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$10 US
FALL 2016
Photo. GIF. Print. Limitless possibilities.
H O U ST O N C E N T E R F O R P H O T O G R A P H Y
WE’RE NOT JUST A PHOTOBOOTH COMPANY.
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6 A Walking Conversation with John Gossage with Tim Carpenter
16 Project B and the Vernacular Photobook by Ashlyn Davis
26 A Conversation with Raymond Meeks with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
36 Bearing Witness to Erike Diettes’ Memento Mori by W.M. Hunt
46 Presenting the Photobook by Caroline Docwra
52 KayLynn Deveney with Maggie Blanchard
63 Book Review: Libyan Sugar by Jonathan Blaustein
69 Recent Acquisitions to the John Cleary Library 70 Spotlight
Contents
fall 2016 editors Ashlyn Davis Caroline Docwra
spot is published twice yearly, in conjunction with the fiscal year of Houston Center for Photography. Subscriptions are free to HCP members.
spot web design Bandwidth Productions
spot is a journal of independent opinions published by Houston Center for Photography as one of its many services to the photographic community. The ideas expressed do not represent positions of Houston Center for Photography’s administration or membership and are solely the opinions of the writers and contributors.
design CORE Design Studio spot advisor Peter Brown executive director Ashlyn Davis director of education Juliana Forero, Ph.D. director of exhibitions and programs Caroline Docwra director of finance Sean Yarborough exhibitions and website coordinator Jessi Bowman outreach coordinator Jamie Robertson visitor services and membership coordinator Joseph Roberts development associate Mary LeMaster digital darkroom manager Daniela Galindo education assistant Emilee Cooney
H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y
gallery associate Mayra Mares
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outreach instructors Juliana Contrell Heather Fisher Ceci Norman Stephanie Perkins Chris Skelton summer 2016 interns Hillary Cormier Briana Gonzalez Allison Jagers Jordan Kirkpatrick Minsu Kwan Meredith Loper Katherine Nesser
Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved. No portion of spot may be reproduced without the permission of Houston Center for Photography. Captions are based upon known information of the photograph. In cases where print type and medium are not listed, the image provider has noted these as variable. Houston Center for Photography’s mission is to increase society’s understanding and appreciation of photography and its evolving role in contemporary culture. Houston Center for Photography strives to encourage artists, build audiences, stimulate dialogue and promote inquiry about photography and related media through, education, exhibitions, publications, fellowship programs and community collaboration. For details about membership or advertising, contact: Houston Center for Photography 1441 West Aalabama, Houston, Texas 77006 t : 713.529.4755 f : 713.529.9248 info@hcponline.org
hcponline.org
HCP’s 2015-2016 supporters HCP benefactors The Brown Foundation Houston Arts Alliance Houston Endowment The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation HCP underwriters Artists’ Framing Resource Patricia Eifel and Jim Belli Larson-Juhl Jean L. Karotkin Antonio Manega Nena Marsh The Meyer Levy Charitable Foundation Fan and Peter Morris Celia and Jay Munisteri Texas Commission on the Arts The Wortham Foundation HCP platinum sponsors Elizabeth and Dave Anders Krista and Mike Dumas Katharine Bartheleme Frazier King Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation The National Endowment for the Arts Poppi Massey Alexander and Muffy McLanahan QUE Imaging Texas Women for the Arts The Wortham Foundation HCP silver donors Maconda Abinader Julie and Drew Alexander Amegy Bank The Beth Block Foundation Cameron International Corporation Susan and Patrick Cook Catherine Couturier Gallery Tom and Marybeth Flaherty Sherry and James Kempner Carol Liffman James Maloney HCP green circle Joe Aker Eddie and Chinhui Allen Joan and Stanford Alexander Cara Barer Gay Block and Billie Parker Charles Butt Shelley Calton and Stuart Nelson Jereann Chaney John D. Chaney The Chaney Foundation Michael Deal Bevin and Dan Dubrowski Exxon Mobile Foundation James R. Fisher The Albert and Ethel Herzstein Foundation Howard Hilliard and Betty Pecore The Mavis Kelsey Fund Anna B. McCullough Burt Nelson J. Andrew Nairn The Robertson-Finley Foundation Sue and Bob Schwartz Paul Smead Scott R. Sparvero Laura Torgerson The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation Whole Foods spot is generously underwritten by Jean L. Karotkin and The Meyer Levy Foundation
From the Editor
I’m excited to write to you for the first time as the Executive Director of Houston Center for Photography. It’s a thrilling moment for the organization as we consider the innovative ways we can build on HCP’s legacy as one of the oldest member-run photography organizations in the country. As we discuss plans for the future, it’s been useful to dig into HCP’s past, and I’ve found myself combing through old issues of spot, which are available in their entirety on HCP’s website. The spot archive offers a rich documentation of HCP’s history as well as a unique perspective on the history of photography over the past 35 years. I encourage you to check it out! When we began planning this issue, Caroline and I invited Peter Brown, photographer, educator, and one of the founders of HCP, to act as a special advisor. At our first meeting, he met us in HCP’s John Cleary Library with two large bags of photobooks. As we passed them around, we realized just how central the photobook is and has been to photography and to spot— thus, the focus of this issue.
Peter’s bag of books points to the democratic nature of the photobook, which allows images to circulate widely and have a profound impact on a broad, diverse readership. One of the defining characteristics that nearly all this issue’s contributors mention is that in a photobook, a photograph is not meant to operate singularly. It is intended to be viewed in the specific context and sequence of the other images, akin to a cinematic experience or novel. John Gossage points this out when discussing Walker Evans’ seminal 1938 American Photographs. Inscribed in the dust jacket is a set of operating instructions in all caps, urging viewers to look at the photographs in the order presented. The result is, as Lincoln Kirstein writes, “intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense, and perfection.”
It’s an exciting moment for the photobook—and an exciting moment for spot! As always, thank you readers for coming along for the ride. I look forward to seeing you in the galleries, classrooms, and library in the year ahead!
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books, the photobook as an archive, and the emotional and political power of a book to confront readers with a personal experience of war. Many of the books in this issue will be featured on the display shelves of our John Cleary Library this fall. We invite you to flip through them in person, and peruse the nearly 4,000 other books available in our library.
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With context and accessibility at the forefront, this issue discusses a wide range of topics such as the material and design aspects of handmade artist
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Ashlyn Davis Executive Director
Contributors Maggie Blanchard Maggie Blanchard is Director of Twin Palms Publishers. For over thirty years Twin Palms has published exceptional photography and art books with an emphasis on monographs. Each beautifully made book honors the original work while creating an object that has a life of its own. Maggie is also an educator who teaches in order to continue to learn.
Jonathan Blaustein Jonathan Blaustein is an artist, writer, and educator based in Taos, New Mexico. He has exhibited his work widely in galleries and museums in the US, and in festivals in Europe as well. His photographs reside in several important collections, including the Library of Congress, the State of New Mexico, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Jonathan is a regular contributor to the popular blog A Photo Editor, as well as the New York Times Lens blog, and has taught at UNM-Taos for many years. He has also written about art and photography online for The New Yorker, VICE, and Hyperallergic.
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Tim Carpenter
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Tim Carpenter is a photographer and writer who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is a co-founder of TIS books, an independent photobook publisher.
Ashlyn Davis Ashlyn Davis is co-editor of spot and the Executive Director of HCP. Prior to moving to Houston, she worked with various arts and publishing organizations in New York City and Portland, Oregon. Ashlyn is also a writer, and she has co-edited a book of historic photographs of the American West, Islands of the Blest, which was published in 2014 by the Silas Finch Foundation. She holds a BA in Art History from Pratt Institute and an MA in American Studies with a focus on the history of photography from the University of Texas at Austin.
Caroline Docwra Caroline Docwra is the co-editor of spot and the Director of Exhibitions and Programs at HCP. She recently curated the exhibitions, Travelogues, with Nathan Hoang, Sara Macel, and Natalie Slater and co-curated In the Wake, Somewhere in the Balance, and Teresa Munisteri’s Strangers to Darkness. Docwra holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology and a minor in Art History and is currently pursuing a Masters in Arts Leadership from the University of Houston.
W.M. Hunt
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and editor of The Great Leap Sideways. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, and Paul Graham. He was a Light Work artist-in-residence in May 2016, recently guest-edited the Aperture PhotoBook Review (Spring 2016), and is a faculty member at Purchase College, SUNY.
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Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
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W.M.—Bill—Hunt is a New York-based collector, curator and consultant, and a champion of photography. He loves fresh talent and Houston. He has been on the HCP Advisory Board for a number of years. “RE: Groups: American Photographs before 1960” was shown at HCP in 2010, and in 2015 he brought “Conversation in Color” with Bill Armstrong and taught his workshop “How I Look at Photographs.” He also teaches at the School of Visual Arts and for many years he has produced the “Your Picture …” panels for PDN. His big book “The Unseen Eye; Photographs from the Unconscious” came out in 2011. He has also written for “L’Oeil de la Photographie” and other publications and monographs. Hunt has been a longtime board member of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund.
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John Gossage, Tecate, Mexico, from A Dozen Failures courtesy of the artist
A Walking Conversation with John Gossage WITH TIM CARPENTER
held both in his Washington, D.C. apartment (which doubles as a world-class photobook library) and on a picture-making walk nearby.
JG: It’s actually the real goods as opposed to the speculation. But if you said, “Explain to me what you’re doing right now, when you choose to make a picture,” well, I don’t know the answer to that. As you know, you educate your instincts and then you work on instinct. In that Scorsese documentary on the Rolling Stones, they ask Keith Richards what are you thinking when you’re onstage. Well, nothing. If you think when you’re playing, you haven’t learned what you’re doing. You don’t think. TC: There’s an idea attributed to Tod Papageorge that if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not reading enough. JG: (laughs) Yeah, exactly. There’s a reason I have Atget screensavers on my computer. They’re a constant reminder that there are better ways to organize the world than I know how to do. Basically I look at the ones I don’t know, and ones that are awkward. It’s literally instructional to me to see how he worked. TC: I sometimes wonder: what if the idea of the photobook had existed for Atget? JG: Well, he did the albums, which had a connection. The pictures with a border around them I assume were from album pages, and they’re inscribed from where they are. But I don’t think anyone before [Walker] Evans thought of literature in the photobook. TC: Right. When we spoke before you placed the beginning of a photobook literature with American Photographs. JG: Yeah, I can’t find anything else in any other language earlier than that, and he’s so positioned for it. Being essentially a writer by aspiration initially, and then he gets involved with [Lincoln] Kirstein, who’s also a writer and has at least as much to do with the editing of that book and everything as Evans does. They were perfect for each other.
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in early June for a conversation
TC: Thanks for agreeing to photograph during part of our talk. I’m excited for that.
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John Gossage kindly met with me
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John Gossage, San Diego, California, from A Dozen Failures courtesy of the artist
TC: I want to probe more about what you mean by a literature. Gerry Badger has famously quoted your four standards for a great photobook. JG: Yeah, the random email. I kept telling him, “I’m not going to say anything profound in this email.” TC: And then it all became set in stone. But I think the crux is the second idea: that the book must be a self-contained world. JG: Yes. That’s what any novel does. All of the sudden we’re in a person’s bedroom. That’s the world, that’s the effect that it has. And it’s a literary model that we’ve honed in on and are able to use. Let’s take a look at American Pictures, [sic]. Whoever writes this [on the dust jacket], and we’re not sure if it’s Evans or it’s Kirstein: “The reproductions in this book are intended to be looked at in a given sequence.” In all capital letters. He’s telling you what’s going on; they’re operating instructions. Which is bizarre, and if you don’t have the dust jacket, you don’t know it exists. TC: Did the Museum of Modern Art hang the pictures in the same order as the book? JG: Well, Evans did it, very eccentrically. He locked himself in the gallery at night, and basically he was cropping the pictures and sort of plopping them on the wall. It’s very clutzy. You can envision that Evans was never particularly interested in installing things on the wall. It doesn’t seem to be what he cares about. TC: Which is a theme I’d like to talk about: as you’ve made clear with The Pond, you never saw that as a wall show at first. JG: I didn’t want the photographs to be scanned. The simple thing that Evans understood, whether he voiced it or not, is that there is a special case of having a single picture, having it be in front of you, and then very clearly pass into memory. Have it not be accessible, and that memory affects the picture that comes after it. That these speak to each other that way. All of this is Photobook 101 now, but it wasn’t back then. This was the avant-garde.
JG: With The Pond, I just thought that was no literary model for narrative landscape. There was no effective equivalent in writing. Landscape tended to be setting, in general. William Maxwell showed me a few literary examples of what I was trying to achieve, so it wasn’t unprecedented, but certainly not common. The idea was to reinforce the ordinariness of the pursuit. I would take a step off of the pavement. You leave the pavement, and then you go home. It’s all those little paths that kids have, the back way, the more interesting way to go.
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TC: So that’s where The Pond has always felt different to me from American Photographs or even The Americans, another source of classic pictures. You made photographs that you didn’t mean to be classic; the pictures operate some other way, and I always thought that where you took the photobook with The Pond was a major break with those precedents.
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And now we’ve come to find that 75% of these pictures in this book are the classic American pictures.
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TC: That ordinariness presented a fresh challenge to most viewers. These were not obvious wall pictures. Whereas most of the pictures in American Photographs and The Americans do a lot on their own. JG: That’s because you weren’t young at the time they were made. I wasn’t either, but I think it’s because we’ve learned how to look at them almost genetically. And both of the books sold phenomenally badly at the time. They had no audience whatsoever; you couldn’t give them away. The funny thing is, even with the reprint of The Pond and all the people who say it had an impact on them, we only sold about 12 copies I think. I did a signing at [International Center of Photograph] that Aperture set up and one person came. It was a phenomenally unpopular book. TC: It’s like that quote about the Velvet Underground: They didn’t have many fans, but all of those fans went out and started bands of their own. JG: Yes! Well, it was reviewed in People magazine, which was totally cross-marketing. “Gee, I wonder what photobook I should buy, let’s see what People recommends.” TC: When you were young in New York, and friendly with many legendary photographers, were there also folks interested in the book form in the way you were? JG: Well, yes and no. Remember there were almost no shows, no galleries. So if you’re interested in photography, you’re interested in books. That was the default position.
H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y
TC: Was anyone thinking in the literary way you’ve described? Were you talking with anybody about that?
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I would be the one who would go through the show quickly so I could get to the bookstore and buy the catalog.
JG: I wasn’t even fully thinking of that. I just wanted to have it and look over it. I would be the one who would go through the show quickly so I could get to the bookstore and buy the catalog. I was a slow learner, I needed to see it over and over again to know what the best work was about. TC: So with The Pond, whom did you show the pictures to as you were working on it? JG: Lewis [Baltz]. He had done The New Industrial Parks and he was the first person I knew personally who aspired to the kind of thing that I was interested in. It was an idea about what you want and how you want to do it. TC: And yet your work is so different from that of a conceptualist like Baltz. JG: My pictures inform me. They provide an inclination to do something, to try something somewhere or some way. And then the pictures inform me of the place I’m going with it. I’m the inverse of a conceptualist. I don’t illustrate preexisting ideas; I don’t know how to do it. TC: So The Pond comes out and only a few people buy it at first. Were you discouraged? Or did you feel you were on the right track? JG: I’m fairly un-career-oriented. I really didn’t give a fuck. Lewis said it was a great book, Walter Hopps said it was a great book, Leo Castelli. Other people like that. So, OK, it’s a great book. (The cloudy day brightens a bit and we walk outside, into the large forested park across the street.)
John Gossage, Hyattsville, Maryland, from A Dozen Failures courtesy of the artist
In general, I’m interested in the inverse of photojournalism. I’m more interested in the photograph than in the event. That’s one of the interests in this kind of photography. TC: You also said of a successful photograph: I can live with this view from my experience lived up to this point. JG: (halts to make a picture) What choice do we have? (stays silent for another moment) Alright, the light’s happening.
JG: No, because then I tend to have to hang around places too much. And I’m impossible with tripods. TC: So speaking of tripods, is The Actor your only large format work? JG: Yeah, I sort of kept that back for a while. It had to do with Baltz kind of issues. I wanted to do it because I found the architecture particularly odd in the vernacular sense, but also if you did a series where you said they were all banks, that people would find that in the picture no matter where you put it. You set the context up. And then when I looked at it, I thought it was too close to Lewis and other people that I knew, and it wasn’t as good. It was a side little thing. Alec Soth was actually the one who got me to do it, because he wanted me to do a book with Little Brown Muskrat. (I laugh.) But his format was 24 pictures, and we both really agreed that it should be more pictures.
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JG: Clearly, the kind of things I photograph, it’s like that (points to a curb by a tree and a sidewalk), the more commonly available it is, almost the more interested I am in it. And when I turn it off, when I’m not on duty, they don’t fascinate me. They are what they are. I like that there are times when things are just exactly as they seem. It’s a relief.
TC: Do you like a day like this, with shifting light?
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TC: You once said: “The things that I photograph, in the way that I photograph them, to be beautiful.” I’m drawn by the agency you claim in that.
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John Gossage, CaĂąon City, Colorado, from A Dozen Failures courtesy of the artist
TC: So, speaking of more pictures, let’s talk about Berlin in the Time of the Wall. JG: More pictures! TC: When did you think you’d do 450-odd pictures in a book? JG: Part of it’s an editing issue. Sometimes more is more. (pauses to make a picture) Michael Abrams asked the bad question. When I first met him he said that being a collector is frustrating because you’re not really involved in the medium. And he’d really liked Snake Eyes, and he said, “Do you have anything else?” And I said I have a book that I can’t really propose to any publisher with a straight face. He said tell me. And he’s a guy who figures out how to make things work. TC: And so for Putting Back the Wall, how’d you figure this was going to be two volumes? JG: Well, I was talking with Michael and we were making some other books, and he said John we should do another book of yours, too. And I said let’s so something that absolutely nobody wants; let’s do some more Berlin pictures. “Don’t encourage John. Things are going to get out of hand very quickly.” Young photographers will kill me to hear this, but I’ve never had to make a compromise on any book I’ve ever done. I’ve been exceedingly lucky. I got in on the ground floor.
I’m out here to make something. And sometimes, you know, it’s just not the day to do that. And you wind up with failures. And then you make a book out of those!
TC: And talking about things getting out of hand, you made The Things Animals Care About, And or Hey Fuckface, where the “books” aren’t even bound. When did you start thinking about those kinds of things? JG: I got interested in the space between the wall and your lap. It’s engineered so you can’t hang those pictures. So it’s somewhere in between. TC: How did the bootleg of Hey Fuckface come about? JG: Well, they [Horses Think Press] had done Alec’s Broken Manual, and they just asked. And I thought that’s cool, lets see what it looks like. And I enjoyed it immensely. I even added extra pictures, the alternates that were good.
JG: I know how to make pictures. My pictures, not other people’s. But sometimes what they look like can be pretentious. They strain for meaning, as opposed to inhabiting it. And that feels bad, and that happens all the time. Because I’m out here to make something. And sometimes, you know, it’s just not the day to do that. And you wind up with failures. And then you make a book out of those!
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TC: You once recounted a conversation with Robert Adams about coming home frustrated sometimes from a day of photographing. Does that still happen, or do you feel like you can produce on any given day?
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(stops a longer while to make a picture)
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TC: So let’s talk about failures. JG: Yeah, aren’t we supposed to be talking about A Dozen Failures? TC: Yes, ultimately. The first thing is to distinguish failures from mistakes. JG: Mistakes are really easy. If I left the exposure for what I had inside, that’s obvious and has no other ramification. TC: But failures are slippery. JG: The failures book has actually been amazingly interesting to me because it set the expectation for pictures somewhere else that I wasn’t used to putting them. And as I look at the pictures more, I’m getting closer and closer to that. It’s changing my definition of success. It’s made for me, basically. It’s changed the edit of the next book. I mean, it’s arguable that all of those pictures are successes. Very very arguable. TC: When I first saw the pictures and the idea, the thing that delighted me the most was that it hung together as a photobook on its own, but that’s also like a Rosetta stone, a way to unlock your career. JG: Exactly. I went back to contact sheets all the way from The Pond shooting to see: can I pull that all in? What was it that met the criteria I was setting for myself? TC: You’ve talked about A Dozen Failures being a really tough edit. JG: Yeah. One, I wanted to make it a book that people wanted to look at repeatedly. And all my initial instincts are how do you make the most successful pictures you can. And this wasn’t the given. I had to relearn how to do what I was doing, and keep appraising, looking at it over and over again to see did it really do what I wanted it to do. Or was I just sneaking in some orphans–and it couldn’t just be that. That’s not interesting.
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TC: Right. So tell me more about straining versus inhabiting. JG: In the book, the closest I came to straining was a picture of shopping center parking lot with the light of God. That was the over-reaching picture. Can you ask more from the literature of the picture than you actually can support? That’s what Romanticism is, by definition. TC: That makes me think of a similar idea that prose is descriptive of an experience, whereas a poem embodies the experience. JG: Yes, and the trap of poetry is to overreach, which happens all the time. TC: Perhaps that’s a nice note to end on. Let’s not overreach.
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John Gossage, Tijuana, Mexico, from A Dozen Failures courtesy of the artist
Project B and
H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y
An Interview with Barbara Levine
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the Vernacular Photobook BY ASHLYN DAVIS
AD: Barbara, tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to work with the found image and the book form. BL: Like many people, I’ve always loved books and libraries and looking at other people’s pictures. My mother and grandmother went antiquing often (and I went with them) and the shops always had piles of old photos and photograph albums. I was bit by the collecting bug early on! I thought I was building my own little library of beautiful unusual books full of strange places, time and people. Learning about forms and visual language and appreciating photobooks followed, first as a photography student at the San Francisco Art Institute and then when I went to work at SFMOMA. I began to relate to vernacular photograph albums as objects, as visual explorations, as storytelling, and as visual concepts. I explored the idea of the photo album (from time period 1880–1930) as the first generation of photographic storytelling in my first two books, Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing The American Photo Album (2006) and Around The World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums (2007, both Princeton Architectural Press).
removed from their intended circle
Because for so many years I was focused on photograph albums and have worked with both formal and personal archives, I am informed by the idea that images seen together constitute something different than those same images seen apart. At their core, archives are an effort to willfully construct a specific context that changes and enhances the meaning of its component parts. In this way, one who assembles a personal archive isn’t merely accumulating but is actually closer to being an author—an author who interleaves new meanings into the relationships between discrete images.
Context in my opinion is key. As is editing. With found images there are infinite combinations and interpretations. When creating the photobook, Camera Era, my co-author Martin Venezky and I wanted to bring together seemingly disparate images and set them in motion with careful editing and design to create a meditation on the camera and its complicated hold on our lives. We considered every aspect of the book an important part of the context including for example, the intimate size of the book and how it would feel when you held it in your hands.
most of the single images in my
collection have probably been ripped out of photograph albums—they have been removed from their intended circle—and now in my hands they invite
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BL: Yes, I agree with the idea that early family photograph albums were the first generation of photographic storytelling. I work primarily in the artist as editor mode and I am keenly aware most of the single images in my collection have probably been ripped out of photograph albums—they have been removed from their intended circle—and now in my hands they invite a new appreciation and interpretation.
I am keenly aware
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AD: Let’s talk a bit about Camera Era. One of the things I love about this and many of your publications is that they reference past and future possibilities of the photobook. These vernacular images were once in someone’s personal archive, likely a family album, which is itself an elementary form of a photobook. At the same time, as the images are repurposed and reprinted, you reiterate the photograph’s potential to be endlessly reinterpreted based on context. How does thinking about context, the archive, and interpretation figure into your work?
a new appreciation and interpretation.
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In the early days of photography, photographs were meant to be handled‌.
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Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky Camera Era, Project B, 2014 5 3/4 x 4 in, 96pp, Softbound Numerous anonymous b&w and color photographs courtesy of the artist
The keeping, looking and sharing of photographs included an interaction.
AD: Yes, the tactile nature of the book is so special and creates a viewing and experiential context in and of itself. It’s also one reason, I think, why we’re experiencing a surge and renewed critical interest in the photography book during a time when practically every image can be viewed online. So many decisions come into play: paper, binding, typography, layout, rhythm, and sequencing. How do you bring each book you produce a unique voice through the design decisions you have to make? BL: As a visual artist, I am very conscious that book space is different from experiencing images framed on a wall or viewed on a backlit screen. When making my book, Snapshot Chronicles in 2005, I wanted to make a book that not only featured the photograph albums and their images but a book that made you feel by way of its design-time, wear and tear, and the edges of the photographs and the album pages and could do so in a way that didn’t make the images or the concept of the book feel nostalgic or quaint. In other words, I wanted the book to feel like an immersive experience from the moment you picked it up. I had the good fortune to meet the distinguished designer, Martin Venezky, and we have been collaborating on books and photographic collages ever since.
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Martin and I embarked on the idea that we could create something that would be a standalone photobook as well as an object in the exhibition (in a perfect world the exhibition would have also had a small screen device so the visitor could view the found images in all three formats to experience how space and its design affects our experience of photographs). We considered every aspect of the book design part of the authorial and artistic intention to ensure the voice of the book and the vintage images in the book would feel unique, engaging and relevant to our contemporary lives.
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I am working in the vein of an artist who is also a collector and an archivist who is also a curator and Martin from the point of view of graphic designer— both of us however are interested in how seemingly typical vintage images can be edited, re-purposed, animated or simply reframed to create new associations and narratives. The fact we collaborate in a way that the images and design work so closely together is unique. In 2014, I curated the exhibition Camera Era for Cherryhurst House in Houston. In considering a printed piece, I wanted to produce a piece that would function differently than a general exhibition brochure or catalogue.
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Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky Camera Era, Project B, 2014 5 3/4 x 4 in, 96pp, Softbound Numerous anonymous b&w and color photographs courtesy of the artist
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Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky Camera Era, Project B, 2014 5 3/4 x 4 in, 96pp, Softbound Numerous anonymous b&w and color photographs courtesy of the artist
AD: It seems that many of your projects, in design, subject matter, and concept are self-referential, like the way the images in Camera Era point back to the camera itself or demonstrate modes of seeing and not seeing. How does the book form allow you to conceptually explore the more meta inquiries into the medium? BL: I work primarily with found and vernacular materials and the book form is ideal for conveying the visual, narrative and tactile qualities of vintage material. All my books start from my emotional response to the image(s). As a collector, I curate pictures in my collection. I work with them as raw material, almost like a photographer without a camera—and a book format is ideal for giving voice to details that for me are a part of the mystery and aura of the material Details such as the imperfections, edges, the wear and tear from handling, etc. As soon you pick up a book, open its cover and turn a page, you are activating a story. That physicality is specific to books. With photographs there is a sense of exchange that is different from other mediums; in the early days of photography, photographs were meant to be handled—carefully slipped into ornate albums or stereviewers, or pasted on an album page, real photo postcards were sent through the mail, gorgeous albumen views of far away places and peoples were tipped on to book pages, snapshots were passed around or written or doodled upon, sometimes they were hand tinted. The keeping, looking and sharing of photographs included an interaction. Though our experience of looking at photographs has changed and broadened there is still in my opinion, an inherent exchange between maker and viewer specific to photography, and photobooks elegantly and inventively capture that spirit. AD: Since you are dealing with found photographs, how do you grapple with the intent of the original photographer? Most of these photographs, I would assume, were made strictly for private enjoyment. What does it mean to you to then re-situate them in a public domain?
The irony is not lost on me that despite the cliché of images staying within a family, now more than ever there are endless discarded and dislocated images and photograph albums (not to mention that most people’s family photographs now reside on devices or in the cloud both of which will become obsolete in their own lifetime). I get many calls to please help people sort out what to do with their old family photos because they don’t have space for them or the children don’t know the people in the photos and they just can’t bring themselves to throw them away. It is a complicated relationship and the vocabulary of photography is evolving as we speak.
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Naturally, I don’t feel this way.
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BL: Early on in my collecting of vernacular photo albums and snapshots people would ask, “do you know the people in the albums?” “Have you contacted their families?” There is a prevailing sense that family photographs always stay within the family and that it is sad or an unspoken violation when old photos land in a stranger’s hands.
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Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky Camera Era, Project B, 2014 5 3/4 x 4 in, 96pp, Softbound Numerous anonymous b&w and color photographs courtesy of the artist
There is a sea of anonymous photographs around us—vintage snapshots and the like that can be found at flea markets, in giveaway piles, on eBay etc. Most people consider them worthless but for me, if I can read the image, if there is anything distinguishing about it historically or the composition or emotion, then it is not a throwaway image. So I pull images out of the stream and examine the layers and bring seemingly disparate images together, bring them to light and hopefully in doing so come to understand the artifact nature of found images and their ripples and in doing so reveal something not seen at first glance—and the idea that my contemporary curatorial sensibility can coexist with these original expressions—sometimes in harmony with them, sometimes at a curious distance—is one of the principal pleasures of collecting and working with found photographs. AD: What are you working on now? Do you have a new book coming out soon?
BL: So many! First ones that come to mind right now are Andy Warhol’s Index Book (1967); Paul Kooiker’s Nude Animal Cigar; Michael Abrams’ Welcome To Springfield and Beyond the Dark Veil: Post Mortem & Mourning Photography from the Thanatos Archive.
Most people consider them worthless but for me, if I can read the image, if there is anything distinguishing about it historically or the composition or emotion, then it is not a throwaway image.
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it is not a throwaway image.
AD: What photobooks are you currently reading?
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BL: Yes! People Knitting: A Century of Photographs published by Princeton Architectural Press comes out this Fall. I am excited about this book because I have a special fascination for the intersection of knitting and photography. Knitting has been around for centuries, but only in the last 150 years have we been able to actually photograph someone in the meditative act of knitting. And of course, I am drawn to offbeat and unlikely subjects!
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A Conversation with Raymond Meeks with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa Raymond Meeks (b. 1963) is widely known and well respected as photographer and book-maker who has published over twenty photobooks in a wide range of formats since 2009. In the Orchard Journal series (2010–2011) published with Silas Finch, Meeks produced three collaborative books intertwining his work with that of Wes Mills, H O U STO N C E N T E R F O R P H OTO G R A P H Y
Mark Steinmetz and Deborah Luster. However, the vast majority of Meeks’s books
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have been self-published in very small collectible editions, each comprising a specific and singular body of his own photographic work. In November 2014, Light Work organized a mid-career retrospective of Meeks’s photographic work and books, and this year Meeks is embarking on a new collaborative series of books under the title Dumbsaint. In the following conversation, Meeks discusses his photographic practice and its ties to book-making.
Orchard Journal Vol. 1 Crime Victims Chronicle Deborah Luster/Raymond Meeks courtesy of the artist
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (SWW): Can you tell me if there was a particular moment when you were first drawn to book-making as something that could be integral to your photographic practice, and could you say a little about what it is that you especially love about the photobook?
The quality of an object—in this case, a book or print—is an equal reflection of the level of attention focused in the making of it. Bookmaking became a channel for formal expression and filled a void left by the absence of printmaking in a chemical darkroom. There was much enthusiasm behind my early experimentation in constructing books—a sense of immediacy. I was less concerned with archival permanence than the performance of making, so I purchased materials (masking tape, spray paint, adhesives) from hardware stores as well as paper suppliers. I really value the formative time spent making books as objects, though bookmaking—in its material processes—is less meaningful and interesting for me today. Now I’m far more interested in engaging with subject, and exploring the narrative possibilities that the photobook offers: sequential and paired relationships that create expansive ideas which point beyond the contents of each individual picture. I’m interested more these days in the challenge to employ as few devices as possible in the interweaving of pictures that broaden and defy easy understanding.
Bookmaking became a channel for formal expression and filled a void left by the absence of printmaking in a chemical darkroom.
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During the same period, I began to sense a lack of context for the pictures I was offering to galleries—I felt that the compressed moments of a single picture lacked an anchor or broader context linked to moments that preceded or directly followed it. So initially, my books were a short series of images that aspired to expand and contextualize the single image.
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Raymond Meeks (RM): I should say that what initially drew me to exploring bookmaking is not what sustains and excites my practice today. In 2009, I’d moved my family from Montana to Portland, Oregon, and I was without a darkroom. Printmaking and darkroom processes have always been integral to my practice of shaping a single image. I had to settle for scanning negatives and printing with an Epson, which is not inherently gratifying in terms of producing prints that evoke qualities similar to the silver gelatin prints I’d been making.
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erasure; a sound like someone trying not to make a sound summer 2014 courtesy of the artist
I felt that the compressed moments of a single picture lacked an anchor or broader context linked to moments that preceded or directly followed it. SWW: That brings me to something I consider to be a crucial distinction in this context, between a photobook and an artist book. Even in relatively short-run edition sizes of say 500 copies, photobooks are typically mechanically reproducible near-identical objects with few if any unique handmade elements. Artist books plainly don’t need to follow that logic, and I’d argue most of your books are artist books in that sense. They’re raw and improvisational objects, sometimes housed in casings fashioned from foam core and strips of wood, sometimes comprising loose leaves bound together with adhesive tape, or filled with pages on which prints are made on the back of pages stripped from other books... The word I instinctually associate with your photographic work is evanescence, and your books seem to reflect that. Can you talk a bit about how your material choices intersect with the language of your photographs?
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erasure; a sound like someone trying not to make a sound summer 2014, courtesy of the artist
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RM: That’s a wonderful observation, though I can’t claim any conscious awareness with regard to material choices echoing the language of my pictures. I wish I could. In many cases, the photographs and the materials are co-dependent and inform one another. There are certain books, such as in love with drama (2014) that I wouldn’t have made in the absence of the paper—repurposed from an oversized book of reproductions depicting “Early Russian Icons”. The sheets were heavy enough to support mounted prints and contained the right amount of pulp to allow ink to rest on the surface for inkjet printing. The book paper inspired a dual narrative. The first; a series of fertile fields from a nearby farm, were printed directly to the paper. The landscapes were made in one early afternoon, previous Spring seeding. The accompanying narrative was sequenced from an edit that represented the early stages of an intimate relationship I had begun—the joy and conflicts associated with merging our lives. These pictures were printed to transparency film and positioned beneath the landscapes.
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untitled, furlong summer 2015 courtesy of the artist
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untitled, furlong summer 2015 courtesy of the artist
SWW: In Pretty Girls Wander (2011) you write: “I photograph close to home as memory looses structure; its architecture, trying to make light speak from the fixed edges of rooms long vanished.” Can you talk a bit about how you go about photographing, and how your pictures work their way into books?
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RM: I’ll work for a while making pictures, and most of the time these are things that are part of my backyard or part of the fabric of my life, so that I make work where I find myself wanting to spend time with a person or a subject, oftentimes dictated by the type of experiences that I want to have in the world. I’m not a prolific photographer. I don’t always have a camera on me. I spend more time without a camera, in part because the moment I have a camera, the thing I’m interested in eludes me—I don’t see it. I have to experience it without a camera first, and then hope that there’s some semblance of it when I go back to photograph that can capture what drew me towards it the first time. I’m really slow to visually organize and make sense of things, so I have to experience the things I’m drawn to a lot—quite frequently—before I can photograph, which is why I end up photographing close to home, because it’s the thing I drive past a hundred times before I finally see it.
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Then it’s not until later when I think “okay, well it’s time to pull something together—I’ve got to offer something to my small base of patrons or collectors that will allow me to make work for a couple of months.” So then it’s just a process of looking at everything, and trying to figure out what’s the common thread, what’s the narrative that seems to exist here. Then it usually involves reading and listening to music, and thinking about the way that certain songs are sequenced and how particular tones are repeated. I think about music and literature and look for a title that creates that thread or that structure that I can then attach my photographs to. That’s typically the evolution of the work. With the exception of Winter Auction (2015), which was one four or five-day event that did happen quickly, but that happened back in Ohio where I’m from, so I had some familiarity with it.
bottom furlong; blue evening artist book, summer 2016 courtesy of the artist
I’m not that good at going somewhere unfamiliar. I’ve heard Alec Soth talk about collaborating with John Gossage, and getting off the plane and within the first three hours Gossage had made hundreds of photographs, and Soth had made one. That’s something I can relate to. Lately I’ve been looking at Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004). It’s one my top five books, and I love the idea of a project that’s that expansive—I love the idea of a project like that, but I don’t know that I have the patience for it with my own photographs. I tire of them too quickly. And that’s the problem with making chapter books, which is what I call them; I make the books as sort of a preview and a sharing of a small segment of the work, and ideally I’m working towards a larger monograph at some point, but by the time I finish working with it as a chapter book I’m kind of done with the picture.
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I spend more time without a camera, in part because the moment I have a camera, the thing I’m interested in eludes me—I don’t see it.
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furlong; blue evening artist book, summer 2016 courtesy of the artist
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furlong; blue evening artist book, summer 2016 courtesy of the artist
SWW: I hadn’t heard you describe your books as chapter books before, and I wonder whether you think there’s an upper page limit to the size of book that you can make working in this way? The books feel like these concise and poetic constellations of notes… Do you feel you’re pushing up against a structural limitation working at this scale and in this way, or do you think that you’ve discovered the specific nature of the way you need to work to be able to make work that you like?
RM: It’s at least a forty foot drop at the minimum where those kids leap off the rocks down to the water, so I’m trying to figure out a way to make pictures where we can more palpably feel the forces of nature on those bodies— trying to work in that brief suspension of time before gravity takes hold. I just instinctually feel like it’s still worth exploring.
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SWW: Maya Deren said that “a ritual is an action distinguished from all others in that it seeks realization of its purpose through the exercise of form. In this sense ritual is art; and even historically, all art derives from ritual. In ritual the form is the meaning. More specifically, the quality of movement itself is not a merely decorative factor—it is the meaning itself of the movement.” It comes to mind because I think in the furlong work what you can start to see is a sense that the freedom these young adults feel in this ritual act is soon to be compromised, or possibly even about to end. So the movement—the leap and the fall—is itself meaningful.
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RM: To be able to make work that I like, and also to be able to fund the work that I do, because—sometimes to a fault—this is what I do. I taught for a little while, but it wasn’t all that lucrative, so I’m not teaching and I don’t have a steady job, so this is what I do. The downside to that is that I feel compromised in terms of taking risks. I feel like these books, like the two furlong books (2015) were created to take a pause and put together a small piece that would allow me to continue to work. But the work is still very much unresolved. So I’ve continued doing it, and I started photographing again a couple of weeks ago and I’ll continue to do so throughout the summer, I think because the work needs to go beyond some point, because right now I think the photographs and the narratives that I’ve made close down around this idea of nostalgia. But I’m still trying to understand why I’m there, why I’m photographing it, and what it has to say. The pictures I’m drawn most to are the ones where it feels like those bodies in that space, and the repetition of it, feel like part of a ritual, like a keeping of time almost. And that’s sort of where I’m at now, but it’s still so unresolved, and I know that the work will eventually inform me of what there is to say, or it’ll say it or solve it for me. It’s a bit of a riddle, and I’m confused because it seems like no matter how I pair them the work feels beautiful, but a little too accessible and maybe too romantic, and I want it to go somewhere else. I want you to be able to enter it and take something more out of it than that.
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Bearing Witness to Erika Diettes’ “Memento Mori”
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by W.M. Hunt Memento Mori translates as “remember that you must die”. It is more of an admonition here than a proposition to consider some still lifes associated with death. It serves as a strong title for this two volume set of books from the Colombian artist, Erika Diettes. These are part memorial, part history, part invitation to recognize and to respond to the violence that has plagued Colombia for the past twenty-five years and more. Colombians have endured unthinkable and ongoing violence from the drug turf wars between the Medellin and Cali cartels and the leftist guerrilla actions by FARC (Fuerza Armadas Revolutionaries de Colombia) against the government. Diettes has a strong sense of honor. She has been vigilant about reaching out to people–the witnesses–and inviting them to be part of these projects by offering testimonies and or by donating personal articles.
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right From the Shrouds Series # 1 Digital black and white photograph. Printed on silk. Colombia, 2011, courtesy of the artist
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The most immediate and dramatic works are very large, full face black and white portraits called “Shrouds/Sudarios”. These are dramatic and affecting images of mothers and wives photographed in states of transcendence, almost all with their eyes closed, sometimes with tears. It is not known to us what the memory or suggestion is, but it seems clear that the subjects—twenty of them—are seeing into an unfathomable darkness and evidencing a rapture or ecstasy of grief. In the introduction, curator Anne Wilkes Tucker says, “in the portraits...of these women, they are possessed”. They seem to have gone to a place of no return, emotionally and psychologically. The artist observes, “You become like a ghost; you have a pulse, but you have no life.” The images were printed on fabric then hung in massive candlelit cathedral interiors where they have an elegiac impact even for the book reader. In person these would undoubtedly prove to be enveloping, physically and emotionally, as Diettes says, “ghostly, ethereal”.
left From the Shrouds Series # 20 Digital black and white photograph. Printed on silk. Colombia, 2011, courtesy of the artist
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In person these would undoubtedly prove to be enveloping, physically and emotionally, as Diettes says, “ghostly, ethereal.”
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There is a disconnect between what is undoubtedly the immediacy of encountering the work in situ and the more mediated experiencing of it in such a lushly produced book. One feels the loveliness of the latter may be at odds with the terror and tragedies at the heart of the investigation. The empathic impact is blunted somewhat. This is, however, a small caveat.
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We are in the fields of suspended, infinite mourning‌
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From the Shrouds Series # 8 Digital color photograph. Printed on glass. Colombia, 2011, courtesy of the artist
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In addition to “Shrouds/Sudarios” the two other bodies of work “Drifting Away/Rio Abajo” (translatable as downstream) and “Reliquaries/Relicarios” deal with evidence transformed into markers. Distanced as the set may be, collectively the three are spiritually affecting if not intoxicating. The two volumes offer gravitas in their size, acting like headstones in a slipcase. The first volume has texts which range from the artist’s powerful introduction to an essay by author and curator Ileana Diéguez, “Images in Mourning” to a well considered interview between the artist and Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator Emerita of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sensitively guiding us through Diettes’ practice. The essays include statements worth repeating Diettes’ “images… [are] not going to be about idealization of their faces, but instead about the nificance of their pain” and Diéguez’s “We are in
like the sigthe
fields of suspended, infinite mourning…” But it is the photographs in the second volume which have the most immediacy: the “Sudarios” portraits first and foremost, then in “Rio Abajo”, with clothing seeming to float in the limbo of a clear but moving river, printed large format on glass. Luminous.
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We see the portraits in installation as well as images of the third series, “Reliquaries/Relicarios,” personal effects of the dead and missing trapped in compact thick square tiles of seeming amber (actually a rubber polymer/tri polimeros de caucho), glowing in an almost alien yellow, evidence suspended for eternity.
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Diettes has been intense about her process, sensitive in particular to the witnesses to terrible cruelty and then offering up places for them, allowing them to possibly process past horrors. We share in that journey. The events that bring artists to bear witness like Ms. Diettes with her Mememto Mori are the cruelties of our inhumanity. copyright W.M. Hunt 2016
left top From the Drifting Away series # 6 Digital color photograph. Printed on glass. Colombia 2008 left bottom From the Drifting Away series # 4 Lateral View Digital color photograph. Printed on glass. Colombia 2008 right top From the Reliquaries series # 111 Frontal view Mixed Media (rubber tripolymer) Antioquia, Colombia 2011–2015 right bottom From the Reliquaries series # 64 Lateral View Mixed Media (rubber tripolymer) Antioquia, Colombia 2011–2015 all courtesy of the artist
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PRESENTING THE PHOTO BOOK BY CAROLINE DOCWRA
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This past March, artists, curators, and writers
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travelled to Houston to immerse themselves in photography for FotoFest’s 2016 biennial. I reviewed the work of hundreds of artists from all over the world in the month-long portfolio review sessions. During these meetings, several things stayed with me, one being the prominence of the photobook. Books were presented not only as supplements to prints but in some cases as the final vision of the artist’s work.
Thomas Holton’s series The Lams of Ludlow Street, was presented as prints with an accompanying book. In an attempt to reconnect to his own Chinese heritage, Holton closely follows the life of a Chinese-American family, subsequently becoming so engrained in their everyday life that he becomes a part of their family. Holton writes, “My need to see the Lams regularly moved beyond the desire to make new photographs and became akin to visiting family members that I cherish. I return out of love and the knowledge that time is fleeting. I just happen to always bring a camera.” The book, published by Kehrer Verlag, allows the viewer to peek into this American family’s everyday life and experience the ups and downs of their relationships to each other and to Holton. Over the past decade, the closer the family grew to Holton, the more they revealed; yet, the older the children became, the more their distance from the camera grew. The book condenses time and this comprehensive story into a powerful visual narrative.
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THOMAS HOLTON
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“ My need to see the Lams regularly moved beyond the desire to make new photographs and became akin to visiting family members that I cherish.�
left Dinner for Seven, 2011 right A Stern Lecture, 2014 bottom Bath Time, 2004 all courtesy of artist
Jessa Fairbrother’s Conversations With My Mother explores maternal relationships—her relationship with her mother as she was dying of cancer and her own inability to become a mother herself naturally. The physicality of the book is an emotional response to the artist’s new situation. It is an exploration of her reversed role as the care-giver—she explores her struggles with relocating and dealing with these new emotions. Before this news, Fairbrother and her mother worked together, passing back-and-forth a disposable camera to document their everyday lives. “I tried to make sense of things that had no sense except sadness…I burned, buried and embellished photographs of us. I performed my grief and began to stitch.” Each page of the self-made book is carefully assembled, every image pin-pricked, stitched, or collaged, featuring images of herself, her mother, and her surroundings. As the viewer runs their finger along the pages they realize each
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mark allows the artist—and the viewer—catharsis.
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It is an exploration of her reversed role as the care-giver—she explores her struggles with relocating and dealing with these new emotions.
top left Wearing mother’s wig top right (spread left to right) Me, taken by Mother and Mother, taken by me bottom (spread left to right) Untitled (hair loss) and Untitled (Mother with scarf) all from the series Conversations With My Mother courtesy of the artist
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JESSA FAIRBROTHER
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Untitled (Mother with scarf), from the series Conversations With My Mother courtesy of the artist
ROSEMARIE ZENS
The meaning wanders along the horizontal plane challenging the viewer as you take in each image and consider their contribution to the story. Rosemarie Zens is an artist whose work seems to live happily in the pages of books. I was presented with three beautifully crafted books, each with a different feel but still following Zens’ delicate eye for storytelling through imagery. As the Eye Wanders, was particularly effective and was presented accordion style.
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“To present the sequences in a series as an art object, almost like a sculpture or in a concertina-style book—having the images stand or line up—the flat two-dimensional photographs are augmented to three or more dimensions. Not only is the interplay between content and form of significance, but also between various kinds of presentation.” With this presentation method, she allows the viewer to consider these five paired images and how they speak to each other. The meaning wanders along the horizontal plane, challenging the viewer as they take in each image and consider their contribution to the story. Zens shows how sequence, presentation, and dimension play an important role in the viewer’s experience and final comprehension of the artist’s story.
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top Given elements to Plato’s Cave, first sequence from As the Eye Wanders bottom As the Eye Wanders spread all courtesy of the artist
KATE JORDAHL
Kate Jordahl was one of the last artists who I spoke with. She brought a stack of books published by her own press, True North Editions. Her small, “One Poem Books” are created in small editions and each feature her photographs taken in response to a single poem. Though they are small, they are not delicate; they are hefty with detail and meaning in each image. Each edition is different and focuses on a different poet. Wild Geese, the fourth edition in this series, is based upon the poetry of Wendell Berry. As you flip past the poem, the words “What we need is here” resonate in your mind as you focus on the relationship of his poetry to her black and white landscapes. Kate writes, “What we need is here—in the world, in our hearts, at the turn of a page. What we need is there—out west, over the next hill, back home.” Berry’s words cast a more somber tone to her photographs, visualizing that nostalgia for a place unknown.
As you flip past the poem, the words resonate in your mind as you focus on the relationship of Berry’s poetry to Jordahl’s photography.
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Additionally, Jordahl and I spent time talking about how curatorially to include books in the gallery setting apart from simply setting them on a bookshelf. Whether self-published or not, I think this is an interesting discussion for artists and curators to have as the book form is just as final as a print on the wall. For me, these four artists highlight the importance of the art of the photobook as a window into the artist’s intentions. With the photobook, viewers have the opportunity to hold, flip, and feel the intentions of the artists. This ability to increase the viewer’s physical interaction allows the viewer a chance to become a part of the artists’ story. top Afternoons with Ruth, Edition of 50 Silver gelatin prints, letter press, hand bound published by Dreaming Mind and True North Editions. bottom Wild Geese, hardback edition of 100, paperback edition of 300 Hardbound and stamped published by Dreaming Mind and True North Editions.
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KayLynn Deveney, Vandruff Cinderella Home, Orange County, California courtesy of the artist
KayLynn Deveney
WITH MAGGIE BLANCHARD
I met KayLynn Deveney about a decade ago and immediately liked her; she is smart and unpretentious, which is also a good way to describe her work. She is focused, driven, and not overly concerned with how her work will be received, only that it meets her own high standards.
Now that KayLynn has completed this project , I spoke with her more about the work and the process of making it into the book All You Can Lose is Your Heart.
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On the day we got together, KayLynn drove me through a concentration of storybook-style homes. It was midday and the bright sun made everything look bleak but KayLynn talked energetically about what she had learned and the photographs she was making. Seeing the houses through her lens transformed my view into something strangely wonderful.
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KayLynn lives in Northern Ireland, but we try to get together when she is back in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she grew up. On one of those get-togethers, she told me about her new project photographing storybook-style ranch homes. Coincidentally, I had recently spent a staycation in Albuquerque with my family, and while running one morning, got pleasantly lost in the grid of the city and found myself amid the oddest homes with decorative gingerbread gables sloped to within inches of the ground. Having grown up in Vermont, everything about Albuquirky (as the locals sometimes call it) seems a bit mystifying, so I just chuckled and plodded on. When KayLynn saw these houses for the first time, she did not dismiss their peculiarity. Instead, she recognized that the style represented something about history and psychology, and decided to learn more.
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below KayLynn Deveney, Princess Jeanne addition, Albuquerque, New Mexico right top KayLynn Deveney, Vandruff Cinderella Home, Orange County, California right bottom KayLynn Deveney, Del City, Oklahoma all courtesy of the artist
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I often started with, “I’m wondering if I can have your permission to photograph your house.” … I had some great conversations at people’s doors. MB: In your introduction, you thank all the people who said yes to a stranger at the door. How did you summarize what you were doing when people opened the door? KLD: When a stranger rings my doorbell, I am extremely reluctant to answer—not because I am afraid, but because I don’t want to buy the alarm system or satellite TV (they may be selling). I had to convey to people quickly that I wanted their permission to photograph their house and nothing more. I often started with, “I’m wondering if I can have your permission to photograph your house.” They usually continued to listen after that and I began to explain the project I was working on and the fact that I intended to publish and exhibit my work. Almost everyone agreed and many people thanked me for asking permission first. I had some great conversations at people’s doors.
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MB: You write that the homes are a portrait of the people who live there. You’re a native of Albuquerque, where most of the pictures were taken. What aspects of the homes might people miss if they are unfamiliar with Albuquerque or New Mexico?
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KLD: The houses seemed out of context in Albuquerque. In a desert city defined by tumbleweeds and arid soil, the snow-shedding peaks of the chalet style seemed so out of place. I thought the polite architecture reflected the desire to bring a model from somewhere more bucolic, more fairytale-like, to our high-mountain desert. I’m not sure people from places other than New Mexico, Arizona, or Nevada would fully pick up on that incongruity. I also found the attempt to build storybook-style homes, in hopes of encouraging a storybook life, sweet and optimistic. Roadrunners and Zia symbols are specifically New Mexican touches and the gravel or dirt front yards are indicators of the punishing heat of Southwestern climes, but many of the details in the photographs are more broadly American. I think that most Americans will recognize the significance of the raised,
acid-green truck parked on the lawn right under the windows or the gingerbread-man fence. Radio Flyer wagons, jack-o’lanterns, inflatable pools, carefully planted window boxes, and glowing windows through which you can just glimpse the magnet collection on the refrigerator are common signs and signifiers for most people living in the Western world now. MB: Do you identify with the people who originally bought the homes or the people who live there now? KLD: The original owners were of a different generation and experience, and I don’t really have a feeling for their perspective. They bought their homes during a booming period in the housing industry and a time of real optimism. I identify more closely with the people living in the storybook homes in Albuquerque today. I am an Albuquerque native. I eat New Mexican food and have the requisite chile addiction, and I own a modest house in Albuquerque—built around 1960—with my husband, Will. When I think of home, I think of low-slung ranch houses, Bermuda grass, and the smell of the evaporative cooler. I think of the neighborhood strip mall and the pink glow on the mountain at sunset, visible through the sliding glass door. I identify in those ways. Those things all signal home to me. MB: When you were making these pictures did you think about the idea of aspirational living? KLD: I thought about the value of living your life at home with intentionality. I think it’s important to know who you are and to define your domestic space in a way that encourages you to become who you want to be. Words like “aspiration” and “happiness” can be tricky. “Growth” and “contentment” and “thriving” are more my speed. Contentment at home must mean something different for each one of us. Creating the best context in which to thrive seems like a good aim. There are inherited patterns for domestic living and I think we should routinely question those patterns’ efficacy for ourselves.
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KayLynn Deveney, Princess Jeanne addition, Albuquerque, New Mexico courtesy of the artist
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KayLynn Deveney, Las Vegas, Nevada courtesy of the artist
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KayLynn Deveney, Princess Jeanne addition, Albuquerque, New Mexico courtesy of the artist
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MB: What the houses represented initially is different from how we perceive them now. Our view of the “wife-planned home” has changed, and the recession and housing crisis of 2008 made people question the idea of homeownership as a path to security and happiness. Could you share your thoughts on this? KLD: The houses initially provided a model for domestic life that probably felt right for a lot of people following World War II and the Korean War. The predictability of the shared model or dream of home were comforting for people who had seen war and were living with the threat of the Cold War. I think our contemporary experience is different—we desire and need different things now. The housing crisis of 2008 made owning a home impossible for many Americans, and many of us had to adapt and create home as an experience in a rented property rather than a permanent experience in an owned property. Also, many people now need space to work at home, not just bedrooms for kids. There is not one family model any longer. We have a lot of different needs and configurations of “family” and I believe the variations in the homes’ exteriors reflect this. In some houses you see reflections of permanence and others you sense temporariness. In some you see the reflection of children, in others just a single occupant—one car, one aesthetic, etc. Rather than a cookie-cutter style, you see diversity of experience.
MB: Did you start the project thinking of it as a book? KLD: Most of the time I imagine the final form of my work as a book. I think it’s because I love stories. I love to hear or read stories and I love to tell stories. My career started in photojournalism and this love of storytelling has always been the major drive in my work. I certainly believe that you can tell a story on the wall of an exhibition or in a film or even in a single photograph, but the mode I love the best is the photographic book. There is a quote by Gerry Badger in his book, The Pleasures of Good Photographs, that rings true for me. He writes, “For it is in the photobook, in my opinion, where photography sings its loudest, most complex, and satisfying song.” MB: Why did you decide not to photograph inside the homes? KLD: It was more difficult to see the original design inside the house. From the outside you could recognize both the formula of the design and the diversity of the occupants. Inside, the connections from one house to another were more difficult to see. You could see the passage of time outside the house, but less inside. The stories inside also became very individual and less collective. I was interested in the phenomenon of the houses and what they meant to a large group of people.
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left KayLynn Deveney, Princess Jeanne addition, Albuquerque, New Mexico middle KayLynn Deveney, Del City, Oklahoma right KayLynn Deveney, Princess Jeanne addition, Albuquerque, New Mexico all courtesy of the artist
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I thought the polite architecture reflected the desire to bring a model from somewhere more bucolic, more fairytale-like, to our high-mountain desert.
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MB: How did the book evolve as you created it? KLD: The main evolution of the work was its growth in scope. It started out as a piece of work about the Bellamah houses in Albuquerque. But as I learned about homes of the same style in other parts of the country, the geographic scope of the project grew. I made two trips to photograph homes in Nevada and then, when I found builder Jean Vandruff’s biography online, I made two visits to Southern California. Finally, I located a neighborhood in Del City, Oklahoma that I believed had become the first storybook neighborhood listed for historic preservation. Since the book has been published, I have heard from people in other parts of the country. It’s great to continue to get reports of storybook homes throughout the U.S. I would love to start collecting old family snapshots from people’s storybook homes and putting them up on my website where the work is featured. MB: How involved were you in the sequence and layout of the book? KLD: I edited, sequenced, and laid out the book. I also did that with my first book, The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings. I have been lucky in both cases to work with publishers who were happy to take my developed books and tweak the design where needed while leaving the major elements in place. Martin Lutz at Kehrer Verlag designed the cover with my input, made the typography throughout the book stronger and better, and corrected design mistakes where he found them. He was great.
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MB: What was the most enjoyable part of making this book?
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KLD: I loved many things about making this book. Some of my favorite aspects of this project included getting an iced coffee and driving around looking at houses to see if I could find details that spoke to me about who the people living inside might be. I loved talking to the people who lived in the houses and hearing how they felt about the houses. I loved meeting Jean Vandruff and talking with him about his ideas and decisions. I loved making book dummies, trying out different design approaches, and choosing the materials for the final book. I loved traveling to Germany to be on press for the printing. MB: I love the endpapers. Tell me about them. KLD: I wanted the endpapers to look like wallpaper. The franchised Cinderella Homes plans included suggested wallpapers, and I loved the idea of the photographs of the houses being cushioned in wallpaper. I also knew I wanted bits of photographs from the project to provide the imagery for the wallpaper, but I didn’t know how to use Photoshop to accomplish this task. So, I worked with my friend Charlotte Cobb, a professional illustrator, to make the wallpaper that existed in my mind. I went on to make a tea towel that features the same imagery. It’s an accompaniment to the book that I offer for sale on my website. Learning how to make tea towels was a blast. I would love to continue making domestic articles like these using photography.
top KayLynn Deveney, Las Vegas, Nevada bottom KayLynn Deveney, Bellehaven, Albuquerque, New Mexico all courtesy of the artist
Contemporaneously, members of the US Congress are sitting down, on the floor, to protest the legal loophole which allows potential terror suspects to buy semi-automatic weapons over the counter. And that’s just today! Zoom out on the last two weeks, and it’s been an onslaught of sickening violence. One horrible story after another has greeted the Summer of 2016 like a hostess with chronic halitosis. In Orlando, Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay club. (With one of those aforementioned semi-automatic weapons.) The day before, a reality TV singer was killed by a deranged fan there too. In Chicago, a completely DIFFERENT reality TV singing sensation was also shot dead in the streets. And to top it all off, a mentally unstable racist stabbed and shot Jo Cox, an English politician, in broad daylight in West Yorkshire. She died, shortly after, at 41. That last one really shook me, and when I learned she’d been born on the exact same day as my wife, it became harder to tune out the grief. We all suffer when a bright voice for tolerance is silenced, but I can’t stop thinking about her end. Getting stabbed, and shot, repeatedly? Bleeding out, knowing you’ll never see your kids again? That you’ve lost everything at the hands of a sick-evil-hate-monger? That has to be the worst way to go. But it happens all the time. Hackings and shootings. Bombings and land-mines. All over the world. Every day. Violence is hard-wired into human consciousness. It’s our fatal flaw, as a species, and one that just may prevent Homo Sapiens from ever discovering if planet Earth can actually support 20 Billion people. War is systematized, organized violence. It has always been with us, and good luck predicting its demise. We might wish otherwise, but the human tendency to aggress is too embedded to excise.
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BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN
As I write this, UK citizens head to the polls to decide upon the Brexit. Fear pulses through the air like a wifi signal, as immigrants and refugees are literal poster children for the “Leave” campaign.
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JONATHAN BLAUSTEIN BOOK REVIEW
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BEYOND THE GEO-POLITICS, THE BOOK ALSO PLACES US SQUARELY INSIDE THE MIND OF A YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHER WHO FELT THE NEED TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING, TO LIVE THE STORY, AND WAS LUCKY TO MAKE IT OUT ALIVE.
Michael Christopher Brown’s excellent photo-book Libyan Sugar, recently published by Twin Palms, is perhaps the best attempt I’ve seen at depicting the human capital upon which War feeds. The dead, and there are so many dead in this book, force you to stare at an uncomfortable reality: decomposing boys and men fertilize countless tales glorifying War down the ages. (The book opens with a passage from Slaughterhouse Five which implies as much.) Libyan Sugar is as visceral as food poisoning, detailing the Magnum photographer’s journey into the heart of the Libyan War. (Thanks to his smart use of both imagery and text.) The latter utilizes contemporary communication techniques, as Skype chats, Facebook messages, and emails dominate, many employing the no-caps-and-chronically-misspelled style resonant of the 20 teens. Brown is in regular contact with his parents, sister, and an Italian woman, Chiara, whom we assume is his girlfriend. They advise him on Libyan happenings gleaned from the Western news, wish him well, and worry often. He photographs almost entirely with an iPhone, which explains the square format, and also grounds the story-telling in the 21C. He’s shot in the leg, once, and then, fatefully, is blown up in the infamous explosion that killed Tim Hetherington, his friend, and Chris Hondros, his colleague. Thankfully he survives, and clues us in on how things went down that day.
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It makes it very personal, the loss, and terribly sad. Later, Brown returns to the scene of the bombing, looking for vestiges of their blood.
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The pictures herein are graphic, made from February to December, 2011, as the world hoped for better things for Libya, and then discovered otherwise. We see Gaddafi’s dead head at some point, just one more corpse in a book filled with rotting flesh and kinetic energy. The Arab Spring, and the Libyan War, remind us that our Western expectations have no bearing on the events on the ground in that vast desert. But beyond the geo-politics, the book also places us squarely inside the mind of a young photographer who felt the need to experience something, to live the story, and was lucky to make it out alive. The book is taut, arresting, jarring. Choose your adjective. But you should look at it anyway, because just as Michael Christopher Brown’s time in Libya, 5 years ago, changed him forever, perhaps seeing the results might change you too.
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LIBYA. BENGHAZI. March 20, 2011. 12:17:52. At a morgue, he was killed during fighting in Benghazi. copyright Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos
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LIBYA. TRIPOLI. August 28, 2011. 12:56:48. Remains of a body, at Abu Salim Hospital. copyright Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos
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LIBYA. MISRATA. October 22, 2011. 11:51:30. Gaddafi, dead on the floor of a meat locker. The guards would not let us see the left side of his head. copyright Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos
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LIBYA. BIN JAWAD. March 6, 2011. 16:05:59. Revolutionaries head toward the front line, to the east of Bin Jawad. copyright Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos
Recent Acquisitions to the John Cleary Library Block, Gay, About Love: Photographs and Films 1973-2011, Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2011.
John Cleary (1937–2008)
Houston Center for Photography’s John Cleary Library is home to more than 3,800 books on photography and related subjects. Originally, the library primarily housed books that were reviewed in spot magazine, but it has since grown to be a comprehensive reference library on photography. The John Cleary Library includes monographs, surveys, exhibition catalogs, instructional books, periodicals, and self-published artist books. Its home in HCP’s Learning Center is a comfortable place where all are welcome to enjoy photography in book form and share John Cleary’s passion for photography. The library is free and open to the public during HCP gallery hours and by appointment, and you can browse our collection online by visiting: www.librarything.com/profile/HCPonline John was an avid photography collector and dealer; self-educated and highly-devoted, John helped to propel Houston’s photographic connoisseurship. His gallery, which was located very close to HCP, was a renowned Houston institution that was celebrated for its vintage and timeless contemporary photographs. John’s legacy includes more than 1,200 images of children (known as his “Kid Collection”) and several thousand books on photography.
The Meadow Barbara and Margot Anne Kelley Snapshots of Dangerous Women Peter J. Cohen The Luck Archive Mark Menjivar
Bloemink, Barbara and Daniel Beltra, Spill, GOST Books, 2015. Bosworth, Barbara and Margot Anne Kelley, The Meadow, Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2015. Cohen, Peter J., Ed., Snapshots of Dangerous Women, New York, NY: University Pub., 2015. Cotton, Charlotte, Ed., Photography is Magic, New York, NY: Aperture, 2015. Diettes, Erika, Memento Mori: Testament to Life (Two Volume Set), Staunton, VA: George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016. Jacobson, Bill, Place (Series), Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2015. Kellner, Thomas, Kontakt, Ed. Julia Kneppe, Agnes Reschka, Dr. Marianna Michalowska and Stefanie Scheit-Koppitz, Berlin, Germany: Seltmann & Sohne, 2015. Mann, Sally, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2015. Menjivar, Mark, The Luck Archive: Exploring Belief, Superstition, and Tradition, San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2015. Nakamori, Yasufumi, For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979, Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2015. Nemerov, Alexander, Soulmaker: the times of Lewis Hine, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Ortner, Jon, Peak of Perfection: Nude Portraits of Dancers, Athletes, and Gymnasts, Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015. Saljic, Nenad, Matterhorn: Portrat Eines Berges/Portrait of a Mountain, Bern, Switzerland: Orada & Galerie Rigassi, 2015. Tese, Andrea, Andrea Tese: Inheritance, Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015. Webb, Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb, Memory City, Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2014. Weston, Edward, Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition, New York, NY: Aperture, 2015.
Eli Durst (New Haven, CT) Birds, Bingo, 2016 From the series Connecticut Community Center Pigment print, courtesy of the artist
Congratulations to all of the artists exhibited here, and, in particular, Petra Barth, Eli Durst, and Stacy Platt, winners of this year’s Beth Block Award. —Yasufumi Nakamori, Juror Curator and Head, Department of Photography and New Media The Minneapolis Institute of Art
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beth block juror commendations
This exhibition highlights works by 40 artists—all members of Houston Center for Photography—selected on an international scope from 190 submissions, for the institution’s 34th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition. The exhibited works demonstrate strength, criticality and diversity in the members’ artistic pursuits, and engage with a wide range of themes, from reinterpreting/revising personal or collective histories and memories, to documenting and commenting on changing environments, responding to the materiality and technology of photography as a medium, and constructing a utopian/dystopian space. Resisting against simply creating a beautiful photograph, in all of the works here the artists investigate the limits and potentials of photography, and, in many, they experiment, blurring boundaries between photography and other forms of art (e.g., performance, sculpture, and painting). In this process, they critique the status quo of today’s photographic art and visual culture, and demonstrate their prospective contribution to the further growth of contemporary art and photography.
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34th annual juried membership exhibition
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Stacy Platt (Colorado Springs, CO) NYE 1999, 2015 From the series Waterlogged Archival inkjet print, courtesy of the artist
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Petra Barth (Alexandria, VA) Migrant 10, 2015 From the series The Backpackers/Los Mochileros Inkjet print, courtesy of the artist
Catherine Couturier Gallery Fine Art Photography 2635 Colquitt St. Houston, TX 77098
CatherineCouturier.com Maggie Taylor, The Menagerie, 2015
Defining the Personal Narrative: A Master Class with Susan Burnstine Saturday + Sunday January 14 + 15, 2017 This two-day workshop focuses on exploring and realizing individual narratives through the power of the still image.
VISIT HCPONLINE.ORG/CLASSES for more information and to enroll