Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

I came across the work of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin a number of years ago in the UK with what must have been one of their fairly early projects, but I hadn't kept track of what they were doing since then.

The other day I saw they have a new book/project out called Fig.


Broomberg & Chanarin are a curious pair in a way (though probably no more "curious" than many of the photographers I know who seem to have quite the oddest backgrounds...):

Neither artist has a had conventional training in photography – Broomberg holding a degree in Sociology and the History of Art and Chanarin one in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence – and, unfettered by conventional photographic teaching, they seem to exhibit a freedom in their research process, their photographic style and their political and social engagement unusual in the world of photography. They, for me, are refreshing oddities in a field too often limited by conceptual and stylistic formulae. There is also the question of their working relationship and the undoubted benefits this has brought to their practice.

Fig. could also be seen as either an antidote or compliment to contemporary artists’ fascination with the (re)appropriation of the, often archival, document. Rather than starting with an archival document and subverting its original intention (in the style of Sultan and Mandel’s Evidence for instance) or creating images by mimicking an archival aesthetic or mode (Sputnik by Joan Fontcuberta is a good example of this), Broomberg and Chanarin create new archive of
documents that, when positioned alongside text, vigorously question their own authenticity – the text being constantly in tension with the images and visa-versa. This marks Fig. out as a departure from both the conventions of documentary photography and their own practice to date. - Gordon MacDonald

And I must say I do also like the name of their website - Chopped Liver - which has lots of their work, essays and so on.



Their book Fig. probably takes a little bit of readjustment for the viewer in terms of getting their head around where it is heading. In fact the thing it reminded me most of was a sort of photographic version of one of Max Sebald's books - the sudden shift in space from Imperial China and the Opium Wars to a Seaman's Reading Room on the Norfolk Coast, or the entomological collection of an eccentric Englishman to the containment of Jewish prisoners in a 19th Century defence-work during the Holocaust. Similarly, Broomberg and Chanarin take us from Ditchling Beacon and the Spanish Armada to the Genocide in Rwanda by way of a geologists meticulously catalogued and classified soft porn collection, accidentally accessioned by a museum along with his fossils to a fig leaf stripped from it's branch by the blast from a suicide bomb in Tel-Aviv to the strangely mis-labeled negative nudes titled - "Sussex Pond"

At a glance, this book of photographs and texts, with its quirky leaps from one theme to another, may appear to be a darkly humorous trawl through some outer reaches of oddity: fake mermen, obsessive egg collectors, big-game hunters, and those who numerically classify their collections of soft porn. The eccentricities of its arrangement are matched by those of many of its subjects.
Yet the misapplication of control and classification systems regularly produce graver consequences that run through the book, a deeper pulse below the whimsy and amusement: in it, animal bodies are measured and displayed, human bodies—living and dead—are similarly dealt with, whether they are female models of different colourations (photographed for the enjoyment of Sunday Telegraph readers), or giants or the remains of ‘natives’. Also, at the extreme, that depictions, especially in photographs, may be used to complement the type of classification— ‘Tutsi’, for example, written in a passport—that brings death on its subject. In conversation, Broomberg and Chanarin have said that, despite many horrific photographs of genocide, racialised mass killing still continues, and this book points to the other side of that remark—that because of depiction, it continues. - Julian Stallabrass

All in all, quite fascinating work and generally following a trjectory that's quite different from a lot of contemporary photogrpahy.

Foam Magazine

(Clare Richardson)

It's been a crazy week here with one thing or another - I'm in the midst of working on helping to put up a museum exhibit and it's very time intensive... so a bit slower on the posts right now

I came across Foam Magazine a while back when I was actually looking at the website of its "parent" the Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. Looking through a couple of editions online, it looked pretty interesting, but a little too expensive to subscribe to sight-unseen.


(1,236 sheets of negatives from the 1980s, thrown away on 19 August 2004 - Hans Aarsman)

But a few weeks ago, at the local newsstand (we have an excellent one here with lots of international magazines) I saw a copy of the winter edition, flicked through it, went away, had an espresso, convinced myself it was worth the pennies, and went back and got it.

(Masao Yamamoto)

It's a great photo art magazine. Each issue has a broad theme - this one being "Searching". As well as major articles on the likes of Stephen Shore; Hans Aarsman and Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin (along with several others), it also has good book reviews and smaller articles on different topics - such a section where a selection of people such as Gerhard Steidl or Geoff Dyer talk about images that are "On My Mind". There is also work from current exhibits at the Fotografiemuseum as well as interviews.

(Bart Julius Peters)

All in all it's an excellent magazine for anyone that enjoys the sort of photogrpahy that I often feature on here. It's also well printed.




Looking at their website, I also see that the Spring 2008 edition is out (with the theme "Meanwhile") and looks equally good - articles on Daniëlle van Ark; Risaku Suzuki Clare Richardson; Bart Julius Peters and Masao Yamamoto among others. I'll be keeping an eye out at The Front Page for when it arrives.


(Daniëlle van Ark)

Chris McCaw - Sunburn

I came across Chris McCaw's work last year sometime, and then again a week or two ago. And I must say, I still like them - isn't always the case when I come back to work I initially liked.

The concept in a way is very simple and like all the best ideas was stumbled across by accident:

"I have always been interested in the process of photography- light sensitive materials, chemical reactions, the unexpected. In my case, during camping trip in 2003, I mixed an all night time exposure of the sky, friends, a campfire, and a bottle of whiskey. What I ended up with was a new way of thinking about the process of photography, and a new body of work.

I woke up the next morning, around 10am, far after the sun had risen. I had pointed my camera due east, right into the sun. Assuming the shot was a complete loss, I stumbled out of my sleeping bag and closed the shutter. Later that day while downloading that day’s exposed film, I could feel one of the sheets had a tear in it. Completely confused, I was tempted to throw the sheet away. Luckily I kept it and discovered what had happened a week later in the darkroom.

The camera, with it’s lens focused at infinity with the aperture wide open to capture the movement of the nights stars became something like a magnifying glass. Much like my early experiments with small scale pyromania using mom’s magnifying glass focusing the sun on dry dead leafs, the camera’s lens was burning the film inside the camera.

But this is just part of it. Another physical aspect that occurs to light sensitive emulsions when subjected to intense exposure to light is something called true solariztion-image reversal through extreme over-exposure. Not to be mistaken with the darkroom printing technique called the sebbatie effect, of re-exposing paper to light while the print is developing, also commonly called solarized prints." (from View Camera magazine).

Part of what I like about them is the unpredictability of the end result. Also the simplicity of it - basically a lens and a paper negative. And then there is the physicality - it's not just the alchemic, hidden reaction of light and silver, but the burnt imprint - the physical trace of the sun on the image.


And then there is the fact that I find them simply quite beautiful

Of course there is also the impression that they can be quite fun to make:

"Not only is the resulting image a representation of the subject photographed, but part of the subject (the sun) is an active participant in the printmaking. This is just the beginning of this new body of work. I plan to continue to investigate the possibilities of this method of printmaking. My favorite part is watching smoke come out of the camera during the exposure. Thank you for looking."

Finally, I thought I saw something the other day about this work winning a prize, but I couldn't track it down?

Wolfschanze

Once upon a time during my ill spent youth in the late 1970's I was on maneuvers in West Germany north east of Lüneburg Heath and close to the Inner German Border and was sent to find our Brigade Headquarters (a mobile collection of Landrovers and Armoured Personel Carriers with a great mass of aerials).

Wending deeper and deeper into the German forest, aiming for a map reference, we eventually and suddenly came upon an old abandoned wooden guard hut with a broken barrier. Driving through we realised there were a few more decrepit huts and then large concrete structures loomed out of the forest gloom. Overgrown with moss, they had earth on their roofs - which were six, eight or even ten feet thick - deep with forest mulch and from which there were now growing quite sturdy trees.




Some were damaged and cracked, with heavy riveted steel doors hanging off their brackets and recessed machine gun slits with ferns growing out of them; while others still appeared to be in surprisingly good shape.

The British 7th Armoured Brigade Headquarters had set itself up amongst the remains of one of Hitler's command bunkers.



After delivering our dispatch and before leaving we took a look around - there were still odd remnants of their previous occupiers, broken chairs, some moldy wartime newspapers, yellowed notices on noticeboards, rusting Wermacht cooking equipment. But it was that first experience of encountering the bunkers in the dark green of the forest that has stayed in my memory.



Now, it wasn't the Wolfshanze - Hitler's Wolf's Lair - which was in Eastern Prussia - now Poland, although it was a substantial complex. But when I came across these photographs of the Wolfshanze by Swiss photographer Tonatiuh Ambrosetti, it certainly brought back that fascinating - if somewhat formidable experience. (via wood_s_lot)

(BTW, Ambrosetti also has some other good work on his site, such as Rocs2, Memento and War Games)

Stephen Gill correction

Just a quick note - the url for Stephen Gill's book and print sales hadn't taken in the post below. It's corrected now so you can actually find it....

Stephen Gill - prints

Now here's an opportunity I wish I could take advantage of right now... I'd guess that if you have the spare cash around (even if you need to eat Kraft Dinner for a week :-( ), this is an opportunity not to miss.

I've talked about Stephen Gill a couple of times and really quite like a lot of his work. And considering how quickly his books go out of print, I'm not sure how long most of these will stay on the shelf:

New Special Edition Stephen Gill Prints available

These single collectors prints are limited to 50 of each and are from selected project series including - Billboards, Hackney Wick, Hackney Flowers, Archaeology in Reverse and Warming down.

The prints are signed and numbered and printed to the highest quality on 12” x 10” Fuji Crystal c type paper.
The images will be shipped in April / May 2008.

(Available here - you can also get his books here at the same site)

Finally, do note that those prices are in Pounds (£) Sterling, so they aren't quite as cheap as they look across this side of the Pond at first glance, but I'd still say pretty good value.

The world's oldest photograph - 1790?

A photograph (well, actually a Photogenic Drawing - basically an early photogram) just know as "Leaf" is coming up for auction at Sotheby's and may possibly be the oldest photographic representation in exisitence.

It had previously been attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the founding fathers of photography. Fox Talbot made a number of other leaf prints and this one was though to have been made by him in about 1839.

But new research suggest it might well have been made as early as 1790 by Thomas Wedgwood, James Watt or Humphry Davy, who were all early experimenters in photography.

"...Sotheby's says research by a leading photo expert suggests otherwise - that several early photo experimenters could be the authors, including Thomas Wedgwood, James Watt and Humphry Davy, who worked in the medium decades earlier. If that theory is true, it means the photo could have been made as early as 1790..

All six photogenic drawings were contained in an album belonging to Henry Bright of England whose family had a close social connection to the Wedgwoods, Watt and Davy, adding further support to the theory that "Leaf" could be by one of them, Sotheby's said...

The work of Wedgwood, of Wedgwood china fame, Watt and Davy was documented in their day and cited in standard histories of photography, but no examples have ever been identified, Sotheby's said... (more at the CBC)

You can check out the auction at Sotheby's - item #43 (you need to log in to see the full details) - and get your wallet out on April 7th. Maybe you could own a bit of photographic history.... (oh and take a look at some of the other work in the auction while you are there).

There is a fairly extensive essay in the online catalogue:

"In 1984, Sotheby's in London sold a small group of anonymous photogenic drawings that were originally part of an album assembled by one Henry Bright. The photogenic drawing offered here was among that group, and after the Sotheby's sale, it was re-attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot. Dr. Larry Schaaf, the Talbot authority, has questioned that attribution, and in the essay below, explores other possibilities of authorship, including Thomas Wedgwood or members of his circle.

It may seem surprising that photogenic drawings are such very rare survivors. William Henry Fox Talbot published the full details of how to make them by February 1839. While fraught with uncertainties, the process was relatively simple, used readily available materials and was widely published in the popular journals in the months following Talbot's disclosure. Public demonstrations were given and kits of materials advertised in the newspapers. One must assume that many hundreds of amateurs, scientists, artists, and others were fascinated by getting nature to draw her own image. Following Talbot's published instructions, an experimenter had only to take a sheet of writing paper, soak it in a weak solution of common table salt, and then brush it with silver nitrate. Light sensitive silver chloride would be formed within the fibers of paper. This sensitive paper was then placed in the sun under a leaf or other object and within minutes the energy of the light would reduce the silver chloride to tiny particles of silver, appearing red or purple. The image was a negative, of course, for where the object blocked the light, nothing happened, but where the light reached around or through the object, the paper darkened. At this stage, it could be examined by candlelight, or fixed to make it more resistant to the sun's rays.

Yet virtually none of what we know must have been produced seems to have survived.(1) One explanation for this loss might lie in human nature, for the succeeding generations that have proven to be dismissive of great-aunt Susan's amateur watercolors would probably have thought even less of her sun drawings. Perhaps more importantly, most of these would have remained sensitive to light and those most treasured and admired, paradoxically, probably got the most viewing and were consequently destroyed. The largest known body of surviving photogenic drawings was done by Henry Talbot himself. Yet this leaf, and its companions, do not fit into the corpus of known work by Talbot and his circle. That leads us to contemplate just how it came to be created - and why it has survived."...(Sotheby's)

It still sounds a bit of a long shot, but not impossible by any means. It would certainly be nice for the Brits to have been the ones to have fixed this particular shadow first :-)

Bert Teunissen - Domestic Landscapes?

Bert Teunissen and his mega-project Domestic Landscapes (on his website and published by Aperture) seems to be all the rage right now (and good on 'im for it), but his work really doesn't do it for me.

He examines domestic environment - which are apparently dissapearing - along with those who inhabit them. But I don't find the photographs terribly interesting or convincing - especially when you line up the hundreds he has taken. Individually, or two or three at a time, possibly. The style is particularly off-putting - rather than reflecting the work of the Dutch Old Masters (as someone like Elger Esser successfully does), they seem much more closely related to the somewhat forced style of early colour news magazines. The use of colour in particular seems fairly incidental - rather like Robert Polidori's interiors. In fact these resemble many of Polidori's interiors in style, but with people dropped in and the use of colour is essentially cosmetic.

"Over the past decade, Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen has documented hundreds of old European homes. These are rudimentary yet cultured settings aglow with a warm, timeless atmosphere; spaces in which a primary interior feature is that of natural light. Old World details crowd the frame of each image: ornate wallpaper, ancestral portraits, home-cured hams hung from exposed beams, and decorative dishware proudly displayed on mantels. The homes pictured here were built before the World Wars, before electricity was a standard feature, a time when sunlight played a pivotal role in the conception of architecture. Teunissen renders these last vestiges of old Europe with a palette and sensitivity to light that recall Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt." (Aperture)

Overall he seems to have produced what is effectively a typology of lonely old men and women of Europe (thanks SG) - a sort of conceptual nostalgia. And that's where I think the problem lies for me - this is a very conceptual work - and yet it is a topic which would work far better without being bound by a theory - swap concept for context and focus on the subjects and it might have worked better - a lot better.




The other problem with the concept, that apparently informs and guides this work, is that it embraces a whole lot more things and ideas than the work shows in its limited range - so the pictures generally tend to fall short when compared to the words. By comparison, reading John Berger's "Into Their Labours" trilogy (Pig Earth, Once In Europa and Lilac and Flag) conveys similar ideas with far more rigour and vision and much greater reflection on the "european peasant" and the migration from countryside to city (among several other themes).

"Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done." John Szarkowski

In looking at these pictures, I compare them to the work of something like The Day-to-Day Life of ALbert Hastings, or the (horribly titled) For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness - both of which seem to embody an honest affection for the subjects of their work rather than the pinned butterfly collection of Domestic Landscapes. There's a bigger gap than we might generally think between detachment or a lack of sentimentality - and unemotional distance. And that, ultimately, is what comes across to me in this work - that cool distance.

Transformer Houses

A few years ago I came across this work by Canadian photographer and artist Robin Collyer and then I came across a few the other day on the web.

These aren't houses, but rather they are disguised electrical substations, complete with windows, curtains and a bit of lawn and landscaping.



This is one of those things you can really do only once and that you luck into and just come across. I just like the idea of tracking these places down, as well as exploring the ideas behind the mind of a Utility deciding to do this, and how it replicated the feel of homes in different neighbourhoods.

"During the 1950s and 1960s, the Hydro-Electric public utilities in the metropolitan region of Toronto built structures known as 'Bungalow-Style Substations.' These stations, which have transforming and switching functions, were constructed in a manner that mimics the style and character of the different neighborhoods... there are about 100 of these structures located on residential streets in the central and the suburban parts of the greater Toronto area."

All in all rather neat.

Robert Frank Extravaganza

At the end a nice Easter Break (well, it had a 4 year old's birthday party in the middle of it...), I sat down to read the long Vanity Fair article on Robert Frank: Robert Frank's Unsentimental Journey - amazingly (VF, The New Yorker etc never seem to have the article you want to read online), they have the whole article on their website.

Charlie LeDuff in Vanity Fair on a Trip with Frank (at 83) to China:

...“It amazes me,” he said. “It’s a book of such simplicity, really. It doesn’t really say anything. It’s apolitical. There’s nothing happening in these photos. People say they’re full of hate. I never saw that. I never felt that. I just went out to the street corners and looked for interesting people. O.K., I looked for the extremes, but that’s because the mediocre, the middle, it’s bland and that bores me.

“They called the book drab and sad. But at that time photography wasn’t that advanced. It’s not drab and sad. This is what it was. I had no idea. There was no agenda. I was absolutely amazed when I went to the South. The stupidity. It was sadistic then.

“But looking at these pictures now, I don’t see what all the fuss was.”

The truth of the matter is the book was a drive-by job. The pictures feel intimate, but in a way they are, like their creator, cold and Germanic. He did not stop for lunch at the sharecropper’s house. He did not know the name of the undertaker for whom the funeral was held. “No time, no time. I had to move,” he remembered. And so he piled into his Ford Business Coupe and kept heading west.

“I only ever spoke to one person,” he said. “The woman who got married in Reno. She called up her father to say she was married and he hung up the phone on her.”...

...In the early morning, before sunrise, the ancient city was still cloaked in gray and shadow, and I stumbled through the stone streets in a bout of jet lag and self-loathing. Whom should I meet wandering the streets in a pair of blue work trousers looking fatigued and disoriented? It was Robert Frank, with his Russian-manufactured Lomo point-and-shoot camera, tears in his eyes. I watched him take snaps for a while and roll a little video before his legs started to give out. We settled on a noodle shop and ordered tea and potatoes and sour buns.

He’d been having dreams on this fantastic trip to China, he told me. Undoubtedly the last trip before the Ultimate Trip. He talked about ego, the marrow and the mistake of the artist. The sacrifices one makes in pursuit of genius. “The children. That’s my regret. There is so much guilt there,” he said, rubbing some imaginary stain on the plastic tablecloth...

...“So do you like China?,” I asked.

“Not when I see this,” he said, referring to the old people dancing to a mindless tune. “I see this and I think, Obey. No, I like America. I’ve become an American absolutely.”...

...Robert Frank is an enigma: hard and empathetic and melancholic all at once. He abhors schmaltziness and syrup. I asked him if he would like to see a photograph of my baby. He answered, “Why should I want to see that?”

It is the same with him about photography. Digital photography destroys memory, he believes, with its ability to erase. Art school is another problem, teaching students to be blind. Editors are worse—they poke the artist’s eyes out. Photography: one minute it’s not art at all. Then perhaps it is. And then again it is not. That’s Robert Frank.

“There are too many images,” he said. “Too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was.”

And maybe it is his fault. Who would believe that a hairy little man could take snapshots of nothing and make millions of dollars? Anyone can take a snapshot. So, maybe, anyone can be famous if he gets lucky once.

Frank watched the dancers for a long spell, until his wife appeared, twirling among them. The old man laughed a real laugh. “I am happy today."...

In the course of reading the article, I looked up the Steidl website for the new anniversary edition of The American's they are publishing (I'm sure the pre-publication orders are piling up...) and found a great pdf on what they are calling The Robert Frank Project :



"“The Robert Frank Project” is an ambitious long term publishing programme which encompasses Robert Frank’s complete oeuvre – reprints of his classic books, reprints of some less well known small books, the publication of previously unseen projects, newly conceived bookworks, and his Complete Film Works in specially designed collector’s DVD sets. This ensures the legacy of this original and seminal artist and that Robert Frank’s work will be available and accessible for many years to come in a scheme and to a standard that the artist himself has overseen."

It has some great stuff in it such as "A Short History of the Publishing of The Americans", "Robert Frank in Göttingen " (for the design and printing of the new edition at Steidl) by Joel Sternfeld, and a listing of all the books/films published so far and those still to be published.

"Robert Frank and I must have made an interesting sight that warm July afternoon on Düstere Strasse. We resemble each other but he is older than I so no matter what we were up to we could have made sense as father/son.

And in one important sense we were: when I was becoming a photographer in the late 1960s, his book, “The Americans”was already a landmark–that’s much too weak a word but what other word for a body of work that changed the course of the river of Photography in a way that it could never take the old course again.

I would look at it before I went to sleep and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again. The country was so bleak in those sooty pages, each one an artifact ripped from the landscape and brought straight to the bindery. Frank had found a way to give form to the formless lives that went unmilled in America.



Two years before I encountered his book I had taken my first cross-country trip–three of us in an immense gold driveaway car that needed to be delivered to its owner in Los Angeles. We sailed from the East Coast to the West in less than three days–one of us sleeping across the back seat, one up front trying to stay awake with the driver.

It was December. We angled into New Mexico as the sun was going down and pulled into an A. and W. Root Beerstand. The dirt parking lot seemlessly joined the desert and the desert night. A cold wind came up as the sky turned black–the same cold wind every traveller without a room feels as the sun goes down.



A wrapper from someone’s fries blew into the desert in a moment of Americanized infinity. Frank’s book reminded me of that moment. And now here he was on Düstere Strasse in Göttingen and here I was beside him. Inside at Steidl “The Americans”was being printed–the reproductions were to be as close a match as possible to the Delpire edition that had set Photography on its fat ear when it first come out in 1958...(Joel Sternfeld)

"Finally, of course, the is the Americans itself and it's 50th Ann9iversary in 2009, with an exhibition going from The National Gallery of Art, to SFMOMA to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2008/2009 is going to be the year of Robert Frank and The Americans...

Gabriele Basilico: Silicon Valley, 07

(Gabriele Basilico, San Francisco, 2007, 2007; Digital pigment print; 23 5/8 in. x 31 1/2 in. (60 cm x 80 cm); Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico )

I mentioned this book way back at the beginning of the year in my selection of upcoming books for 2008 - Gabriele Basilico: Silicon Valley, 07 .

As I understand it, Basilico was commissioned by SFMOMA as part of a project exploring the current state of Silicon Valley and the effects of the technology boom on the region.

I think people tend to fall into one of two groups - either they like Basilico's work or they don't and can't really be bothered with it. Obviously I'm in the former group...

(Gabriele Basilico, San Francisco, 2007, 2007; Digital pigment print; 39 3/8 in. x 51 3/16 in. (100 cm x 130 cm); Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico)

This is a very nice, large size (larger than many of his recent books) and well printed book. But what's especially intriguing is how much of the work is in colour - I haven't counted, but probably close to a third of the pictures.

(Gabriele Basilico, San Francisco, 2007, 2007; Digital pigment print; 39 3/8 in. x 51 3/16 in. (100 cm x 130 cm); Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico)

Some of Basilico's colour wok has shown itself before, such as in the Beirut book for example, but not a lot compared to his B&W work. And it is black and white that he is predominantly known for.

A couple of things about that - first, the colour work is extremely well and beautifully done. But secondly, it runs seamlessly with the B&W work. Basilico makes it look easy here, but my opinion is that it's quite difficult in the first place to make successful colour and black & white photographs of the same subjects at the same time (or thereabouts - which is what Basilico seems to have been doing). Not only that, but I've rarely seen a monograph type photo book of one project or subject that works well with mixed colour and black and white - I can think of very few. Yet my experience here was that in looking through Silicon Valley, 07, I hardly even noticed when the work changed from one to the other and back again. But it influences the whole book overall.

I'd certainly love to see the exhibition of this work which is on at SFMOMA (on until June 15th) - going to have to keep an eye out for cheap flights...

(Gabriele Basilico, San Francisco, 2007, 2007; Digital pigment print; 23 5/8 in. x 31 1/2 in. (60 cm x 80 cm); Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico)

One the content of the book, Basilico does have a certain style - although he rings the changes within that. And while a number of the pictures clearly say "US of A" or "California", I was surprised to see how, through Basilico's eye, so many parts of the Western US look curiously like the parts of suburban extra-urban and post-industrial Italy he has explored for so long. The homogenization of such regions is a global phenomenon which more often than not submerges local uniqueness in favour of the generic.


(Gabriele Basilico, Redwood City, 2007, 2007; Digital pigment print; 23 5/8 in. x 31 1/2 in. (60 cm x 80 cm); Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico)

Basilico's work has a deceptive simplicity to it. There have been quite a number of books by Basilico that have come out in the last couple of years - a glut even... (and more yet slated to follow). This book has quickly become one of my favourites.

(Gabriele Basilico, San Jose, 2007, 2007; Digital pigment print; 23 5/8 in. x 31 1/2 in. (60 cm x 80 cm); Collection of the Artist; © Gabriele Basilico)

(Many thanks to SFMOMA for the images here)