND MIRTA GOMEZ
38 THEN & NOW
Ed Ruscha returns to photography and his book-making roots. » BY ALEX SWEETMAN
40 Publishing the
The acclaimed column on publishing photography books. »BY MARY VIRGINIA SWANSON AND DARIUS HIMES
Photography Book 46 Raw Materials
Transformed
Hatakeyama’s first solo U.S. show invites dialogue. »EXCERPTS FROM AN ESSAY BY YASUFUMI NAKAMORI
ON OUR COVER Lewis Baltz, detail of Laguna Beach, 1970. Courtesy RAM Publications
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
DEAR READERS, I was recently reminded of that greatest of tragic and epic poems, Homer’s Iliad. Achilles is indisputedly the central figure of the work, and yet, as you’ll recall, he literally sits out of the action—the battle between Achaeans and Trojans that rages on the plain of Troy—until very near to the end of the book. Then, moved by the death of Patroclus, he suddenly bursts to action, manifesting all the qualities that befit one who is described over and over as “godlike.” How is it that he is so central to this piece and yet he doesn’t do anything for nearly four-fifths of the book? The answer partially lies, I suspect, in the reality and value of inaction, particularly when it is based on principle. Achilles has chosen what he sees as an appropriate response to the situation presented—namely the affront to his honor by Agamemnon. Great art is often made in response to situations that life presents. And the editing process—of choosing to represent this over that, to act on this and not on that—is what refines our questions. The artists in this issue all have posed lasting questions. Without questions, we wouldn’t know what to search for. With warm regards,
Darius Himes, Editor
darius@photoeye.com
CONTRIBUTORS AVIS CARDELLA Avis Cardella is a freelance writer specializing in the areas of photography, art and pop culture. Her work has appeared in various publications, including American Photo, ArtReview, Picture, Surface and British Vogue. A born and bred New Yorker, she currently resides in Paris, France.
degree in the history of art at Cornell University, he lectures for the Adult and Academic Programs of the Museum of Modern Art. ALAN RAPP Alan Rapp is a San Francisco–based design and photography-book editor. His architecture criticism appears in San Francisco magazine.
PHIL HARRIS Phil Harris is a photographer, teacher and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. In 2000, he published a twenty-year photographic retrospective book, Fact Fiction Fabrication.
GEORGE SLADE George Slade is a Minnesota-based historian, curator and advisor on matters photographic, and a long-term photo-bibliophile. He is also the Artistic Director of the Minnesota Center for Photography.
MARK HAWORTH-BOOTH Mark Haworth-Booth is a Visiting Professor of Photography at the University of the Arts, London. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
MARY VIRGINIA SWANSON Mary Virginia Swanson is an author, educator and consultant committed to helping photographers advance their careers. Her website is www.mvswanson.com. She lives and works in Tucson and New York City.
LARISSA LECLAIR Larissa Leclair is a photographer, writer and traveler. Her work focuses on visual history and culture, and international photography. She lives in the D.C. area.
ALEX SWEETMAN Alex Sweetman is the Director of Media Arts at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
YASUFUMI NAKAMORI Yasufumi Nakamori is a New York–based photography historian and curator. While working on his doctoral 8 photo-eye Booklist Winter 2005
DENISE WOLFF Denise Wolff is a writer, editor and photographer living in New York City. She is a regular contributor to the photo-eye Booklist.
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DIRECTOR/PUBLISHER RIXON REED rick@photoeye.com EDITOR, PHOTO-EYE BOOKLIST DARIUS HIMES darius@photoeye.com BOOK DIVISION MANAGER / PHOTOGRAPHER'S SHOWCASE MELANIE MCWHORTER melanie@photoeye.com RECEIVING AND SHIPPING DANIEL FULLER daniel@photoeye.com
Kate Breakey Still Lifes December 2nd, 2005–January 28th, 2006
PURCHASING IAN RODRIGUEZ ian@photoeye.com BOOKTEASE/GALLERY ASSISTANT VICKI BOHANNON vicki@photoeye.com AUCTIONS ERIC MILES eric@photoeye.com EDITORIAL ASSISTANT JENNY GOLDBERG booklist@photoeye.com ASSOCIATE GALLERY DIRECTOR JOSLIN VAN ARSDALE joslin@photoeye.com GALLERY ASSOCIATE KARA PRIMOMO kara@photoeye.com GALLERY ASSOCIATE SUMMER HOECKEL summer@photoeye.com
PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY PHOTO-EYE BOOKS & PRINTS 376 GARCIA STREET SANTA FE, NM 87501 TEL 505 983 6172 FAX 505 988 4487 BOOKLIST@PHOTOEYE.COM SUBSCRIPTION INFO ONE YEAR (4 ISSUES) $20/US, $36/CANADA, MEXICO $56/ALL OTHER COUNTRIES (1ST CLASS MAIL) BY CHECK (US FUNDS DRAWN ON A US BANK) OR VISA, MASTERCARD, AMEX. DISCOVER. VISIT OUR WEBSITE: WWW.PHOTOEYE.COM/BOOKLIST MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE: 954 772 6659 954 772 6823 954 772 6848
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photo eye Gallery 370 Garcia Street Santa Fe, NM 87501 USA 505.988.5159 gallery@photoeye.com photoeye.com/katebreakey
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ABOUT OUR COVER
THE CURRENT FANFARE around color photography
Renewed Topographics A trilogy of Lewis Baltz’s seminal works. By AVIS CARDELLA
10 photo-eye Booklist Winter 2005
from the 70s has left me hankering for a healthy dose of the era’s stunning black-and-white. So the arrival of Lewis Baltz: The Tract Houses/The Prototype Works/New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (RAM/Steidl/Whitney), an exquisite three-volume slipcased presentation of this American-born photographer’s three earliest works, is just what the doctor ordered. While Baltz did eventually move into color photography later in his career, his early-career documentation of the changing American landscape of the 70s relied on the meticulous control and formality that only the black-andwhite print could offer. But, as one of the publication’s two essayists, Sheryl Conkelton, explains, what set apart Baltz’s depictions of stark, monotonous man-made environments—parking lots, industrial parks, tract houses—was that “they maintained narrative content even as they foregrounded form as a newly different signifier of meaning.” His sticking with the black-and-white paradigm may have been a “clear reference to modernism,” but ultimately, it was Baltz’s subject matter that separated this early work from other photographic precedents of the time. Baltz chose to photograph the man-made landscape he saw emerging around him. In the late 60s and 70s, California, where Baltz grew up, was a hotbed for the kind of modern architectural nightmares that have now come to define suburban sprawl. These anonymous, repetitive and often cheaply built structures, defined by their sameness, not only became his subjects, but gave form to his presentation as well. Baltz photographed The Tract Houses and The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California as series, exhibiting them in wall grids designed to mimic a capitalistic world being increasingly mapped out in lines and grids. It was this gesture that ended up defining Baltz as a groundbreaker in conceptual photography. But it was influential gallery owner Leo Castelli, who initially recognized the significance of Baltz’s work. He purchased and showed The Tract Houses in late 1971, a time when the phrase “conceptual photography” was barely on anyone’s lips. Castelli, and other East Coast gallerists, were the first to forge a close link between art and photography in the 70s with their acquisition of works from talents such as Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Robert Adams. It was four years later, in 1975, that Baltz, along with his peers the Bechers and Adams, participated in a traveling photography exhibition titled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Environment. Baltz showed his series The New Industrial Parks, depicting the poured-concrete foundations and breeze-block walls of emerging warehouse structures, car lots and loading docks, all barren and
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Laguna Beach, 1970
foreboding of spiritual ennui. The exhibit closed, the term “new topographics” had been coined and Baltz’s work began to be identified as architectural, “topographic” pictures. Thirty years hence, being confronted with this body of work today, I’m again drawn to Baltz’s tenacity. I just can’t stop looking at the tediously technically perfected black-and-white prints. The shadowy walls of his The Tract Houses, and the inky black car-lots of The New Industrial Parks, appear to still hold mysteries of a future that has already happened. Perhaps Adam D. Weinberg, of the Whitney Museum of American Art, begins to explain when he writes: “Baltz’s low-key, understated and elemental works reveal subjects that are inexorably temporary, yet they have an inevitability, an inscrutability, a permanence, even a stateliness. His images demand more than contemplation and delectation, they demand reckoning.” Lewis Baltz (The Tract Houses, The Prototype Works, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California). Threevolume set. Photographs by Lewis Baltz. RAM/ Steidl/Whitney Museum of American Art, Santa Monica, 2005. Clothbound with a printed dustjacket. 292 pp., 133 duotone illustrations, 11 x 11 $225.00
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A Survey of New Books CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: PHIL HARRIS, DARIUS HIMES, LARISSA LECLAIR, ALAN RAPP, GEORGE SLADE, DENISE WOLFF
BOOKS REVIEWED, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: p. 13 STEPHEN SHORE, AMERICAN SURFACES GREGORY CREWDSON, GREGORY CREWDSON p. 15 STEVEN B. SMITH, THE WEATHER AND A PLACE TO LIVE DAVID GOLDBLATT, INTERSECTIONS p. 16 THE PERFECT MEDIUM JOAN FONTCUBERTA, LANDSCAPE WITHOUT MEMORIES p. 17 LIFE & AFTERLIFE IN BENIN p. 18 JOSEPH MILLS, THE LOVES OF THE POETS p. 19 ELLEN GALLAGHER, MURMUR JEFF WALL, CATALOGUE RAISONNE 1978–2004 p. 21 ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ, THE EARLY YEARS KATY GRANNAN, MODEL AMERICAN p. 22 KIKUJI KAWADA, THE MAP p. 23 RICHARD MISRACH, CHRONOLOGIES p. 24 JERRY UELSMANN, OTHER REALITIES ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN, SAGA NICHOLAS KAHN & RICHARD SELESNICK, CITY OF SALT p. 25 STUART ROME, FOREST p. 26 TANYA MARCUSE, UNDERGARMENTS AND ARMOR MARK KLETT AND BYRON WOLFE, YOSEMITE IN TIME p. 27 KIM STRINGFELLOW, GREETINGS FROM THE SALTON SEA p. 28 THE OPEN BOOK p. 29 DAVID GOLDES, WATER BEING WATER p. 30 STEVEN KATZMAN, THE FACE OF FORGIVENESS BOB THALL, AT CITY’S EDGE p. 31 DEREK HENDERSON, THE TERRIBLE BOREDOM OF PARADISE
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From American Surfaces, by Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore | American Surfaces
Gregory Crewdson | Gregory Crewdson
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN SHORE.
EDITED BY STEPHAN BERG. ESSAYS BY MARTIN
INTRODUCTION BY BOB NICKAS.
HENTSCHEL, MARTIN HOCHLEITNER, URS STAHEL
Phaidon Press, London, 2005. Designed by Untitled. Printed in China. Paper-wrapped boards with dustjacket in a photo-illustrated paper bag. 224 pp., 300 color illustrations, 8¼ × 9½ $55.00
AND STEPHAN BERG.
After the Factory and on the cusp of his view camera peregrinations, Stephen Shore snapped hundreds of pictures while motoring across the American land in 1972 and 1973. Shot with a Rollei, these pictures dryly capture the ordinary moments and things of small-town milieu on the open road, and that poetic terminus, the motel. In this sense American Surfaces is a practice run for the more intensive series of trips he would soon after take to create the large-format pictures that would comprise Uncommon Places. The photographs are reproduced as they were first exhibited in 1972, at standard 35 mm print size, with a mesmerizing density. The concern of Americana itself—an investigation of how the national vernacular succumbs to an accelerating anonymity—is always present, right where the pictures purport to remain, on the surface. But taken just as a travelogue or a kaleidoscopic portrait of American identity in transition would ignore the discipline the pictures pursue. Almost all of them rigorously follow the Shore program, seizing similar vantages of small-scale architecture, shop windows, fridges, flashbulb-sudden portraits, scummy toilets, diner food, televisions, kitsch paintings, and the occasional odd detail. And for all their regulation, they are also disarmingly hilarious. It’s hard not to laugh at their poker faces, even as they interrogate the notion of stereotypical images and all that. The quavering between the academic exploration of loss of identity and the impulse to restrain cracking up is the mode for the new era he helped usher in. ALAN RAPP
Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2005. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 200 pp., 80 color and 100 b&w illustrations, 11¾ × 10 $55.00 In his own words, Gregory Crewdson says, “I am drawn to photography by some irrational need to create an image of a perfect world. I strive to create that perfection through obsessive detailing, through a weird kind of realist vision. When the mystery of the photography emerges, my irrational need to create a perfect world meets up with some kind of failure to do so. This collision between failure and compulsion to make something perfect creates an anxiety that interests me.” Crewdson creates a world of perpetual loneliness, of lucid dreams based in reality but not real. The subjects seem detached, alone, isolated. The title of Stephan Berg ’ s essay, “The Dark Side of the American Dream,” encapsulates Crewdson’s vision. This wonderfully produced book is published in conjunction with the first European retrospective of Crewdson’s work. It showcases twenty years of images, ranging from his days as a graduate student to the present. (Samplings of Crewdson’s early work can be seen in his MFA portfolio housed at Yale University’s Arts of the Book collection.) Gregory Crewdson features selections from his six major bodies of work: “Early Work,” “Natural Wonder,” Hover”
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From The Weather and a Place to Live, by Steven B. Smith
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“Twilight,” “Dream House,” and “Beneath the Roses,” as well as behind the scenes production stills. Regarding Crewdson’s latest series, ‘Beneath the Roses,’ Katy Siegel says, "[F]or the first time he expands his vision from the individual, private home to the public, shared spaces of commerce and sociality. In his effort to realize a subjective vision, Crewdson, amazingly, has grasped a social reality, just as the Hollywood films he has taken as his model embody enough reality to speak meaningfully to their audiences.” If you were to own any book by Crewdson, whether a longtime admirer or new to his work, this would be the one. LARISSA LECLAIR
of Bill Owens’ subjects in Suburbia present in these images; Smith’s work falls in between, offering direct demonstrations of the clutzy, inept quality of growth without sense. Hambourg, who selected Smith for the award, places Smith in the lineage of Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins on the basis of his “breadth, formal elegance, and concision”; Smith leavens and updates that legacy with a healthy dose of New Documents’ social critique and New Topographics’ ironic engagement with the built environment. GEORGE SLADE
David Goldblatt | Intersections PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID GOLDBLATT. WITH AN
Steven B. Smith | The Weather
INTERVIEW BY MARK HAWORTH-BOOTH AND CONTRI-
and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West
BUTIONS BY CHRISTOPH DANELZIK-BRUGGEMANN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN B. SMITH.
Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2005. Editorial direction by Curt Holtz. Design by WIGEL. Printed by Passavia, Passau. Paper-wrapped boards with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 120 pp., 90 color illustrations, 13½ × 11½ $60.00
TEXT BY MARIA MORRIS HAMBOURG.
Duke University Press in association with CDS Books at the Center for Documentary Studies, Durham. Designed by DJ Stout and Julie Savasky, Pentagram Design, Austin. Printed by Stinehour Press, Lunenberg. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 128 pp., 80 duotones, 10 × 9 $39.95 On the heels of Larry Schwarm’s On Fire comes the second volume enabled by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Smith, a Utah native who now teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, grew up near Salt Lake City. His black-and-white, large-format photographs show the texture and topography of suburban sprawl in California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado over the last fifteen years. There’s a distinct appeal to these images, deriving in part from their historical value but also from their dead-on description of the headlong, heedless character of these developments. Smith captures the almost quaint (almost, if it weren't eating up land and resources at such alarming rates) incongruity of building against the odds in landscapes ill suited to such dense habitation (to habitation by much beyond lizards and cacti). The concept of Manifest Destiny has been reduced to the humble, futile aspirations of these domestic geometries attempting to tame the rough edges of nature, and bring it to heel on the property line and beside the picnic table (the spread on pages 86 and 87 offers a hilarious illustration of this). There’s none of the graceful power of Toshio Shibata’s images of Japanese civil engineering or the earnestness
AND MICHAEL STEVENSON.
David Goldblatt has photographed his birthplace, South Africa, since the late 1940s, during decades that have seen enormous injustice and significant evolution. Goldblatt’s photographs have always strived for daily examples of humanity under trying circumstances. A large section of his work, including portraits of miners and other laborers under the oppressions of the apartheid system of government, confronts the huge issues through specific, identifiable, close-up interactions with individuals. In his recent publications, however, Goldblatt peers deeper into the material culture and natural surroundings that may have given rise to, or acted as the stage for, his country’s inhospitable history. His 1998 book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, was released by Monacelli a publishing house known more for its books on architecture—which this was—than on photography. The new book, Intersections, shows Goldblatt’s use of color in his personal work, and an increased attention to broad landscapes, environmental portraits (including a series enigmatically titled “Municipal People,” showing the faces of South African politicians in their sterile, 21st-century settings) and urban settings suggestive of Lee Friedlander’s complex layering and visual cacophony.
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Anyone who has read or seen plays by Athol Fugard will instantly recognize the arid, overpowering Karoo desert Fugard’s characters are subject to; Nadine Gordimer is another important literary connection to Goldblatt, whose photographs in Intersections are both epic and intimate personal narratives, including his own, writ large. GEORGE SLADE
The Perfect Medium TEXT BY CLÉMENT CHÉROUX, ANDREAS FISCHER, PIERRE APRAXINE, DENIS CANGUILHEM AND SOPHIE SCHMIT. EDITED BY PATRICIA FIDLER AND MICHELLE KOMIE.
This catalogue is a revised edition of Le troisième oeil: La photographie et l’occulte, issued in conjunction with the exhibition held at la Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris, in 2004–05, and published by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, in 2004. American edition published by Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005. Cover design by Daphne Geismar. Book design by Clotilde Chevalier. Printed by Eurografica, Italy. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 288 pp., 280 color illustrations, 9 × 11 $65.00 Without knowing it, the world has been waiting for this book for a long, long time. What a treat it must have been for the curators of the traveling exhibition, from which the book is drawn, to delve into the hitherto demeaned field of “spirit photography.” The photographs have the freshness of a newly-plowed field, though they have been well known to the specialists who have accumulated and archived these images in special collections in New York, London and Paris. From the early days of the medium (pun intended), light sensitive materials have been used as “proof” of otherworldly phenomena, including auras, the movements of magnetic fluids in the living and the dead, ectoplasmic manifestations, spirit mediums’ ability to commune with the departed, levitation, thought projection, and so forth. Regardless of one’s beliefs, the sheer variety and ingenuity of the often crudely executed images are fascinating. From a 21st-century vantage point, the pictures read as some sort of century-long Euro-American conceptual art project. Less cynically, the existence of the whole field might be traced to short life expectancies, high infant mortality, and the pressing need for a generalized “scientific” basis for an afterlife. The poignancy of the ferocious battles fought between believers (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), charlatans
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From The Perfect Medium, published by Yale University Press.
and debunkers is laid out in detail in the lively text. But the real cream of the book is the imagery of mediums extruding ectoplasm, or in the throes of spiritual transport, the tracing of “vital fluids” on photographic plates, “thoughtography,” and on and on. Anyone who feels a twinge of nostalgia for the days when photographs were considered objective (The Pencil of Nature) will be unnerved to realize just how long photography has been praised as the light of Truth by some, at the very same time that it has been condemned by others for casting a shadow of deception. PHIL HARRIS
Joan Fontcuberta | Landscape without Memories PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOAN FONTCUBERTA. TEXT BY JOAN FONTCUBERTA AND GEOFFREY BATCHEN. EDITED BY LESLEY A. MARTIN.
Aperture, New York, 2005. Designed by Francesca Richer. Printed in Italy. Photo-illustrated paper over padded boards. 96 pp., 80 color illustrations, 11¾ × 8¾. $40.00
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Known for his elaborate photographic hoaxes that challenge our ideas of knowledge, Fontcuberta takes art and its bedrock, the landscape, to task as he examines what happens when they are subjected to scientific analysis. Using geographic software that builds photo-realistic landscapes from scanned data (such as maps), Fontcuberta enters scans of various landscape masterpieces to generate entirely altered geographies. Cézanne, Dali, Mondrian and Le Gray, among others, are subjected to the process that Fontcuberta refers to as orogenesis—mountain formation through the faulting of the earth’s crust. Interestingly, the software is encoded to reproduce highly stereotypical features and renders the data into all the sparkling lakes, blue skies, crisp waterfalls, and breathtaking mountains that we recognize from postcards and nature calendars. And, thus, the groundbreaking artworks are transformed into cliché panoramas through a kind of virtual, hyper-realistic orogenesis. Fontcuberta also turns to his own body for material. One can imagine him giddy at the scanner wondering what his face and genitals will look like as computer-generated landscapes. And we can’t help wondering, too, why the earscape appears as a winter scene or why an eagle soars above the desert in the tonguescape. Throughout, the "photographs" force the viewer to consider the genre of landscape more carefully. Instead of providing a cultural interpretation of nature, as the act of art making often does, these landscapes provide a scientific interpretation with cultural metaphors of nature deeply embedded within its terms. With this, Fontcuberta questions if science, itself, is not culturally and socially driven, if the tools we use to measure actually perpetuate cultural norms as much as advance our horizons. His landscapes of landscapes question the foundation of human knowledge: our dependency on metaphor, something both the imagination and sciences share. The book’s cover brilliantly features Rousseau’s The Dream on one side and its computer translation on the other, emphasizing the duality of metaphors: the expanded metaphoric possibilities through dreams and art, as well as the strictures that metaphors place on science, defining uncertainty with what is known and familiar. A master conceptualist and comedian, Fontcuberta keeps us looking, laughing, thinking and guessing in this new monograph. DENISE WOLFF
Life & Afterlife In Benin PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENOÎT ADJOVI, JEAN AGBÉTAGBO, JOSEPH MOÏSE AGBODJÉLOU, BOURAÏMA AKODJI, LÉON AYÉKONI, CHRISTOPHE MAHOUKPÉ, SÉBASTIEN MÉHINTO AKA PIGEON, EDOUARD MÉHOMÉ AND CAMILLE TCHAWLASSOU. INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS SEELIG. PREFACE BY ALEX VAN GELDER. ESSAY BY OKWUI ENWEZOR. EDITED BY ALEX VAN GELDER.
Phaidon, London, 2005. Designed by MadeThought. Printed in Belgium. Paper-wrapped boards with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 136 pp., 80 duotones, 9¾ × 11 $59.95 In the same tradition as the well-known portrait photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, with backdrops and occasional props, the photographers in Life & Afterlife in Benin go beyond just the studio portrait. Nine Beninese photographers have been brought together by Alex Van Gelder. Their photographs show the viewer a varied spectrum of life and reverence of death in this small West African country in the latter half of the 20thcentury. Included are family portraits, portraits of friends, spiritual photos and rites of passage, photographs of prisoners, theatrical portraits, personal portraits that show off the subject’s character or special possessions, and deathbed portraits. Commissioned locally and photographed by locals, it is true that there is an absence of an original ethnographic agenda. And Van Gelder writes, in the preface, that he “did not approach [these photographs] from the usual anthropological or sociological perspective.” However, many of the photographs are captioned by ethnicity and therefore do signify a specific perspective. In his essay, Okwui Enwezor, a leading scholar in African art and photography, begins the scholarly discourse by discussing the work from an art-historical perspective. Moved from private collections into a more public one, these records of existence have become art. And I would add that these photographs will have an impact on African photography in much the same way that Disfarmer’s images have had and continue to have on photography in the United States. Regardless, the images are simple, enticing and present the viewer with a telling portrait of Dahomey before independence and Benin after. Phaidon, with Life & Afterlife in Benin, continues to enrich our understanding of African photography. LARISSA LECLAIR
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Joseph Mills | The Loves of the Poets PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSEPH MILLS.
Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2005. Designed by Joseph Mills. Hardbound with velvet-wrapped boards. A limited edition of 100 is presented in a velvet clamshell box, with an original print, numbered and signed by the artist. 30 pp., 26 four-color plates, 9 x 12 $50.00/$250.00 This jewel-like book brings the troubling visions of Joseph Mills into a trade edition with elegance and unsettling efficiency. Mills creates photocollages from found ephemera, mounts them on objects or pastes them into existing books, and heavily coats them with furniture varnish. The collages are then photographed, which constitutes the base material for subsequent limited editions of the work, as well as this trade edition. The yellowed images of two-headed lovers, violently disfigured bodies, alien-eyed babies, and revenant Sacco and Vanzetti possessing the bodies of a dog and a priest are like dispatches from an old, nightmarish wire service. The collages are anything but seamless, but their recurrent imagery and interplay among horror and sick humor hearken to the masterful surrealist “novels” of Max Ernst in his collage phase. Their brute impact is even more disquieting in such a refined and gorgeous package; an emerald velveteen casewrap with beveled edges and bound with a faux crocodile-skin spine reveal little of the mutant images within. The pages are gilt-edged and in a subtle but brilliant stroke, the ghosting effect, which references the original book object, gives the impression that one is seeing through thin stock to the previous page. This only adds another level of disorientation to an already intense and lovely dip into the dark side. ALAN RAPP
Ellen Gallagher | Murmur PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELLEN GALLAGHER AND EDGAR CLEIJNE. ESSAY BY CAOIMHÍN MAC GIOLLA LÉITH.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and Scalo, Zurich, 2005. Designed by Irma Book Office. Five individually softbound volumes held together by hidden magnets. Edition of 1500. Five volumes, each approx. 160 pp., color illustrations throughout, 5 × 6 $95.00 Murmur is an unusual exploration of the art book and book arts that is true to the various dimensions and modes of Gallagher's work. This catalogue comprises a five-book set to accompany her 2004–05 show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. The several volumes
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From The Loves of the Poets, by Joseph Mills.
survey work in various media—film, collage, paper sculpture, drawings and paintings—that include aquatic themes intermingled with subtle caricatures of black identity. Barely decipherable but fabled sea creatures, bobbing black heads on paper waves, scratchy frame-by-frame drawings over a scene from It Came from Outer Space, manipulations of advertisements from old issues of Ebony all comprise her multivalent output in the show and the catalogues. They also break the conventions of art books to beneficial effect. First, the packaging literally hinges on a neat but simple device: magnets in the spines of these books cause them to adhere to each other in a snap. And for some reason, some of the first and last signatures are stitched together three-quarters of an inch out from the spine, causing the pages there to open less than the rest. Most of them function as flip books to convey snippets of the 16mm film loops from the exhibition, but also contain production ele-
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From Jeff Wall, Catalogue Raisonné 1978–2004
ments that work as conceptual facets. Alternating pages of the central volume that contains the curator’s text fold up to double the height of the book, perfectly suited to feature Galloagher’s barely-there paintings. This act of unfolding slows the pace of looking at the book, as the frame-per-page structure of the other four books accelerates it. Either way, the regular rhythm of looking is interrupted, causing the reader to look closer—an enforced change in the viewer’s perspective and attention that visual artists would delight in. ALAN RAPP
Jeff Wall | Catalogue Raisonné 1978–2004 PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEFF WALL. EDITED BY THEODORA VISCHER AND HEIDI NAEF. ESSAY BY JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER.
Steidl & Partners, Göttingen, 2005. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 500 pp., 120 color and 92 duotone illustrations, 9¾ × 11¾ $125.00 In tandem with a major retrospective exhibition that opened in April at Schaulager Basel in Switzerland, and currently showing at the Tate Modern in London, there are at least three new book titles out that showcase the pho-
tographic work of Jeff Wall. In scope and detail, Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné 1978–2004 is by far the most comprehensive and systematic collection of Wall’s distinct photographs and writings. This is a monster of a book, with nearly 500 pages. Since 1978, Wall has created about 120 images, and all of them are presented here in chronological order. This format enables the viewer to see both the evolution of his ideas and the consistency of his approach throughout the last 25 years, starting with his first large-scale light-box transparency The Destroyed Room, 1978 and ending with A view from an apartment, 2004–05. With his staged “snapshots” of primarily urban life, he creates a credible world that blurs the line between staged and documentary photography. Half of the book is dedicated to just the images themselves, and the other half consists of explanatory notes on each photograph, four short essays by Jeff Wall, pages of exhibition history and an indispensable bibliography of literature by and about Jeff Wall. The extensive annotations on each image include year, medium, size, edition, owner or collection, featured exhibitions, noted texts, technical notes and general insight into the piece. This meticulously researched book is the definitive source on Jeff Wall. L. LECLAIR
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From The Early Years, by André Kertész
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André Kertész | The Early Years
Katy Grannan | Model American
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ. TEXT BY ROBERT
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATY GRANNAN. ESSAY BY JAN
GURBO. INTRODUCTION BY BRUCE SILVERSTEIN.
AVGIKOS. EDITED BY LESLEY A. MARTIN.
EDITED BY ROBERT GURBO AND BRUCE SILVERSTEIN.
Aperture, New York, 2005. Designed by John McNeil and Kim Le Liboux. Printed in Italy. Photo-illustrated dustjacket over paperwrapped boards. 112 pp., 70 color illustrations, 10½ × 12 $40.00
W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2005. Designed by Laura Lindgren. Printed by Novoprint Rt. Hungary. 160 pp., 90 duotones, 5 × 5 $17.95 When Hungarian photographer André Kertész did not have access to an enlarger early in his career, he made contact prints instead. And he became quite adept with this size, creating miniature images with incredible depth and sophistication. A real feeling of youth and artistic exploration dominates these pictures, which span from 1912 to 1925. From the very joyous experiments with his brother, Jeno, in the countryside, to his idyllic romance with Elizabeth, from his portraits of WWI soldiers, to his later hospital stay as he convalesced from a wound, we witness Kertész explore different photographic interests and subjects. In order to compose for such a small format, Kertész needed to ground his images in strong lines and geometry, forging the hallmarks of his later modernist vision. Thus, “the Hungarian Contacts”, as they are called, chronicle not only Kertész’s coming of age as a man, but also his development as an artist. Before immigrating to the U.S. in 1936, Kertész left the contact prints with an agent in Paris, who was later forced to flee the city under Nazi occupation. She buried the cache of tiny works in a makeshift bomb shelter on a farm in southern France. Kertész lost contact with her, and decades passed before the agent rediscovered Kertész because of his Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition in Paris in 1963. Thankfully, she led him to the site where he recovered the still-buried treasure. Though some of the Hungarian Contacts were part of the National Gallery of Art’s 2004 retrospective and though Kertész enlarged some of the images in his later years, a broad selection of them are presented together here as art objects in their own right and in the size that Kertész originally intended for them. The book commemorates an important show of the work at Silverstein Photography in New York City and includes an engaging personal essay by Robert Gurbo, the curator of the estate. This new volume presents the Hungarian Contact Prints—many unpublished before now—in a wonderfully small format that enchants and refreshes. DENISE WOLFF
Photography is a subtle agent of our interconnection and our dislocation. The frame can glue together disparate, transient components in time and space, and then provide us a pathway to a sort of impersonal “lived” experience; simultaneously, the camera can yank a moment out of a flowing current of life, to lay it trembling and fluttering on the bank, pitiful in its disoriented vulnerability. Katy Grannan’s working method is to seek out portrait subjects through laconic want ads in (mostly) small-town newspapers. The photographer manipulates the space and the lighting, but the sitters choose how and where they want to be portrayed. Occasionally, she photographs the same person over time, but many of her portraits are “one-shots” of cooperative strangers. These choices result in a stylized profundity, somewhere between a pose and a discovery. The resultant pictures are an unusual form of collaboration, in which the camera simultaneously peels and cocoons Grannan’s sitters, revealing the transparency and opacity of the individual persona. The viewer is left to wonder not only about the enigma of human identity, but about the impulse that drives people to reveal (or at least present) themselves to a stranger, to undress themselves with our minds, and about our need to fulfill our part of the bargain by looking. This work is also an uncomfortable look at how the desperate desire to be acknowledged, visible in many areas of contemporary culture, makes for a sort of visceral, corporal democracy: we all own a body, and it can signal our distinctiveness even when other means of making ourselves heard seem to be out of reach. Somewhere beyond issues of authenticity, anonymity, ambition and anomie, Grannan seems to be posing the question: what are the basic foundation stones of our identity, and who can know us? And when they know us, what do they know? PHIL HARRIS
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From The Map, by Kikuji Kawada
Kikuji Kawada | The Map PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY KIKUJI KAWADA.
Nazraeli Press, Tucson, in association with Getsuyosha, Tokyo, 2005. Designed by Kikuji Kawada and Naomichi Kawahata. Printed by Mitsumura Printing, Japan. Edition of 500. Clothbound with separate saddle-stitched accompanying textual insert, housed in clothbound slipcase with photo-illustrated wrapper. 49 pp., 23 four-panel gatefolds printed in duotone. 9 × 6 $250.00 During the past decade we have been witnessing the birth of a new academic discipline—the study of the history of the photographic book. Originally published on August 6, 1965—the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima—The Map (“Chizu”) by Kikuji Kawada is one of those milestones in photobook publishing that lands on everyone’s list of the most important photobooks ever. It has appeared in Roth’s Book of 101 Books, where Vince Aletti applies his keen insights and elegant writing style to a critique of the work, as well as in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History, Volume 1. The selection committee commissioned by the Hasselblad Center to curate an exhibition on the history of the photographic book, entitled The Open Book (the catalogue to which is reviewed on pp. 28–29), also readily
22 photo-eye Booklist Winter 2005
placed the book among the select few worthy of inclusion. What makes The Map so important is the masterfully distilled experience this book object presents. PostWWII Japanese artists necessarily had to confront the specter of war on both a personal and societal level. The issues were dizzyingly complex—they had been defeated, humiliated, occupied, and bore the ignominious brand of being the only people upon which the atomic bomb had been used. Kawada attempted to tackle that dark legacy head on. The photographs in this book (printed so heavily that the book reeks of ink the minute you open it) are primarily of the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, originally constructed in 1915 as a base for promoting the sale of goods produced in Hiroshima Prefecture. The building was at ground zero of the atomic bomb blast, which ravaged the building instantly, killing everyone within. The dome and many of the walls were left standing, it is believed, because the blast reached the building from directly above. The entire ground zero acreage has been turned into a war memorial, with this building at the center. Kawada photographed details of the dome and the charred, burned walls, rendering the abstract textures and forms nearly incomprehensible save for their reminiscence of burned flesh. Every other page is a double fold-out, which slows the viewing process down to a methodical ritual. The re-issue is altered only slightly from the original; its impact unlessened. DARIUS HIMES
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From Chronologies, by Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach | Chronologies PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MISRACH. EDITED BY RICHARD MISRACH AND JEFFREY FRAENKEL.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 2005. Designed by Dana Faconti and Fabio Cutro. Printed by Trifolio, Verona. Edition of 5,500. Photo-illustrated paper over boards. 280 pp., 135 color illustrations, 15 × 12. $85.00 Richard Misrach’s work has invariably concerned itself with place, most famously the desert of the American West and Southwest. His monumental, ongoing project Desert Cantos has consistently brought to the fore questions about our society’s use of land—whether as natural resource, dump site, military training ground or vacation arena. While the Desert Cantos may be considered his magnum opus, numerous smaller bodies of work have been realized along the way, including his series of photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and his recent work, “On the Beach”—work that was inspired by Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic novel of the 1950s. If the phys-
ical world is compared to an X and Y graph, place may be thought of as one of the axes, and time the other. Chronologies, as a book, fleshes out the element of time in Misrach’s work, summarizing and subsequently enlarging on what we know of this artist and his work. By removing the photographs from all context—as part of this or that completed project—and simply putting them in chronological order (and acutely limited to just 135 pictures), one learns a great deal about several things. First, there is a depth of concern with the landscape in front of him brilliantly coupled with intense engagement and experimentation with the picture plane. Secondly, we learn by example. We witness the ebb and flow, over years, of attraction to subject matter or concern with certain compositional problems. Penetrating attention to specific subject matter gives way to lyrical ramblings. It’s a fascinating journey. Misrach is clearly far from terminating his production of images—many more will come, hopefully, over the next 20–30 years. Chronologies allows us to witness how a mature artist has approached simultaneous projects at once—the book deftly weaves the threads of these projects together through the altogether simple construct of time. Moving beyond a simple anthology of best works, Chronologies guides and
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directs, jogging this way and that, but ultimately reveals a gait that is satisfyingly photographic and uniquely American. DARIUS HIMES
Jerry Uelsmann | Other Realities PHOTOGRAPHS BY JERRY UELSMANN. TEXTS BY JERRY UELSMANN, PAUL KARABINIS, AND PETER C. BUNNELL.
Bulfinch, New York, 2005. Designed by Metaphor, Inc. Printed in Singapore. 112 pp., 55 duotones, 12 × 12½ $50.00 One of the nice surprises of my life in photography was the discovery that Jerry Uelsmann is a very funny man. Hearing him crack up an audience at a national conference of photography teachers and professionals gave me a renewed appreciation for the playful imagination that runs through his once iconoclastic, now (in an era of daily Photoshop miracles, a program that he gracefully dismisses in a copyright page disclaimer) remarkably settled and iconic images. This survey of Uelsmann's work, dating from the early 1960s to 2004, is not hilarious. But it is revealing; the artist's voice appears on facing pages throughout the long, finely printed plate section, concluding with this—”ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself”—which is as fine a statement as any artist could make about discovery and pleasure and takes Diaghilev's charge to Cocteau—“Amaze me”—to a more refined, responsible, yet joyous level. Uelsmann is not a sober symbolist, but a darkroom alchemist with the skills of a master printer and the free-form, intuitive image construction of a surrealist film maker. To have his deft aphorisms accompanying your meander through this retrospective volume is a distinct pleasure, and a window into a seemingly bottomless reservoir of creativity; the hilarity, however, will have to wait for the “Uelsmann Live” DVD. GEORGE SLADE
Arno Rafael Minkkinen | Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN. ESSAYS
Printed by Centrostampa, Varese, Italy. Edition of 6,000 trade and 250 limited. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 160 pp., 140 tritones, 11 × 12 $50.00 Nearly ten years ago, in the essay for Body Land, Minkkinen wondered how many more photographs he could make. Fifty? One hundred? And of these, he asked, how many good ones would there be? His response: “[I]f I count the good ones thus far, another ten would be perfect.” Well, by looking at his new monograph, he has exceeded his own expectations. In fact, at least twice that many good photographs have been made since then and published alongside 100 others in Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Since 1970, Minkkinen has used nude self-portraiture to create a harmonious dialogue between the body and its milieu. And by being nude, Minkkinen, as model, exists in a timeless world. With humor and playfulness he conveys an ethereal essence in his images, all of which are created with nothing other than himself, his camera and the environment around him—no double exposure, no multiple negatives, no computer manipulation and no assistant. What you see in the image happened before the lens. Minkkinen can pinch the tip of a Santa Fe mountain, become part of the atmosphere, dwarf vast Southwestern landscapes, rest alongside nature in peace, and transcend his own body. Saga takes as inspiration the Finnish national epic poem, the “Kalevala,” that sees the creation of the world as having occurred through natural forces. Read together, the thematic sections of the book themselves sound like a poem: “from the water,” “of the hands,” “to the north,” “along the lakes,” “towards the forests,” “among the women,” “across the desert.” This retrospective of thirty-five years represents Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s thinking about our relationship to the earth, to time, and to each other. His stunning work is beautifully edited and both the trade and limited edition are well designed with poignant essays by Alan Lightman, A. D. Coleman, and Arthur C. Danto. LARISSA LECLAIR
BY ALAN LIGHTMAN, A. D. COLEMAN, ARTHUR DANTO, WITH PASSAGES FROM THE KALEVALA. EDITED BY
Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick|
ALAN RAPP AT CHRONICLE BOOKS, A. D. COLEMAN
City of Salt
AND TODD BRANDOW FOR VERVE EDITIONS.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICHOLAS KAHN AND RICHARD
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2005. Designed by Katy Homans.
SELESNICK. TEXTS BY KAHN/SELESNICK, EREZ
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From City of Salt, by Kahn & Selesnick.
LIEBERMAN AND SARAH FALKNER. EDITED BY NANCY GRUBB.
Aperture, New York, 2005. Designed by Francesca Richer. Printed in Italy. Clothbound book in photo-illustrated paper-wrapped slipcase. 96 pp., 40 color illustrations, 17¼ × 8¾ $125.00 Perhaps this is the latest indication, along with the dramatic and dreamy work of Gregory Crewdson and Robert ParkeHarrison, that an emergent movement of new photographic fabulists is on hand. As they had with their first book, Scotlandfuturebog, Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick again create a world both mythical and campy in this series of panoramic photographs. The antique tones of the pictures are the most subtle part of the endeavor, even down to the lavish package; nearly eighteen inches long to accommodate the panoramas and text, set side by side, the book is housed in a clothand-paper slipcase. Kahn and Selesnick’s hallmark tableaux—elaborate composites of natural vistas, detailed dioramas, and costumed friends as models—spin fabulist narratives. They both restore and parody the sense of astonishment produced by early photography and imperial adventure tales. Each photo accompanies a fictive text that matches the beauty and showiness of the pictures (a small sample: “Nothing can satisfy the hunger of
the feral hogs that hunt amid the marshlands.”). Taken together, an oblique faux history emerges, blending colonial travelogue, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and ironic allegories. This mix of painstaking staging and manipulation to subtly ridiculous effect demonstrates the thin line this creative team walks, always betting that their compelling fantasies cannot easily be dismissed. The richness and oddness of the photos and their meticulous dedication to the concept remain a visionary exception to much of today's photographic practice. ALAN RAPP
Stuart Rome | Forest PHOTOGRAPHS BY STUART ROME.
Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2005. Printed in China. Clothbound with a photo-illustration tipped on the cover. Trade edition of 1,000. Special edition of 50 copies, numbered and signed by the artist with an original gelatin silver print on the front cover and presented in a clamshell box. 52 pp., 36 duotones, 13 × 13 $50.00/$250.00 Stuart Rome’s clear-eyed meditations on the chaos of forest flora provide Nazraeli Press with excellent material for another of their characteristically appealing volumes. From its gratifyingly large plates to its silky green binding cloth, Forest exemplifies Nazraeli’s commitment to the tactile pleasures of reading photobooks. It is the
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images, though, that carry the weight and justify our attention. Significantly, Rome has not captioned the plates in his book. This is not description of specific forest environments, but evocation of the spirits that loom and linger amidst all arboreal surroundings. These black-and-white images are densely packed, with a quicksilver blend of fine gestural calligraphy, deep spaces of nearly impenetrable shadow, and dramatic splashes of sunlight penetrating the canopy and catching vines and leaves in a mesmerizing grisaille fashion. These are images to get lost in, and we can be grateful to Rome for having made the journeys through what often seems like impenetrable greenery; it is sometimes extremely difficult to imagine where his feet were when he made an image, as his vantage point seems impossibly elevated. Studying Rome’s forests is an exercise in letting go; the circuits your vision takes into, around, and through his photographs are better and more rewarding the less they are forced. Don’t hurry, as you may miss something amazing (or trip on a vine). GEORGE SLADE
Tanya Marcuse | Undergarments and Armor PHOTOGRAPHS BY TANYA MARCUSE. ESSAY BY VALERIE STEELE.
Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2005. Designed by Vyen Ngo. Printed in China. Three hardcover volumes in a slipcased set. 112 pp., 53 duotone plates, 6½ × 10½ $50 Tanya Marcuse, recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim fellowship, gained access to museum collections and archives, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology, to examine undergarments and armor ranging from the 4th century B.C. to the 19th century. Though she photographs the specialized and beautiful clothing, her main interest in the investigation is the human body and identity; she documents all the corsets, bolsters, codpieces and breastplates with a sensual eye for how the form might have inhabited the pieces. Presented here in
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three slim, clothbound volumes and housed in a slipcase, this collection of elegantly toned platinum prints makes a fascinating commentary on how we fashion our social identities and gender roles. At first, underwear and armor may seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. The undergarments featured here are meant to be hidden and private, to exaggerate the female form within it without revealing an underlying false structure. Armor, on the other hand, proudly bears itself as it conceals and protects the male body (and identity) within it, presenting a hyper-masculine and impenetrable facade. Yet both under- and outerwear shape the human bodies and identities they enclose. Interestingly, it is the male armor that is more intricately detailed—featuring steely tendrils on a headpiece, and carved designs on breastplates—while the undergarments are often more rudimentary. Marcuse focuses her examination not on the lacy delicacies that we might associate with ladies underwear, but on the bone, wooden, and metal architectures of corsets and bustles for women of the Victorian period, as well as on a stunning chastity belt and breast enhancer. Not only are these objects controversial because they shape the image of women according to the desires of men in a confining manner, but they resemble the male armor, revealing themselves to be a kind of under-armor, meant to attract rather than protect. Both under- and outerarmor were meant to bolster a specific gender identity directed mainly toward impressing men, whether on the battlefield or in the parlor. In this series, Marcuse challenges how different these objects really are and questions how what we put on our bodies shapes our identity. The intimate scale of the photographs and Marcuse's mastery of the medium make for a delightful and thoughtful reading experience. DENISE WOLFF
Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe | Yosemite in Time. Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK KLETT AND BYRON WOLFE. TEXT BY REBECCA SOLNIT. EDITED BY SARAH NAWROCKI .
Trinity University Press, San Antonio, 2005. Designed by David Skolkin. Printed by Tien Wah, Singapore. Trade edition of 4000. Special edition of 75, presented in a clamshell box with an original signed and numbered print. Clothbound with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 144 pp., 60 duotone and color illustrations, 12 × 9¾ $45.00 Walking in the illustrious footsteps of the original western rephotographic survey of the 1970s, and its sequel, the Third View project, this book is, in a sense, a zoomed
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From Yosemite in Time, by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
view with an accompanying narration. Yosemite in Time is the brainchild of photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, and writer Rebecca Solnit, and its completely collaborative quality is the first of its stratified pleasures. Wolfe, Solnit and Klett have refined and pared the interdisciplinary approach used in the Third View project, exchanging ideas and brainstorming techniques while spelling each other at the wheel. The lively and inclusive nature of this corps of rediscovery seems to have been extended as well to the artists who originated the ways we have come to think about Yosemite (and perhaps American wilderness as a whole): Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Much of the inspiration for rephotography is, of course, to better understand the original impulse behind the choices, both documentary and aesthetic, of western ur-photographers; a further benefit is the opportunity to see physical evidence of the passage of time. Yosemite in Time takes this process further by merging the calculated precision of re-placement of the camera in time and space with the more intuitive, less perspectivallycorrect use of numerous panoramas. By embedding the
original views in contemporary (mainly color) panoramic collages in original and instructive ways, the authors manage to rehumanize what might otherwise seem exhausted ways of seeing. Digital imaging technology has been used sparingly and appropriately to locate the past and the present with respect to each other, and the integrity of the effort is greatly enhanced by Solnit's text, which weaves the pictures into an appropriately layered critical/historical whole. Ultimately, she and her collaborators use Yosemite as the quintessentially American means to ask larger questions about timelessness, human vision, and the relentless nature of change. PHIL HARRIS
Kim Stringfellow | Greetings From the Salton Sea. Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005 PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY KIM STRINGFELLOW.
Center for American Places, Inc., Santa Fe, 2005. Designed by Kim Stringfellow. Printed in China. Edition of 2,500. Photo-illustrated dustjacket over photo-illustrated, paper wrapped boards. 144
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From Greetings From the Salton Sea, by Kim Stringfellow
pp., 45 color illustrations, 12 halftones, 5½ × 8½ $25.00 Kim Stringfellow's book charts a ten-year obsession with the peculiar Salton Sea in the deep desert of Southern California. This is an odyssey about an oddity, the condensed story of the peculiarities that people and landscape can inspire in each other when topography and money collide. The Salton Sea is a western palimpsest: by turns it has been a saline desert flatland, an irrigated money machine a disastrously accidental inland sea below sea level, the site of wild real-estate speculation, a classified military outpost, a glittering destination resort, an environmental debacle, a designated catch basin for agricultural runoff, and crucial wildlife habitat. The area’s story is as instructive as it is deeply American, and Stringfellow tells it well, deploying conventional historical text and retrieved artifacts, as well as well-realized color photography of the area as it stands today. The book, which is drawn from an original installation, is laid out rather like a handbook to the sights, sounds and smells of the Salton Sea over time, chronicling the series of disjointed visions and somewhat haphazard events that produced the strange, ruinous pres-
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ent-day sea. Stringfellow is to be commended for going beyond a standard denunciation of human hubris in the western landscape, though. She also directs our attention to the communities that have sprung up in the cracks of the desert floor: significant populations of migratory and resident birds (many of whom are threatened by the growing salinity of the Sea), and a vibrant human squatter community that makes its way by scrounging and recycling the remnants of past incarnations of settlement. Her purpose is to highlight the irrevocable bond between human and natural ecologies, and the responsibilities we unwittingly take on when we try to bend reality to match our dreams. PHIL HARRIS
The Open Book (A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present) ESSAYS BY SIMON ANDERSON AND UTE ESKILDSEN, A CONVERSATION WITH PHILLIP AARONS, AND A PHOTOESSAY BY GERHARD STEIDL, INCLUDING A CONTRIBUTION BY ROBERT FRANK. AFTERWORD BY HASSE PERSSON. EDITED BY ANDREW ROTH.
Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden, 2004. Designed by Steidl Design/Bernard Fischer. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Softbound. 423 pp., numerous color illustrations, 8 × 10 $49.95 Walking into ICP’s exhibition space for The Open Book
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Roth; media consultant Christoph Schifferli; Interview magazine editor Ingrid Sischy; and book publisher Gerhard Steidl. DARIUS HIMES
David Goldes | Water Being Water ESSAYS BY PHILIP BALL AND VINCE LEO. EDITED BY RON GEIBERT.
Wright State University Art Galleries, Dayton, 2005. Designed by Jan Jancourt. Printed by Meridian Printing, East Greenwich. Edition of 1,000. Softbound. 52 pp., 8 duotones, 3 illustrations, 8¾ x 12 $25 show was a bibliophile’s dream. Lining the walls at chest level was a plexiglass enclosure containing some of the finest examples of photographic books from the history of the medium. Ranging from John Thomson’s 1878 Street Life in London, a handsome publication filled with woodburytypes, to Mitch Epstein’s Family Business, released in 2003 by Steidl, the exhibition meticulously presented the carefully curated examples. The only drawback was that the damn plexiglass enclosure was locked! When seeing a good book, who doesn’t natu-rally want to pick it up and hold it? The book form—as an intimate object to be held—is so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness that locking them away, especially when we are at the same time being asked to learn about and appreciate them, seems particularly tortuous. Thank God for the exhibition catalogue. The first photographs made their appearance in the late 1830s, and as Martin Parr and Gerry Badger point out, the vehicle for their dissemination was, more often than not, a book. It was a few decades later, however, when it became possible to combine photographic reproductions and text on the same printed page, that the era of the photographic book was truly launched. The Open Book chronicles the art of the photographic book from that moment to the present. It presents more than 130 of the most significant examples of the genre, produced by such diverse figures as El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Ken Domon, Christer Stromholm, Esko Mannikko, Nick Waplington, Sophie Calle, Roni Horn and Richard Prince. The books shown here were chosen by a remarkable international jury: curator Ute Eskildsen of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany; curator Hasse Persson of the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden; fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld; rare-book specialist Andrew
Well, it’s about time someone did a book on David Goldes’ photographs. This elegant and intelligent volume, published to accompany an exhibition of Goldes’ water photographs at Wright State University Art Galleries, brings the same careful scrutiny to his photographs that the photographer has brought to numerous subjects over the past three decades. Goldes, the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Guggenheim, and the holder of master’s degrees in both photographic fine art (SUNY Buffalo, via Visual Studies Workshop) and molecular genetics (Harvard), makes photographs that are as clearly seen and cleanly rendered as a Blossfeldt botanical specimen. These are beautiful images, though, because of their quirky combination of functional illustration and exquisite tonality. There's a tangible sensuality in the silvery surfaces, a pleasure in both the scientific and aesthetic phenomena Goldes has discovered and divulged to us. One image (Electricity and Water III, 1993) of an illuminated light bulb immersed in a tall glass of water leaves me gasping every time I see it. Another (Finding North, 1994) illustrates both magnetic fields and scientific error; one cork refuses to align itself with its six cohorts. His unique, inventive methods of telling these stories distinguish Goldes’ works from effective diagrams. To put a photographic spin on it, these are Berenice Abbott’s physics illustrations as reformatted by Elliott Erwitt, Zeke Berman and Chema Madoz. As Vince Leo suggests in his essay, Goldes is a choreographer, sculptor and partner in these eloquent records of still lifes in motion. This volume, which includes 18 plates reproducing works from 1993–2003, should introduce readers to an important aspect of Goldes’ work and stir interest in his other investigations. GEORGE SLADE
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Steven Katzman | The Face of Forgiveness. Salvation and Redemption PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KATZMAN. FOREWORD BY A. D. COLEMAN. INSPIRATIONAL TEXT BY BILL JOHNSON.
powerHouse Books, New York, 2005. Designed by Kiki Bauer. Printed by EBS, Verona. Trade Edition with a limited edition of 100. Paper-wrapped boards with photo-illustrated dustjacket. 128 pp., 85 duotones, 11 × 13 $49.95 Prayer is an interesting social phenomenon. At the basis of every major religion is found the admonishment to 'turn to God' and offer prayer. In that abstract sense it is universally upheld around the globe. But the particular manifestations of prayer—how groups of people have defined for themselves the proper practice of it—are wildly diverse. For some, it is an extremely private act, something to be performed in the privacy of one’s own chambers. For others, though, the act of praying in public, in a group setting, is an intensely confirming experience. Katzman’s photographs bear witness to this. Working with a flash-equipped hand-held 35mm camera, Katzman has frequented the prayer/ revival meetings of Florida, in particular the churches around Pensacola, Tampa and Sarasota. The congregations are, sociologically, racially and economically diverse. But to look at this body of work objectively, from a position of distance, as though we are to “learn” about a culture foreign to us, is to miss the uniqueness of the project. What Katzman offers is a view from someone who is part of the community, a participant, a “believer,” so to speak. This necessarily raises numerous questions. How does this affect his photographic abilities or sensibilities? And further, what can photographs tell us of an abstract, interior, spiritual experience (as prayer must surely be defined)? If nothing more, I can at least guarantee that this book will raise more questions than not, and that no two people will get the same thing from this body of work. DARIUS HIMES
Bob Thall | At City's Edge: Photographs of the Chicago Lakefront PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY BOB THALL.
Center for American Places, Santa Fe, in association with Columbia College, Chicago, 2005. Designed by David Skolkin. Printed by Oddi Printing, Iceland. Hardbound with photo-illus-
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trated dustjacket. 96 pp., 61 tritones, 11½ × 10 $45.00 In our Fall issue, a book by Chicago photographer Gary Stochl was reviewed. Bob Thall, professor and chair of the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago, wrote an eloquent introduction to the work, and in my review of the book I voiced how nice it must be to have Thall as a professor, given his lucid explanations of the history of the medium. Well, with the release of his own newest body of work, At City’s Edge, we are all afforded the chance to listen to the book equivalent of an evening slide lecture on his work. Thall was born and raised in Chicago, which is shorthand for saying that Lake Michigan and its shoreline are embedded in his personal psyche—it was a directional tool, a playground, a source of wonder and thing of beauty. Thall’s work falls squarely within the aesthetic of deadpan, large-format photography. He has worked in black-and-white for more than 30 years (unlike many protagonists of this school, such as Gursky and Burtynsky) and in that sense, figuratively aligns himself with someone like Lewis Baltz of New Topographics fame. I mention Baltz only for the obvious reasons— large-format camera, black-and-white, and the somewhat removed vantagepoint (whether physical or emotional). But there are others, mainly Europeans like Basilico or Hannappel, who have been exploring sites in mainly the same way. In Thall’s work to date he has focused on Chicago’s buildings, and more explicitly, the spaces that surround buildings. In the brief accompanying afterword, Thall shares with us the worries that had kept him from photographing the lakefront for 30 years. “I was concerned that photographs made at the shore would be too pretty, too much about sky and water, and not connected to what I thought of as my real subject: the social and architectural reality of Chicago...[T]he beauty of the lake could be a trap, a distraction, but the beauty of sky and water was also a legitimate part of the city.” What seems to be lurking beneath these words is a concern that what one sees as beautiful is not a legitimate subject matter. The lake and its shoreline, something that he unabashedly loves and has a deep connection with, had been avoided for fear of sentimentalizing them, or being trapped by “the beauty of sky and water.” Why is beauty a trap, I want to ask, knowing that many artists struggle with the question of legitimacy for their subject matter. In this case, perhaps the inner struggle that Thall obviously went
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From The Terrible Boredom of Paradise, by Derek Henderson
through was required for him to approach this most defining of Chicago’s landscape elements (the very lake that was the cause for the building of the city) with a maturity of vision that simply was not available to him previously. Regardless, if one spends time with this work, there are lessons to be learned. DARIUS HIMES
Derek Henderson| The Terrible Boredom of Paradise PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEREK HENDERSON. TEXT BY HANNA SCOTT AND AN INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST BY MAGDA KEANEY.
Derek Henderson, London, 2005. Designed by Fabio Ongarato. Printed by Samhwa Printing, Korea. Clothbound with an illustration tipped on the cover. 134 pp., 81 color and black-and-white illustrations, 13¼ × 11 $75.00 The title to Derek Henderson’s self-published book refers to his home country of New Zealand. In an inter-
view between the photographer and Magda Keaney published in the book, Henderson states, “I always hear people say New Zealand is such a beautiful place and that they would love to go there because it seems like paradise. I think it is, but that’s just one side of it.” In the tradition of Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, Derek Henderson set out, in 2004, with a view camera and color film to see what was really happening on the islands. A level of social critique is clearly played out, but resonant throughout the work is an abiding affection for how the people have made “paradise” their own. Cars, houses, churches, street corners and long stretches of open road crop up over and over in these detail-rich, saturated color images. Henderson has made his living doing fashion and magazine work and currently lives in London. The Terrible Boredom of Paradise represents a handsome culmination to a long-term personal project. DARIUS HIMES
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The 2nd image from Fried Waters
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THE CUBAN-BORN HUSBAND0-AND-WIFE TEAM OF Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez has worked collaboratively for 30 years, receiving international acclaim for their color photographs of subjects that are generally in a state of flux. Their first book featured photographs of vernacular architecture in the Yucatán, a place they have been regularly visiting and photographing for many years. In their second monograph, Fried Waters, also published by Nazraeli Press, they present images of two separate salt-harvesting lagoons on the Yucatán Peninsula, in southern Mexico. Salt harvesting in this area has been engaged in since prior to the Spanish Conquest. The practice is marked by patience in a process by which mineral-rich water slowly evaporates, leaving behind quantities of salt. In November of 2004, as this body of work was being prepared for publication, Mark Haworth-Booth, who had been charged with writing an introduction to the work, exchanged a series of emails with the artists, asking them about their working methods and this project. The transcription of that exchange is reproduced here: Mark Haworth-Booth: Let me start by asking if Fried Waters overlapped with your previous project or whether it was conceived after that? What triggered it? Eduardo & Mirta: Fried Waters overlapped the tail end of From the Ground Up. We are a bit obsessed with subjects in a state of flux and that is what triggers our projects. In the case of Fried Waters we were drawn to the beauty of the natural transformative cycle, from water to salt. Perhaps, as first generation immigrants/refugees/exiles/transplants /settlers/aliens, etc. to the U.S. we had to evolve, adapt and transform—so, this seems to be the common thread throughout our work. MHB: What is your working method as a partnership? I know something about [Bernd and Hilla] Bechers’ practice: each takes a picture then they decide which is best later. How do you work? E & M: We have worked in a co-active collaboration for over 30 years. We each use identical cameras, shoot the same locations, mix up the film and prints so that the authorship of single photographs is unverifiable. We print together and edit from work prints. For the final cut, we each lobby in defense of our choices until we reach a consensus on behalf of the best photographs. This can take a few moments or a few years—sometimes, the arguments are more interesting than the photographic issues! MHB: That’s a great answer! Do you remember when, how and why you decided to work in this way, as partners? It is so unusual, the Bechers apart. Were they an influence in your decision? E & M: We met in high school in 1970 and we’ve been together ever since. In 1972, during our early college days, we took a photography course. At the time, we were sharing one camera and when it came time to choose the work to present for class, we could not tell or remember who had actually taken which pictures. Naturally, we each wanted to claim the better ones. This presented an interesting set of problems and it also raised questions about the true nature of authorship. Our decision to work collaboratively was an intuitive response to problem solving. For us, it was not a choice; the thing chose us. We learned of the Bechers’ work years later. The first “art” photography book we ever saw and read was Garry Winogrand’s The Animals with an essay by John Szarkowski. Our early work was mostly influenced by Atget, Evans, Arbus, Winogrand, Friedlander and Eggleston. Our first
Fried Waters A photographic study of an ancient Yucatecan saltharvesting technique is the vehicle for a discussion of fluctuation and change. An interview with EDUARDO DEL VALLE and MIRTA GÓMEZ
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subjects were the streets and neighborhoods of Miami, all done with a 35mm camera using black-and-white film. Later on, when each of us had our own cameras, we focused on each other and our extended families. In the early 1980s we met William Eggleston and he showed us 5,000 of his color photographs and that’s how we learned color photography. MHB: Did you go to Memphis to see the 5,000 Eggleston photographs and why did you move up a format and on to tripods? This is such a different way of thinking and working from 35mm. E & M: We visited Bill [Eggleston] in Memphis, but we saw the 5,000 prints when we invited him for an informal presentation of his work at the university where we both teach. At the time, our blackand-white work had become too predictable. By contrast, our color work was a bit more surprising and provocative, so we wanted to learn from the best. We persuaded Bill to bring a few prints for his presentation and he showed up with a trunk full of 5,000 photographs. As it turns out, he allowed us to study the prints for a few weeks. Subsequently, we could not seem to get excited about our black-andwhite work, especially, after our discovery of Yucatán, Mexico. In response to the second part of your question, you are right, medium format on tripod offers a completely different physical approach to photography from 35mm on hand. Medium format helps us observe and assess the possibilities with greater precision. MHB: Do you think Eggleston is interesting as much for his viewpoints/camera positions as for his understanding of colour? E & M: Bill’s work is interesting on both counts—he understands what works best for him. He is a master at elevating the ordinary to extraordinary new heights with a naturalness and ease that conspire against all previous models in color photography (with the exception of Helen Levitt’s color work). His visual vocabulary is so broad and far-reaching that it teaches us that “all” things are worthy of attention or so it seems. This approach to art making is powerfully inspiring and contagious and we enthusiastically applied what we learned from it in our own work, especially in Mexico. MHB: Where does the fine phrase “fried waters” come from? E & M: The phrase comes from an expression we heard while on an extended visit to Italy. The patriarch of the family where we stayed would often give us a lift to the train station. If somebody cut him off the road, etc. he would curse at them in Italian, “YOU ARE STUPID LIKE FRIED WATER!” We immediately appropriated “the curse” for future use. When the conditions are right, the rapid evaporation of water in the salt fields of Yucatán looks like water being deep fried. So, ‘fried waters’ seemed like the perfect fit. MHB: I just had another look at the box of photographs. The selection is so beautiful, from the great cover to the finale of the salt pyramid accompanying the page of acknowledgements. I find myself lacking knowledge of so many things. Are those poles in the water (in the first two pictures following the cover) markers of long-abandoned salt pans? Are the waters tidal? What kinds of events are going on in the water—is the foaming to do with salt production or some quite different chemical activity? How many of the places you photographed are still in production? Is the attraction for you partly because this way of life is disappearing? Is it the same sheet of water that turns different colours towards the end because of different sky colour? 34 photo-eye Booklist Winter 2005
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The 7th image from The Pit, from Fried Waters (top) The 7th image from The Lagoon, from Fried Waters (bottom)
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The final image from Fried Waters
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E & M: The first two photographs are abandoned salt pits that are now used as markers for very small fishing boats during wet season. Even then the water is fairly shallow, on average about two feet deep. During dry season, one can easily walk these areas and observe salt clusters on the poles, ground, rocks, etc. Please note in the second photograph, the pink towards the right of the horizon line is a flock of wild flamingoes, descendants of the ones that inhabited the area at least since the early 1500s when Fray Diego de Landa wrote about what he encountered in the region. This is significant in that Landa describes the entire coastal region of the Yucatán Peninsula as one giant salt-collection site. Back to the flamingoes—these birds are naturally drawn to these shallow estuaries for nesting and feeding. The red in the water, which is produced by high levels of sulphur and other organisms, is what turns the flamingo’s feathers pink. Therefore, the coloration in the water is not produced from the sky or any reflection; it is the natural color of the water at various stages of transformation with the exception of the first and last photograph in [the section] The Lagoon. The water is stagnant and the high winds produce the white foam that collects [along what you see in the section] The Edge, which later turns to a thick brine that eventually hardens and turns to salt. The two locations in this body of work, Xtambú and Dzilam de Bravo, have been producing salt since before the Spanish Conquest. The salt is harvested by hand and collected in woven baskets by very ancient and efficient means. Notice the photograph we chose for the cover—it shows the harvest cycle. Yes, in part it is the attraction to a way of life that is rapidly changing and the persistence of the culture to survive. MHB: Your photographs allow the viewer to people them, and not with one generation only, but many. However, did you find it interesting to speak with the salt workers? E & M: The men and women at work in the salt fields are only around during the harvest. There are no fences, guards or attendants—one has free, unlimited access to the entire area year-round. We’re always alone out there. The few times we’ve encountered workers, it has been a lively exchange. Yucatecans are extremely polite people and by our standards reserved, shy—very few words are spoken (they are working and so are we). They are respectful and welcoming, even in the midst of the harsh conditions. They work in rather small groups—maybe six or seven and mostly family units—from sun-up to sundown. MHB: One final question, did you have any particular model in mind when you planned the book Fried Waters and its sections? E & M: We did not consciously try to follow a particular model, but the book ended up resembling From the Ground Up, our first book published by Nazraeli Press, which is also divided into three parts and a finale. On a lighter note, perhaps the model for both books functions in close relation to the game of baseball—three bases and home plate. The shape of the salt pile on the acknowledgements page of Fried Waters closely resembles the final photograph of home plate in our first book. It also indicates the final product after harvest, which also resembles an ancient pyramid—another kind of home. Fried Waters. Photographs by Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez. Introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth. Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2005. Printed in China. Edition of 1,000 casebound copies, each with an original photograph, printed by the artists, on the front cover. 96 pp., 42 color illustrations, 15 x 13 $75.00 A limited edition of 25 copies with an additional 11 x 14-inch photograph, printed, numbered and signed by the artists and presented in a clamshell box, is also available. $750.00
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Interior page spread from Then & Now
cover: Then & Now
cover: Every Building on the Sunset Strip
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ED RUSCHA MUST BE PINCHING HIMSELF. This year he was singled out to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Meanwhile, his paintings have exceeded the one-million-dollar mark at auction. And now, assured of wealth and fame, he has returned to his first love, photography and bookwork, with the publication of a large-format (17¾” × 12½”) slipcased, deluxe edition titled simply Then & Now. This bookwork is astonishing, maddening, intensely boring and fascinating beyond words. In it, he returns to the impulse behind his classic 1966 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (one of his most famous and, at $8, one of the more expensive of his eighteen books produced between 1963 and 1978). Despite its small format, that book unfolds to reveal almost 25 feet of photographs showing about two-and-a-half miles of the Sunset Strip, with the north side of the Strip on the top of the page, and the south side upside down at the bottom, the idea being when you get to the end of the sequence, you turn the book upside down and start back down the street the other way. A similar technique is used in the new book, a technique not unusual for such panoramic publications, but the juxtaposition of the black-and-white images from 1973 with the color images from 2003 is startling and very revealing of both photography and historical change in the heart of Southern California. In the late 1960s and early 1970s we were not meant to take the photographs “seriously.” Many people thought the books were a joke, which in some cases they were, but very complex jokes, crisply designed, elegantly produced and inexpensive little bookworks. They were certainly not art photography, but made use of photography as a vehicle (to use Ruscha’s word), to produce a piece of conceptual art. Sol LeWitt would even use this text to define conceptual art in an important article in Artforum magazine in 1967. Since then, and after Ruscha returned to photograph the Sunset Strip twelve more times, we can begin to take these photographs very seriously, both as photography and as central to his vision as an artist. Sylvia Wolfe’s excellent recent book from the exhibition of his photography at the Whitney, Ed Ruscha and Photography (2004), confirms this and provides a great deal of information and insight into his photographic work. Then & Now is a vastly more complicated and engaging bookwork than Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Forty-five hundred black-and-white photographs of Hollywood Boulevard made in 1973 are lined up with 13,000 color images from 2003, which parallel the same twelve mile stretch of the Boulevard. Like the earlier book, you have to flip it over when you get to the end of the first half, which in this case is six miles and many pages long. This comparison of then and now may lead us to believe that the more things change the more they remain the same. But for anyone who knows these places, the 30 year contrast and comparison is very affecting, sometimes funny, sometimes touching and sad. Ruscha describes it as: “…a very democratic, unemotional look at the world…documentary in that sense.” Not surprisingly, he credits Walker Evans, as well as Frank and Atget as influences, despite the obvious differences. In its totality, this book is a continuing and profound experiment in time and space and, surely, an instant classic.
Every Building Revisited In a gorgeous new volume, Ed Ruscha returns to photography and his book-making roots, taking us for a ride back down Hollywood Blvd. By ALEX SWEETMAN
Then & Now. Hollywood Boulevard. 1973-2004. Photographs by Ed Ruscha. Steidl, Göttingen, 2005. Designed by Ed Ruscha. Printed by Steidl, Göttingen. Clothbound with printed, binder’s board slipcase. 148 pp., color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, 18 x 13 $175.00
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Publishing the Photography Book: Pre-Press & On-Press Part II In our ongoing column MARY VIRGINIA SWANSON and DARIUS HIMES consider pre-press and on-press realities by talking with those who know it best.
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IN THIS CONTINUATION of the last installment (Fall 2005), Mary Virginia Swanson and our editor Darius Himes continue to explore the ins and outs of the pre-press and on-press stage of publishing a photobook. In order to think through all of the pre-press and on-press issues, we gathered together a constellation of notable figures in the field, ranging from photographers and publishers to book designers and printers, asking them to share with us their insights and experiences. The preceding article featured thoughts from the following people: Donna Wingate, Director of Publications and Publisher Services at D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, an art-book distributor and publisher, based in New York City; Frish Brandt, Co-director of Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco; Jack Woody, founder of Twelvetrees Press and Twin Palms Publishers and Axel Ziegler, Production Manager for Twin Palms; and Mark Klett, a photographer and a faculty member of the Herberger School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe. We will hear from three distinct voices in this installment. David Chickey is a designer and partner in Skolkin + Chickey design firm. Warren Bingham is the CEO of the legendary Stinehour Press based in Lunenberg, Vermont. Chuck Gershwin was the production manager at Aperture for several years and has worked for some of America's best printers. He currently works for Oddi Printing in Iceland. And we will hear again from Mona Kuhn, a photographer who presently teaches at Art Center in Pasadena and lives in the Los Angeles area. Her first major monograph was published by Steidl Verlag in 2004. The questions we posed all revolve around our central theme: how does one prepare a body of work to be reproduced in a book? And while the questions below are wide-ranging, covering the entire process of publishing a photobook, from conception to finished product, we felt that stepping back and querying a variety of people would provide our readers with the most information. Enjoy and please give us your feedback! Q: What are some of the most common obstacles you encounter when working with artists on a book project? David Chickey: As anyone involved in the production of book projects will tell you, each project is different and usually comes with its own set of challenges. The most critical issue, of course, is that a book is only a representation of an artist’s work, not (in most cases) the work itself. Books offer a new—and often very powerful—way to look at an artist’s work, but they are not meant to be a substitute for the experience of the originals. Because a photographer’s work is likely closer in scale and form to the page of a book (as opposed to a sculptor who works on a huge scale), I have found that they sometimes have unrealistic expectations of the printing process. Q: What advice do you have for the photographer coming on press for the first time? How can they make the most of their experience on press? Warren Bingham: Ideally, what should they know before coming on press? Most important is a clear vision of how they want their book to look—bring examples if you have them. The printer should assist the photographer through the maze of artistry and technology of the pre-press and press functions to achieve their vision for their book.
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The photographer should find a printer that seems like an extension of their studio, an artistic collaborator. They should enjoy the process and find their capabilities extended. What advice do we have, what can they expect, how to make the most of it? They should expect to be provided with an accurate estimate including any options they might want; their original materials should be handled with care and sensitivity; accurate proofs and layouts should be provided to give them and the printer confidence that the final product will print to their satisfaction. Once on press they should expect to have their approved proofs and layouts available and be able to communicate with the press operators and technicians to enhance or make changes to the press sheets to their satisfaction. In all cases the photographer should be able to feel that they can count on the printer to care as much as they do and print their work as well as they would themselves in the darkroom. Chuck Gershwin: It is very important to deliver the artwork in an organized and well-documented way. Most photographers have been working on their publications for a long time, but the customer service people at the printers have to grasp everything very quickly and then pass on the instructions to the technicians who actually do the work. Good written communication is very important from the photographer. It is important for the photographer to understand that their job, no matter how important it is to them, is just another job in the shop. By developing a good friendly relationship with the sales person and the customer service representatives they are more likely to get better-personalized attention. Being on press can be a very stressful experience. It costs the printers many hundreds of dollars an hour to keep everything working, so they want reasonably fast decisions in the 'OK' rooms. This is why I usually suggest printing a press proof before printing the book. It is assumed when running a press proof that there will be more time for deliberation and experimentation with the inks and densities. The photographer should of course have the pictures there for comparison. Q: I'm really curious about the time frame that printers work with. Can you describe a typical schedule? Do you have a checklist for photographers? Chuck Gershwin: As a printer, “I want to publish this book” is music to my ears. When I was the production manager for Aperture we would spend a year or two working the editorial and design elements of our books, but the actual printing and binding time was only a few months. I now work on many projects that have a time frame of only one or two months for everything. I don't really have a checklist for photographers publishing their work for the first time. I try to see how much they know about how things work in publishing and printing and then guide them through the process so they are happy at the end. For instance, I always point out how important it is to provide the printer with the best artwork in order to begin the book. I point out who's responsibility it is for different aspects of the project and tell them about the proofing steps. I spend a lot of time with photographers who are publishing for the first time to try to give them a realistic expectation of what to expect as the process moves along. Some tricks to getting things done quickly are to let the printer know that a rush job is coming a few weeks early so they can be prepared in advance. Another very helpful thing to do is to send the pictures in advance to be scanned and proofed so that when the doc-
Covers and interior page spread of various titles printed by Stinehour Press, Lunenberg. Courtesy Warren Bingham and Stinehour Press.
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Cover and interior page spreads of books printed by Oddi Printing, Iceland. Courtesy Chuck Gershwin and Oddi Printing.
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ument files arrive, the hardest part of the job is already finished. Warren Bingham: This can vary greatly depending on complexity, design/vision issues, number of images, etc., but a book can be done as quickly as six weeks if the photographer is available to check proofs and work with the technicians and press operators to get color and tonality right in a reasonable time frame and it could be as long as ten or twelve weeks. We've done books in under a month when needed; others have taken years. Q: Describe the flow of original artwork and scans between a designer, a third-party pre-press company, and the printer. How does that work? David Chickey: Most printers we work with prefer to handle pre-press themselves—and it makes sense, they understand the relationship between their own proofs and how they print from them better than how they print from proofs that come from another source. However, most of these printers are overseas, and the process of sending proofs back and forth can be very time-consuming and expensive. So, with projects where the schedule is critical, we have developed a system for doing pre-press locally. In these cases, the scans are done here in the US, based on profiles that have been provided by the printer. The pre-press company then outputs color proofs (again with profiles provided by the printer) and then we work with the artist going through rounds of color proofing until we have a proof for every image in the book that we are all satisfied with. These proofs are sent to the printer along with the final files for the job, and they become the match proofs that the printer uses in production. Q: Can you talk briefly about a project (using this process) that was particularly successful? David Chickey: The project we completed last year for Joan Watts started with two very clear issues. First, her work is very minimal and hard to capture in print. There is an amazing optical effect in her work—a band of light just above the top of each piece—that would be lost in the process of silhouetting each image on the page. So we had all of the work rephotographed under consistent conditions and used full-bleed installation shots throughout the book. The subtle backgrounds help re-create the kind of experience you get from walking through an exhibition of the work. Second, there were two galleries and a small museum involved—all of whom wanted some sense of ownership in the project, but none of whom needed full separate runs of the job. We placed all the copyright and identifying information on the jacket flaps and created separate jackets for each institution—so while the book is the same in each instance, each institution gets to be the primary name on its editions. Q: When it comes to accurately reproducing original artwork, what do you, as a printer, require? Do you want the original prints or transparencies to scan from or do you only want raw digital files from either the photographer or a third-party scanner? Warren Bingham: We can and do handle all of these formats, but our clear preference is to work from the originals. We prefer to get blackand-white images as high-quality silver prints—the photographer has already added his interpretation to the image; our job is to match it. For color images we prefer to work with transparencies. If the photographer supplies digital files, we prefer high-res RGB files for both color and black-and-white—we’ll convert the B&W to grayscale. If for some reason the photographer wishes to supply B&W as grayscale, we want 450dpi. We occasionally work with files from a
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third-party scanner and in that instance we also prefer to receive the files as RGB with our ICC profiles embedded. In all of these instances we think close collaboration with the printer will benefit the final outcome and extend the range of possibilities. Chuck Gershwin: The first thing you must realize is that the reproduction of any image is just an interpretation of that image into another medium—ink on paper versus whatever the original is. For the most accurate reproduction of an original photograph the printers should always have the original art to scan from themselves. The printer also should have the original photograph in their possession so they can compare their interpretation of the original to the actual original, and then make the necessary adjustments to come as close as possible. When we run a press proof, or are running the job, we always have the original photographs in the examining room to compare against the reproductions in the book. Another important ingredient in printing an accurate reproduction is the paper. Always use the best paper you can get and be sure the people producing the scans know the paper type. I like dull (or silk) coated 100# (or 150 gr.) text for the greatest accuracy. Paper is very expensive, but for most people who are self-publishing their own books in limited quantities, usually around 1,000 books, this is not such a big expense. All digital files are a mystery to whomever opens them up, especially if the client didn't provide a print to go by. I also have worked with photographers who manipulate their photographs in Photoshop and provide files ready for printing. Raw scans require the pre-press technicians to use their own judgment in interpreting the files and adjusting the curves for printing. I always strongly suggest that the photographer send us a print or color slide of the original so we can have an idea of what it “really” looks like. I prefer to get files that are adjusted by the photographer. At the beginning of the project I ask for a few sample files, then run proofs and send them back to the photographer to evaluate. The photographer then uses this knowledge to modify the rest of the pictures. Everyone must remember that the curves for an offset press are much different than the curves for a home inkjet printer. I have one client, Columbia College, which has produced many beautiful books with Oddi Printing. We have worked with them for years coordinating their pre-press to the profiles of our offset presses. One of the reasons Columbia College has been so successful with their books is because they have very high quality scanning equipment, and more importantly, very knowledgeable students and faculty. Q: What type of digital files does your in-house design/pre-press team produce? Warren Bingham: We work with the full Adobe suite of products and Quark Xpress. Chuck Gershwin: We can work with just about anything. Many of the most interesting books we have printed are for people working at home who want to publish their own books. The new electronic age has democratized publishing to a point where for a few thousand dollars people can print their own little books. Sometimes the artist’s lack of technical skills adds to the overall charm of the books.
Covers and interior page spread of Joan Watts, designed by David Chickey. Courtesy David Chickey.
Stay tuned for another installment in the Spring 2006 issue! photoeye.com 43
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In 2004, Mona Kuhn published a major monograph on her work, her first, with Steidl Verlag, the legendary printer and publisher in Göttingen, Germany. For this installment, we asked Mona to share with us her experience of going on press for her first big book. Mona, Can you describe what it's like going on-press at Steidl? Where do you sleep, what time were you getting up to go on press? Where did you eat? What's the community life like while you're there? And were there other photographers there while you were on press? Mona Kuhn: After a long flight across the Atlantic Ocean, I first landed in Frankfurt, and immediately got into a bullet train that took me two hours north into a city called Göttingen, reknowned for its university and academic lifestyle. Steidl Verlag is situated in the historical city center, where Gerhard Steidl converted three turnof-the-century German Fachhaeuser (typical German, historical building architecture) into his offices, printing press and an artist guesthouse. Upon my arrival, Gerhard greeted me warmly and pointed out that I would be staying at the Steidlville guesthouse, in the room referred to as the Joseph Beuys room, because its walls are covered with prints given to Gerhard by Beuys. Of course I was impressed and felt a sense of artistic expression surrounding me. After settling in, I went into the office area and was introduced to the other artists in the conference room, where we spent our days as the book projects progressed. There is a frequent turn-around of guests at Steidl Verlag. During my stay I met curators and publishing directors of institutions like ICP and the Whitney Museum, as well as other photographers such as Massimo Vitali, Bill Burke, Ralph Gibson, Robert Frank as well as meeting briefly the honorable writer Gunther Grass. All of them at some point or another spend time together, waiting for the next press check, or adjusting the design of the book, or reviewing text, and in that environment I had a feeling that we were all equals working hard on our own book project. There was a sense of mutual bonding during those long working hours within an atmosphere of creative sizzling. As the design, editing, scanning and color calibration process came to an end, (by the way all of this is done in-house and if needed adjusted immediately without delay) we moved into the printing-press phase of my book project. Gerhard warned me to take a long night of sleep before we started, and he was right: during the printing process, Gerhard and I met with the printing master every two hours for 48 hours straight. It was a thrilling feeling to see the images laid out on the large pieces of paper, coming speedily from the press, and a total rush to be able to evaluate and make final decisions together. I was also significantly impressed by the professional accuracy of transferring the tonalities and nuances of my work into a printed page of a book. Indeed, it was a pleasure to be invited to work among individuals who all share high levels of expectations and professionalism, and to be able to walk out from the experience with a book under my arm that exceeded my wishes. The first edition of my book has completely sold out, the second is on its way and I have been invited to work on a second book again in the near future. Ergo, I am writing this to you from the fields, while I make more photographs! 44 photo-eye Booklist Winter 2005
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Robert Frank involved in the development of a hand-glued maquette in parallel to the completion of high-res data on the computers for his recent book, Storylines (top). Some of Steidl’s printing presses (middle and bottom). Photos courtesy Steidl Verlag.
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Untitled, 1989–97, 48 C-prints, mounted on aluminum 149 x 386 cm; 22.5 x 46 cm (each)
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ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2005, AN EXHIBITION entitled Tokyo, A City of Light: Photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama opened in the Atrium Gallery of the Marion Center for Photographic Arts on the campus of the College of Santa Fe. Surprisingly, this is the first solo exhibition in the United States for one of Japan’s leading art photographers. It affords us the opportunity to both discuss his work and survey the numerous books that he has produced over the course of 25 years of image-making. Hatakeyama (b. 1958, Iwate, Japan), a tall, slender man with close-cropped black hair and fluid, elegant hands, has said that his photographic practice has been “like kicking a stone from place to place. The most exciting thing is to find the next picture I want to take.” The stone that Hatakeyama has been kicking around has led him from the limestone quarries of Okinawa and Hokkaido and the cement factories that process the stone, to the tops of Tokyo’s skyscrapers and the bowels of her buried river system. Curated by Yasufumi Nakamori, the show takes for its theme the vastness of Tokyo—a subject that is an ongoing source of attraction and fascination for Hatakeyama. Nakamori’s accompanying essay—which is excerpted here—insightfully discusses the photographer’s approach to his art. At the end of this article is select bibliography on the photographer. “[Hatakeyama] has portrayed Japan’s capital city Tokyo in a variety of magical ways. The bustling city, with a population of over 13 million, appears sublime and awful, but also sometimes tranquil in his photographs, as if the artist made them with the invitation of light itself to reveal a city otherwise invisible. Unlike many others who have portrayed the city from street level, Hatakeyama has successfully explored the city from a point removed, whether atop a super-skyscraper or at the bottom of a river running beneath downtown Tokyo. There, the photographer meets Nature and, through his lens, the city unveils a different texture, color and ambiance. “Looking from a bird’s-eye view, Hatakeyama captures, in varying shades of light, the city’s unique structural feature, a rough skin-like organic textural surface, infinitely growing and consisting of a variety of sharpened pebble-like buildings, modern and traditional. The 48 photographs in Untitled of 1989–97, taken from several of Tokyo’s super-skyscrapers at different points of the day throughout a year, have created a panoramic map of the city. But, when seen together in a group, the photographs appear like color samples bars, revealing a surprisingly flat and all-over surface of the city’s topography (which Hatakeyama has compared to a Jackson Pollock painting). The group also presents indexical visual information of the megapolis collected over eight years at the end of the 20th century, as if these pictures were created for a future archeological study. Juxtaposed to the complete destruction of a large part of the city in the air raids of March 1945, these photographs demonstrate the miraculous revival, vitality and sprawling growth of the city. “Hatakeyama’s fascination with contemporary Tokyo is as
Raw Materials Transformed The critically acclaimed Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama enjoys his first one-man U.S. show in the light-filled galleries of the College of Santa Fe. By YASUFUMI NAKAMORI
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particular as that of Felix Nadar to mid-19th century Paris. But through the eyes of Nadar, who photographed Parisian streets from a balloon and the city’s underground catacombs and sewers using an artificial light he invented, Paris was decaying. To Hatakeyama, Tokyo is constantly renewing itself. “Hatakeyama’s further pursuit of the city as a photographic subject took him to the Shibuya river, a small and belowstreet level stream, which runs through downtown Tokyo. (At one point, the river runs completely beneath the gigantic and bustling Shibuya Station.) “In River Series of 1993–94, with his camera on a tripod placed on the bottom of the river, 16 feet below street level, Hatakeyama photographed a timeless and tranquil world found in the river embanked and flanked by the buildings. The photographs, strong artificial light (from the buildings), together with natural light, creates a flat background sky with graded colors, like the ones in Hokusai’s ukiyo-e prints. Apart from investigation the effects of such artificial light against natural light in the city, the photographs bring the viewer’s attention to a shadow image of the street light, abstracted and hovering on the extremely low water of the river. This abstract color-field image (somewhat resembling a painting by Clyfford Still or Mark Rothko) was placed upside-down and made in the artist’s latest Tokyo photographs, River Series/Shadow of 2002. These photographs, as do certain of Gerhard Richter’s paintings, refer to the history of photographic process, aiming to produce an image of schein, a latent image temporarily created through light effects. “While exploring the river, Hatakeyama discovered a hidden entrance to a covered part of the river (beneath the structures) where he found a world dominated by absolute darkness. With a flashlight, as if breaking the sacred darkness and stillness of the untouchable underground world, he proceeded upstream and revealed in his photographs Underground of 1999 this unknown world, its space and inhabitants. Comparing this adventurous experience to being an astronaut standing on the moon, he felt completely helpless before Nature in the darkness (as he similarly felt while looking at a vast snow-covered Alaskan field from a small airplane or while standing on an endlessly-continuing dune in the Sahara). He had to submit to artificial light to see and photograph. But most importantly, this feeling of awe and respect for Nature (light) that he has maintained is the very special quality that makes his photographs of the city so sublime and so beautiful.” All images courtesy L.A. Galerie, Munich.
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#5, #1 and #7 of River Series, 1993–94 (left to right) C-print, mounted on aluminum, 100 x 49 cm
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Blast, #5707, made since 1995 C-print, mounted on aluminum, 100 x 150 cm
“My interest in texture is linked to the Blast series. I used a Nikon with a remote control and a motor drive. These photographs are a gift from the natural world, since there is no person standing behind the lens.”
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A Select Bibliography of Books by Naoya Hatakeyama Lime Works. First Edition. Synergy, Tokyo, 1997 Lime Works, Second Edition. Amus Arts Press, Osaka, 2002 “Limestone is the only raw material in which Japan is self-sufficient. I began to visit limestone quarries and soon, cement factories too. From the environmental standpoint, quarried mountains are pitiful and ugly. But we are all part of Nature and Nature is greater than humanity. It is only by giving nature human qualities that we can understand it. The hole that quarrying creates became connected, for me, to the city. There was a positive-negative space relationship happening. All of this limestone had been taken out of the mountain and transformed into Tokyo. ‘Nature in a pitiful state’ lost all meaning.” Slow Glass. Winchester Gallery, Winchester, 2001 Underground. Media Factory, Tokyo, 2000 "Why do I see such venomously stenchful things as mold growing on the sewage and rat shit as beautiful? The paradox that is born there gave me a chance to think about things." Quoted in Naoya Hatakeyama, the catalogue to the exhibition at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, 2002 One Picture Book #25. River Series/Shadow. Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2005 "Moving around Tokyo on a motorcycle with a camera, tripod and maps, you soon come to see that the limitation of maps is that they contain nothing of the vertical component of the city. The River Series was created with this idea of a vertical map of Tokyo in mind. Solitude and the horizontal line are key to this body of work. A line has no area. I place myself on that line." Naoya Hatakeyama. Tankosha, Tokyo, 2002. The catalogue to the exhibition at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, 2002 Atmos. Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2004 Naoya Hatakeyama. Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern, 2002
Anthologies that include Hatakeyama’s work Issue 25 of Blind Spot magazine. Blind Spot, New York City, 2003 Blink. 100 Photographers. 10 Curators. 10 Writers. Phaidon, Harrisburg, 2002 Land of Paradox. Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona, 1996
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Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) Poems by
Charles Baudelaire Photographs by
Eikoh Hosoe Handmade book includes 11 platinum prints. In an edition of 65 signed and numbered copies. Published by
Please call 800.965.3536 or visit our website: www.21stphotography.com to order the new 48 page, full color catalog from 21ST. Limited to 3000 hardbound, hand-numbered copies.
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The Sonnets of Shakespeare Flor Garduño Photographs
Handmade book includes 11 platinum prints. In an edition of 65 signed and numbered copies. Published by
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DESIGNED BY NATURE
Featuring gorgeous color photos of seashells both familiar and exotic—
ONE HUNDRED SEASHELLS celebrates the luminous arrays of colors, the twists and turns that makes each shell unique and spectacular. A must-have for nature and art lovers alike.
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‘Tis the Season Published in association with Columbia College Chicago
Institutional: Photographs of Jails, Schools, and Other Chicago Buildings by Scott Fortino with an introduction by Judith Russi Kirshner
“Scott Fortino’s pictures manage to convince us that these cold, lifeless institutions are full of light, color, and playful, formal possibility. In fact, he convinces us that lifelessness and playfulness can exist in equal measure. That’s why we keep looking; it’s so hard to believe.”—Paul D’Amato $40.00 Clothbound with jacket 9¾ x 11, 88 pages, 53 color photographs ISBN: 1-930066-39-2 Signed clothbound limited edition with an original print $400.00 ISBN: 1-930066-43-0
At City’s Edge: Photographs of the Chicago Lakefront by Bob Thall
“Bob Thall has earned a place within the rich tradition of America’s critical landscapists, a lineage that stretches back to Timothy O’Sullivan and Carlton Watkins…. This is masterful work by an artist still enamored with the possibilities of his time, his place, and his medium.”—Peter Bacon Hales $45.00 Clothbound with jacket 11¼ x 9¾, 96 pages, 64 tritone photographs ISBN: 1-930066-38-4
Private Places: Photographs of Chicago Gardens by Brad Temkin with an introduction by Rod Slemmons
“By focusing his camera on backyard gardens, Brad Temkin has captured something poignant and wonderful about the human urge to be at harmony with nature, even in the most urban of circumstances.” —Andy Grundberg $40.00 Clothbound with jacket 11¼ x 9¾, 80 pages, 54 four-color plates ISBN: 1-930066-41-4 Signed clothbound limited edition with an original print $400.00 ISBN: 1-930066-42-1
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From the Getty
Antiquity and Photography Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites Claire L. Lyons, John K. Papadopoulos, Lindsey S. Stewart, and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak
Explores the relationship between antiquity and photography in the period 1840–1880, including portfolios of works by several major photographers.
Roads to Rome John Heseltine Introduction by Colin Ford
An evocative photographic record of a series of journeys along the five ancient Roman roads of Italy. $50.00 hardcover
$65.00 hardcover
In Focus: Weegee Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum
The Mining Photographs
Reproduces fifty of the ninety-five photographs in the Getty collection by Weegee, who was best known for his crime photos in the 1930s through 1950s.
Judith Keller
$17.50 paperback
Milton Rogovin
Features more than one hundred powerful portraits of coal miners both at work and at home. $60.00 hardcover
Getty Publications
www.getty.edu
Tel 800 223 3431
Also available at fine bookstores
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photo eye Photographer’s Showcase
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Builder Levy Photographer includes 143 spot-varnished tritone photographs of New York city, the Appalachian Coalfields, Mongolia, Cuba, and demonstrations from the 1960s and the new millennium. Here are real lives as real people live them! “Levy has been steadfast in his belief that, in addition to its narrative dimension, a photograph is an object with its own distinctive aesthetic character. His silver prints...reveal the rich tonalities that are intrinsic to the medium. The photographs in this book are a testament to the fact that these intertwined objectives can produce works of power and beauty.”—from the Introduction by Naomi Rosenblum. Hardbound, 12 x 9½ inches printed on Phoenix Motion Xantur Art Press, NY 2005 [Signed] $49.95
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NOBUYOSHI ARAKI: SELF, LIFE, DEATH LIMITED NUMBERED ED.
- A special luxury edition, handbound and limited to 3,000 copies - Each copy individually numbered - Includes foil-blocked, tipped in, textured pages - Texts throughout printed on different sized, pre-dyed, various coloured stock - Handbound in textured soft leather and presented in a slipcase - Hardback 290 x 214 mm 11 3/8 x 8 8/8 inches 720 pp c.800 color, c. 400 b&w photographs - $175.00 Hardback, ISBN 0 7148 4576 0
Untitled (1997) Silver Gelatin, Size: 16x20 Edition of 100 plus 5 AP’s Signed and Numbered ISBN: 0714846139
Araki Collector’s Editions (pictured above with 2 print choices) Introductory Offer: $1750.OO
www.phaidon.com
Untitled (Kaori, 2004) C-type print, Size: 16x20 Edition of 100 plus 5 AP’s Signed and Numbered ISBN: 0714846066
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T HE B OOK OF P HOTOGRAPHY The History, the Technique, the Art, the Future
PHOTO: GERD LUDWIG
SPANNING MORE THAN A CENTURY AND A HALF of photo-
graphic history and encompassing the work of more than 250 photographers, this comprehensive volume explores every aspect of photography, from the first visionary experiments to the latest technical and aesthetic developments. Here are the pioneers and masters—Andreas Gursky, Edward Steichen, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams, and Brassaï to name a few—whose work illustrates the evolving technologies and techniques that have shaped photography’s past and point the way to its future. HIGHLIGHTED BY 200 STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHS and
featuring authoritative text, biographical vignettes, and more, The Book of Photography is an endlessly informative, visually irresistible chronicle of an art that has not only revolutionized the way we see the world but has transformed it in countless ways. AVA I L A B L E W H E R E V E R B O O K S A R E S O L D O R C A L L 1 - 8 8 8 - 6 4 7 - 6 7 3 3 .
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“Surprising and illuminating.” Keith Davis “A brilliant meditation on how thoroughly photography shapes our understanding of place. It opens a revolutionary new path for rephotography.” John Rohrbach “Though Yosemite is ‘a landscape full of photographs,’ its changing character has rarely been measured with such vision and respect.” Lucy Lippard Trinity University Press San Antonio,Texas www.trinity.edu/tupress 210-999-8884 Hardcover edition: $45.00. Also available in a limited edition of 75 signed and numbered copies, in a custom portfolio box with an original inkjet print, Panorama from Sentinel Dome: $750.00.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT... “ART WOLFE’s wildlife photographs capture the elusive beauty— and the evolutionary benefits—of camouflage.” —Smithsonian
Visit our Web site at www.bulfinchpress.com
Bulfinch Press
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PICTURE-PERFECT BOOKS FROM STANFORD
Yangtze Remembered
Under One Sky
Away Out Over Everything
The River Beneath the Lake
MARGO DAVIS “A photographer who is also an artist is able to summon from her subject the viewer—not only the viewed. Margo Davis is such an artist.” —Toni Morrison Reach into the heart and soul of people from every inhabited continent through sixty tour de force black-and-white portraits by Margo Davis. Under One Sky is a collection of nearly forty years of portrait making by one of the inheritors of California’s photographic legacy. $65.00 cloth
The Olympic Peninsula and the Elwha River
LINDA BUTLER Foreword by SIMON WINCHESTER “Those who view these images . . . will be by turns amazed and dejected: no one who loves China and her people will ever forget these carefully made photographs, nor the moment in history that they so eloquently record, nor the poignancy that they so quietly reveal.” —Simon Winchester $65.00 cloth
800.621.2736
www.sup.org
Photographs by MARY PECK, With an Essay by CHARLES WILKINSON “Peck’s approach is less to document the land than to experience herself as part of its living systems. Her exquisite photographs are the artist’s attempt to share that process.” —Tim McNulty $49.95 cloth
Stanford University Press
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In Focus
PORTRAITS OF TIBETAN BUDDHIST MASTERS DON FARBER Foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche With Words from the Masters and Text by Rebecca McClen Novick “An inspiring book of heart-warming photographs of leading Tibetan lamas.” —Jeffrey Hopkins, author of Cultivating Compassion $29.95 hardcover
THE BODY AT RISK Photography of Disorder, Illness, and Healing CAROL SQUIERS The first book to explore the ways that photojournalists and social documentarians have conceptualized the human subject as a site of both good and ill health. Copublished with the International Center of Photography and Milbank Memorial Fund $29.95 paperback
At bookstores or order (800) 822-6657 www.ucpress.edu
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MY FAVORITE T-SHIRT My Favorite T-shirt. Photographs by Erez Sabag. Text by Shelley Rice. New York, 2004. 96 pp., 57 four-color illustrations, 9.5 x 11 inches Hardbound $75.00
My Favorite T-Shirt, by photographer Erez Sabag, is available as a limited edition, including a signed copy of the book and an 11x14 inch C-print, printed, numbered, and signed by the photographer. Seven separate images available, each in an edition of 10. $1,000.00 each. ISBN 0-9767534-0-5
www.erezsabag.com
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Gary Auerbach
Jeff Witt
Amy Aglar
Sue Abramson
Jackie Alpers
Laurie Schneider
Yvonne Bond
Rich Petronio
Tom Hawkins
Susan Bowen
Alan Kupchick
Santiago Vanegas
John Anderson
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The photographs collected in Havana came out of a 10-day assignment in Cuba in January 2003 for Black & White Magazine, where Richard Pitnick serves as senior contributing editor.
Havana. Photographs by Richard Pitnick. Itzamna Press, Carmel Valley, 2005. 48 pp., 39 black and white illustrations, 13x12” Signed Copies Available, Softbound, $25.00
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PHOTOGRAPHER’S SHOWCASE Welcome to the advertising pages for the photo-eye Photographer’s Showcase. At photo-eye, we believe these artists possess enormous potential. Imagine buying a print by Emmet Gowin, Cindy Sherman, or Robert ParkeHarrison before they hit big. Here’s your opportunity.
Russell Phillips
All of these prints and more are available through the links provided below each photograph. Contact Joslin Van Arsdale at photo-eye Gallery (joslin@photoeye.com or 505.988.5159) for information about adding these beautiful works to your collection. Photographers: contact Melanie McWhorter (melanie@photoeye.com or 505.988.5152) if you are interested in seeing your work in our next Booklist or on the Photographer’s Showcase.
Chicago Theater Proscenium, 1982
www.photoeye.com/russellphillips
Ken Rosenthal www.photoeye.com/ kenrosenthal
A Dream Half Remembered #ZD-54-12
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PHOTOGRAPHER’S SHOWCASE
Michael Levin www.photoeye.com/ michaellevin
STEEL PIER, U.S.A. 2005
Jennifer Drucker www.photoeye.com/ jenniferdrucker
Dandelions at Dark, NY, 2004
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PHOTOGRAPHER’S SHOWCASE
Gaylen Morgan www.photoeye.com/ gaylenmorgan
Breath #5
Debe Hale
www.photoeye.com/debehale
Mary’s Room, Clyde, NC, 2001
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PHOTOGRAPHER’S SHOWCASE
Nepenthe, from the Equivalents series
Ventilator from the Moonshooter series
Jim Krantz www.photoeye.com/jimkrantz
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PHOTOGRAPHER’S SHOWCASE
Missy Gaido Allen www.photoeye.com/ missygaidoallen
Untitled from Iowa Spring
Mihai Mangiulea
Joy Goldkind
www.photoeye.com/mihaimangiulea
www.photoeye.com/joygoldkind
Untitled from Neverplaces 2
64th Birthday, 2005
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photo eye Auctions Shomei Tomatsu, “11 ji 02 fun” Nagasaki (11:02 Nagasaki). Tokyo, 1968. Online auctions of rare & collectible photobooks, including signed first editions and scarce limited editions, along with affordable photographs. Every day, the best prices for the best books. Contact us directly to consign. photo-eye Auctions Eric Miles, Auction Coordinator auctions@photoeye.com 505.988.5152 photoeye.com/auctions
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