I Like - Flash Camera

Flash Camera t-shirt. Unfortunately they only go on sale for 24 hours... damn

"The Pond" by John Gossage

I'm pleased to see that Aperture is re-publishing John Gossage's seminal 1985 book The Pond. (I've written about John Gossage several times before: The Romance Industry; Putting Back The Wall; Snake Eyes).

"Considered a groundbreaking book when first published in 1985, John Gossage's The Pond remains one of the most important photobooks of the medium. As Gerry Badger, coauthor of The Photobook: A History, Volumes I and II, asserts, "Adams, Shore, Baltz--all the New Topographics photographers made great books, but none are better than The Pond." Consisting of photographs taken around and away from a pond situated in an unkempt wooded area at the edge of a city, the volume presents a considered foil to Henry Thoreau's stay at Walden. The photographs in The Pond do not aspire to the "beauty" of classical landscapes in the tradition of Ansel Adams. Instead, they reveal a subtle vision of reality on the border between man and nature. Gossage depicts nature in full splendor, yet at odds with both itself and man, but his tone is ambiguous and evocative rather than didactic. Robert Adams described the work as "believable because it includes evidence of man's darkness of spirit, memorable because of the intense fondness [Gossage] shows for the remains of the natural world." Aperture now reissues this exquisitely produced and highly collectible classic monograph. With the addition of three images and two essays, this second edition offers new audiences the opportunity to celebrate this notable work by a master photographer and bookmaker."

To my mind The Pond is one of the more important photography books of the last fifty years and stands (preceded by Walker Evans' American Photographs) with William Eggleston's Guide, Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places and Paul Graham's A1: The Great North Road among a few others.

I have a rare copy of the original which is one of my more valued photography books, but I'll look forward to seeing the new edition.

Now all we need is for someone to republish Michael Schmidt's Waffenruhe... any takers?

More to come on John Gossage's new book(s) The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler / Map of Babylon soon.


(Update) P.S. The first exhibition of the photographs from The Pond has just opened at the Smithsonion American Art Museum and is on until January. Interesting little comment here:

"EXPRESS: What does the pond represent?
GOSSAGE:The pond is a literary monologue, a narrative landscape book, character development — all of it. ... It's set in Queenstown, but a few of the shots were actually taken in Berlin. I won't tell which ones. I wanted to speak metaphorically about nature and civilization, which I realized halfway through my project. It's a work of documentary fiction. The sites are universally trivial. There are many ponds, and that one may not even be there anymore."
(my emphasis)

(All photographs: John Gossage - The Pond)

Marshall Mcluhan by Douglas Coupland - two thumbs down

Marshall Mcluhan from the Penguin "Extraordinary Canadians" series, by Douglas Coupland

What a perfectly annoying, horrible little book.

It reeks of middle-aged hipsterism like a failed, corduroy clad, English Professor reeks of Old Spice.

Among other things the 'internet tricks' scattered throughout the book already look as dated as one of Mcluhan's glen plaid jackets.

Two thumbs down for this one.

"Another Summer" by Terri Weifenbach

I got this small book by Terri Weifenbach a while ago and although I had looked through it a couple of times I hadn't given myself the time until recently to sit down with it and get to know it properly.

Published by The Thunderstorm Press (based in Japan) Another Summer is a small book (and a small run of only 500 numbered, signed copies) - in a simple grey cloth-covered binding with just the title embossed on the the front in sky blue. It resembles a small volume of poetry rather than a book of photographs and in many ways that's what it is: poetry.

There is no introductory text or essay inside, just the title and forty or so photographs. All of which seem to tell the story of the title - of another summer: a lake, a cottage, children and grandparents, picnics and canoes and back-yards.

In short the summer break of american myth and - sometimes still - of reality. It may be at the cottage or the cabin, or camping or the RV. There is something of the sense that the American Dream still includes Life, Liberty and a relaxing getaway to somewhere "other" in the summer. The idea of escaping (for escape it is) somewhere a little remote, a little wild, a little Walden-ish is still there, albeit it threatened by obsessive workloads, the Protestant Work Ethic, Blackberry addiction, a struggling economy and the threat of the disappearance of the American middle class. Despite which the desire to let children or grandchildren run free by a lake, swim off a dock, hunt for frogs or picnic in a clearing in the woods still survives.

Despite Terri's use of a fairly bright - if not quite saturated - colour palette, her work is a long way from a picture postcard or colour snapshot aesthetic. Or a digital pocket camera print for that matter. All of which would be an easy card for a lesser photographer to play in depicting the 'american summer'.

For one thing Weifenbach continues to use focus as a way of drawing attention away from or towards part of the picture and, to my mind, rendering the picture beautifully photographic in nature - it becomes a photographic picture. In a way these are the anti-HDR photograph, which is the photograph become something else - kitsch among other things.

But more than anything I don't think that this is a book about one summer, or one family or just another summer. Where it could easily tend towards nostalgia and it's associated sentimentality Weifenbach moves much more towards elegy.

And despite the beauty found within the pictures there is also melancholy mingled in with the happiness. Weifenbach doesn't tell us the why or the what of its source. That is up to the viewer, the reader of this book - to make our own meaning as we read it, to make the story our own. Growing up, growing old, loss of parents, loss of the summer idyll itself? It could be all of these and more - or none.

Which is the wonderful thing about photographs - and something so many photographers appear to forget. Photographs have no one meaning. We bring our own meaning(s) to them each time we view them. The inherent ambiguity of the photograph always leaves space for us to imagine and experience in ways which can rarely be foreseen or predicted.

As Edward Hopper said; "I hope it does not tell an obvious anecdote for none is intended", which could equally be said of Another Summer.

(All photographs: Terri Weifenbach - Another Summer)

Summer Book Sale Part I.

Here are the first three books going up for sale:


Walker Evans - Polaroids.




Published by Scalo in 2001
First Edition
Near Fine (slight scuffing on cover)
$100.00 + shipping




Stephen Shore: Fotografien 1973 bis 1993



Published by Schirmer/Mosel, 1995
First Edition

If you've never seen Stephen Shore's photographs of Montana, Texas, the Yucatan and Scotland (along with some of his more well known images) then this is the book for you

$200.00 + shipping




Andrea Modica - Treadwell



Published by Chronicle Books
First Edition edition 1996
Fine

$95.00 + shipping


The fine print:

Books will be sold on a first come first served basis - first person to
email me and pay the price + shipping via Paypal get the book. If
someone emails to buy a book me but doesn't make payment within 48 hours
then it will go to the next person in line.

Shipping costs will be based on shipping via Canada Post - Standard Parcel for Canada and USA, Air Mail (which seems to get more expensive by the minute these days...) to anywhere else in the world.

All the books are used - sales are as is and final. So if you have questions about the book make sure to ask them.

I'll strike off the books if and when they are sold.

Email Contact for books: Contact

America in Colour in the 1930's & 1940's - LoC

(A cross roads store, bar, "juke joint," and gas station in the cotton plantation area, Melrose, La. 1940 Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-, photographer)

Going by the number of posts that have crossed my Reader in the last couple of weeks it would seem that the rest of the photo-blogosphere has discovered that there are some fascinating colour photographs of the US in the 1930's and 1940's which are held by the Library of Congress. Many of which were taken were by some of the well FSA/OSW photographers such as Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano and Russell Lee.

However, just remember, you actually heard it here first - January 24th, 2008 to be precise...

(The "original" Rosie the Riveter - Riveter at work on Consolidated bomber, Consolidated Aircraft Corp., Fort Worth, Texas 1942 Oct. Howard R. Hollem, photographer (LoC))

Many of these photographs are indeed very fascinating although it the colour ones in particular which seem to have caught peoples imagination.

While these have been up on the LoC website for a number of years, they have become much more widely known since the LoC put a large selection up on Flickr. In fact there are quite a range of institutions and collections which have joined in adding a fascinating array of work to the Flickr Commons from the Getty to the Imperial War Museum to The National Archives UK to the State Library of New South Wales and more.

One result of this is that many institutions are finding they have been able to glean a large amount of extra information about the images through the crowd-sourcing of descriptions on Flicker.

Mind you, although they re easier to view on Flickr, one of the nice thing abut going back to the Library of Congress site for them is you can frequently download very large versions of the files - 50mb to 100mb or so - if you fancy printing off a few for your wall.

All in all worth a look (or another look)

P.S. - The Library of Congress recently updated the front end of it's normal image catalogue database system which improved its user friendliness quite significantly

(Louise Rosskam, 1910-, photographer. Shulman's market, at the southeast corner of N Street and Union Street S.W., Washington, D.C. 1941/42 (LoC))

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - a good read

A good read - so far anyway. I've been reading this on and off over the last few weeks and I'm about halfway through.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is an enjoyable, well written, dense (but not impenetrable) novel set in Eighteenth Century Japan on the tiny western foothold of the guarded island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbour. Home of the traders of the Dutch East India Company.

I had previously read only one of David Mitchell's novels Black Swan Green, which like this is fairly straightforward in terms of it's narrative. Whereas he is generally known for his more narrative bending efforts in his previous novels Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten.

I guess this novel has also just made it to the Booker Prize long list and so will undoubtedly become more popular.

"The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.

But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient,with his very life?”" (Official book blurb)

Mitchell is quite a wordsmith. I enjoy the way he plays with word and language and does so in a way that appears effortless. I read one comment on this book where a reader/reviewer complained about the anachronisms in it - with made me laugh out loud. A "historical novel" is basically just one big anachronism so it seems a bit of a waste of time to actually note them as you go along and then complain about them. In fact one thing I enjoy about The Thousand Autumns is the role of interpreters in it. They are fairly central to the story as they were central to the lives of both the Dutch Traders, Japanese Merchants and Japanese authorities involved with the combination of commerce and protecting Japan from the threat of Western influence. But if course everyone in the book "speaks" English. So there will be a Dutchman helping a Japanese translator find the right words to translate a phrase correctly from Dutch to Japanese - but all done in English. As are also mistakes in translation caused by different but similar sounding words or words with two different meanings - all of which are again in English. Yet you come away from reading such a passage convinced you read/heard it in Dutch and Japanese!

I listened to a radio interview with Mitchell, who lived in Japan for a number of years, and when announced to his Japanese wife (they now live in Ireland) that he was going to write his "Japanese novel" she said that if he wrote another noble Geisha potboiler type novel she would stab him with a very large knife! Luckily she must have considered that The Thousand Autumns passed muster.

Anyway here's some clips from a review. And as I said it is an interesting, enjoyable and intelligent read with enough of a challenge to it that you probably wouldn't want to take it to the beach.

From Charles Foran's review in the Globe and Mail:

"...Jacob de Zoet lies in between the sprawling, mind-altering Cloud Atlas and the controlled, sensitive Black Swan Green. It is a straightforward historical novel, told chronologically and in vivid present tense. Mitchell, who recreates entire worlds with such ease one could be forgiven for assuming that he time-travels to them, and then returns to report on what he has observed and heard (in multiple tongues), moves with no less apparent effortlessness from perspective to perspective.

Jacob’s point of view dominates early on, but there are scenes set among the Japanese themselves, including sequences in a remote mountain nunnery where women are imprisoned as sex slaves. A thrilling narrative shift in Jacob de Zoet centres around that nunnery, and the novel moves away from its should-be lovers, widening out to address the emerging global politics of 19th-century imperialism. How it reconciles them in the elegiac final pages is beautiful and despairing, a quiet, perfect note on which to end.

That ending, a string of failures of “contact,” with the disappearance from history of the story’s protagonists as certain as the vanishing of Dejima itself, is deeply felt. Often overlooked by admirers of Mitchell’s daunting formal skill is the humanism, empathetic and moral, that informs his fiction. An English naval captain endures an outbreak of gout while he attempts to do his empire’s bidding in Nagasaki Bay, affecting his decisions; a Japanese magistrate, learning of an unspeakable cruelty going unchecked, ends it in the only way possible – by sacrificing his own life.

In Cloud Atlas, the theme of predation, the tendency of organisms to prey upon each other to mutual ruination, unified the six separate narratives. In Jacob de Zoet, this preoccupation is evidenced in the careful construction of the various small, overcrowded prisons – islands, nunneries, ships, homes – inside of which the characters must operate. “Why must all things,” the same gout-ridden captain laments, “go around in stupid circles?”

A writer as naturally curious, generous and able to translate an acute perceptivity to, and wonder at, the natural world as David Mitchell isn’t likely to produce a hushed, low-key novel. For some, Black Swan Green was even a little muted: Mitchell with the volume kept too low on his singular voice – or, rather, his glorious voices. Though direct in its storytelling, Jacob de Zoet marks a return to full amplitude. That means occasionally over-long scenes and one or two rambling monologues. But it also guarantees fiction of exceptional intelligence, richness and vitality"

Coming Soon - Summer Book Sale... Gill, Evans, Ghirri and more

Over the next little while I'm going to be offering a few photobooks for sale (for some much needed fund-raising...).

Most will be of the slightly harder to find variety but at a something of a discount from the prices found on the likes of Advanced Book Exchange, Amazon used books, Photoeye etc.

Here's a taster of a few of the titles but please DON'T email me yet about them (I'll just ignore any such emails unless you are offering way over the odds). Please wait until I actually post them. Then it will be on a first come, first paid, first served basis.

Here are a few of the titles that will be on offer:

Joel Sternfeld - American Prospects (First paperback edition 1994)

Sally Eauclair - New Color

Walker Evans - Polaroids

Andrea Modica - Treadwell

Stephen Gill - Archeology in Reverse

Lee Friedlander - Factory Valleys (ex-library)

Luigi Ghirri - Paesaggio Italiano/Italian Landscape (1989)

more...

Photojournalism 1855-2010 R.I.P.

(Roger Fenton's assistant Marcus Sparling in the Crimea 1855)

Photojournalism was finally taken off life-support and pronounced dead on 1st August 2010.

At least, that is, according to Neill Burgess. Burgess - who runs his own picture agency, NB Pictures, represents 10 photographers, including Simon Norfolk, Dayanita Singh and Sebastião Salgado, and was also head of Network Photographers and Magnum Photos in New York, and Magnum London, which he helped set up in 1986. He is twice a former Chairman of World Press Photo - writes for Editorial Photographers UK:

"“For God’s sake, somebody call it!”

Has the time come to take photojournalism off life-support? After nearly 25 years in the business, agency director Neil Burgess steps forward to make the call.

...Today I look at the world of magazine and newspaper publishing and I see no photojournalism being produced. There are some things which look very like photojournalism, but scratch the surface and you’ll find they were produced with the aid of a grant, were commissioned by an NGO, or that they were a self-financed project, a book extract, or a preview of an exhibition.

Magazines and newspapers are no longer putting any money into photojournalism. They will commission a portrait or two. They might send a photographer off with a writer to illustrate the writer’s story, but they no longer fund photojournalism. They no longer fund photo-reportage. They only fund photo illustration.

We should stop talking about photojournalists altogether. Apart from a few old dinosaurs whose contracts are so long and retirement so close that it’s cheaper to keep them on, there is no journalism organisation funding photographers to act as reporters. A few are kept on to help provide ‘illustration’ and decorative visual work, but there is simply no visual journalism or reportage being supported by so called news organisations.

Seven British-based photographers won prizes at the ‘World Press Photo’ competition this year and not one of them was financed by a British news organisation. But this is not just a UK problem. Look at TIME and Newsweek, they are a joke. I cannot imagine anyone buys them on the news-stand anymore. I suspect they only still exist because thousands of schools, and libraries and colleges around the world have forgotten to cancel their subscriptions. Even though they have some great names in photojournalism on their mastheads, when did you last see a photo-essay of any significance in these news magazines?

The wire services have concentrated on development of TV and internet services and focused on financial intelligence to pay the bills, rather than news as it happens. They rely on stringers and on ‘citizen journalists’ when there’s a breaking story, not professional photojournalists...

...I woke up this morning with a dream going around in my head. It was as if I’d been watching a medical drama, ER or something, where they’d spent half the programme trying to revive a favourite character: mouth to mouth, blood transfusions, pumping the chest up and down, that electrical thing where they shout “Clear!” before zapping them with 50,000 volts to get the heart going again, emergency transplants and injections of adrenalin …, but nothing works. And someone sobs, “We’ve got to save him we cannot let him die.” And his best friend steps forward, grim and stressed and says, “It’s no good. For God’s sake, somebody call it!”

Okay, I’m that friend and I’m stepping forward and calling it. “Photojournalism: time of death 11.12. GMT 1st August 2010.” Amen.

(full article here).

(Making the call: Neil Burgess is at his photo-bookstall in London’s Broadway Market most Saturdays. Photo © David Hoffman.)

I'd have to say that, within the confines of Burgesses definition of photojournalism, I'd pretty much have to agree. I don't see the day coming in there near future when a major "publication" - paper or digital - sends off the likes of a McCullin or a Nachtwey or a Peress to cover important stories in depth. Most Photojournalists today - be it for local or regional papers, the national press or the likes of Newsweek or Time or the Sunday Times (or their digital versions and/or equivalents) - really aren't even news photographers anymore - just photo-illustrators.

(Thanks to Dave Burnett for the link)

And on an almost lighter note I'll repost this:

Working in the Print Media today

A short film about how to conduct yourself when offered a photo assignment.

And I can assure those of you who have never worked for newspapers or magazines that every situation in this has happened - and worse... (after I posted this the first time an old friend emailed me and pointed out he'd once been "offered" the half-day rate to travel from Kabul to Uruzgan via Kandahar - check the map - because he would only be photographing for a couple of hours...)

NOTE: Language NSFW...

Raymond Meeks - amwell | continuum

(© Raymond Meeks amwell | continuum)

For a long time, as I kept coming across Raymond Meeks’ work, I could never quite make up my mind about it. I was drawn to the land(scape) aspects of what he does but I wasn’t so sure about some other parts of it and how it all fit together.

One thing I wasn’t so sure about was the mixture of the portraits/people in along with the land in most of his projects. But this was quite hard to tell because although Meeks and his work seemed to turn up quite regularly it was usually only as a brief passing mention somewhere or two or three images from one of his books. And while his books seem to be the main way of presenting his work but they are quite hard to find.

(© Raymond Meeks - topsoil)

With the exception of two or three books, such as A Clearing and Sound of Summer Running published by Nazraeli Press, most of his books are hand-made and/or small print runs produced very much as an artist's book (although Meeks has indicated that he experimented with deconstructing the “artists book“ I see it more as expanding the boundaries of the artist's/photographer's book). As a result these books tend to a). sell out very quickly, b). increase in value rather quickly once they are sold out and c). some of the artist's books are quite expensive (and rightly so) in the first place. In fact a. and b. also seems to apply to his books published through Nazraeli as well.

(© Raymond Meeks from amwell | continuum)

So until recently I had to rely on the overview of his work found at places like Photoeye or on viewing his website. And as the internet is basically crap for viewing this kind of work and getting anything more than the roughest, blurriest, myopic sense of what the work is about I really had to wait until I actually got some of his work in my hands.

Then a couple of months ago a friend sent me a link to Meeks’ website where I could buy a copy of his latest hand-made book project amwell | continuum. So I fired up Paypal and got in on the ground floor with this one.

(© Raymond Meeks from a gathering/topsoil)

Two or three weeks later the package arrived and I must say I was impressed. The size is about 12”x9“ and it is a hand-sewn soft covered collection with 18 pages by my count. It was printed on what Meeks describes as a ”broad format laser printer (weighing-in at a hulking 150 lbs.) I suspect the machine lacks an “energy-star rating” and have found that by shutting down the lights and music and turning down the heat, I can successfully print books without short circuiting the power“, which I think speaks to his continued exploration of the hand-made artists book. My copy also came with two signed prints - one black and white and one colour - along with a delightful little hand written card from Raymond which also has another picture on it.

So as a physical work it is very nice to handle. This particular laser-printing process (I’m thinking at least decade old technology - but maybe two??) also gives a nice and somewhat unique feel which reproduces the images well.

But what of the content? Well, I was pleased to find that my initial sense of being drawn to Meeks’ work was confirmed. The work has a very low key and gentle feel to it. It is very much about a place but it is not sentimental or nostalgic - but rather is straight forward yet maintaining something of the magic or the mystery of the everyday - that is there around us when or if we allow ourselves to notice it. There is a sense of beauty but also more than a little of the sublime.

(© Raymond Meeks from amwell | continuum)

For myself I found quiet echoes of other photographer’s work. Sally Mann - but without so much of Freud’s death-drive. John Gossage - but not quite as cool-eyed. The tiniest chord of Roger Ballen - but without the associated psychotic nightmares. As well as some resonances with Stephen Gill and Masao Yamamoto.

Overall though Meeks’ vision is very much his own. This short book moves beautifully from place to people to interiors to place and from colour to black and white and back to colour smoothly with a sense of ease and in a way which is almost unnoticed as you spend time with the pictures (one thing I have long thought is that the mixing of colour and black & white is an almost impossible thing to pull off). This is all very much in the realm of poetry.

And amwell | continuum is indeed a continuum, a continuation of Meeks’ own coming to terms with moving from Montana to Portland, Oregon - from deeply rural to urban (indeed suburban) and in good part seems to be about letting go of the former while trying to work out how to see and make sense of the latter, a process started in his earlier book Carousel.

”“amwell | continuum” is an artist book/journal which advances the narrative of my most recent artist broadside, “carousel”, while continuing to explore the construct of memory and resolve loss. it’s only now in the completion of this book, that I recognize a sustained and underlying thread of melancholy, similar to a passing glance in the mirror on your way out the door that reflects the unseemly or the shock of hearing your voice in a recording. for me, there are delicate moments of joy represented throughout this book, as well as a kind measure of hope. there are multiple pairings observed in the layout, perhaps to suggest a lingering in the landscape and to parallel my personal impulse to do so. in addition, I’ve been compelled to experience and express time beyond chronological sequencing, the absence of time in the horizontal dimension of past and future.
in the making of books, I’m drawn to the merging of contemporary materials and media with less common and impermanent results. Nazraeli publisher and friend Chris Pichler has generously offered a broad format laser printer (weighing-in at a hulking 150 lbs.) I suspect the machine lacks an “energy-star rating” and have found that by shutting down the lights and music and turning down the heat, I can successfully print books without short circuiting the power. obviously, this limits my printing operation to daylight hours. however, the printer allows for fine reproductions where toner sits on top of cotton fiber paper and is “fused” creating a wonderful merging of mediums. While my recent publishing efforts may have something to do with deconstructing the “art book” and shifting focus from the beautiful object to honoring content and subject, I am, as many, drawn to tactile experience and a clear expression of the work in book form; using inexpensive materials and common tools while subtracting nothing of quality or value from the piece.“

(© Raymond Meeks from Carousel)

Something I’ve also long held is that the book is very much the natural home for photographs and that photographs on the gallery or museum wall are really more of a secondary way of presenting or seeing photographs (My prediction is that in a few years time we’ll look back at the ever larger Stately Home/Palais sized photographs currently in vogue as something of an interesting blip in the photographic continuum. And a few years more and we may even look back at them as something a little bit quaint in the same way we look back at the Kodak Coloramas). Today, with the ever increasing options for photographers to produce their own books - from gluing and hand stitching, to varied forms of print on demand to print it yourself and more, we are already seeing an exciting growth in the photography book in all sorts of different forms. Books limited only by imagination rather than by cost and technology.

(© Raymond Meeks from watching waiting where,?)

There is an interesting interview with Meeks by Darius Himes (worth reading in full) which picks up on the artist’s/photographer’s book aspect:

”Darius Himes: Your artist books are made from appropriated books that I assume you've picked up here and there at various bookstores. When did you first start using old books as a space to work on your photographs, and what motivated you to do so.

Raymond Meeks: It’s just been within the last year that I’ve been thinking about the use of older, existing books. I’d been mounting prints to folded pages for a few years, creating small books with limited, homespun bookbinding skill. I have a sorry stack of tattered books with crusted glue, ruined in the final attempt to bind covers with pages. The use of secondhand books also seemed a decent effort towards recycling, considering the vast heap of books that rest idle on bookshelves and especially
since what I’m doing is exploratory. So little of what I do with photography and books is deliberate or intentional. Certainly, what resonates with others seems to be born out of good luck and grace.

Creatively, I thrive when I’m put in a corner and given limited resources and few options. The books I find provide portals and clues, which allow me to work with the existing title or narrative. Sometimes the dimensions are just right, or the number of pages. But I rely heavily on the inherent voice of the book and enjoy the collaboration between what the book was in its previous life and what it might become...

...DH: Could you describe for us the process of finding a book and then how you transform it? Are there clear steps along the way and does that take months? Or do you find yourself completing these objects in a weekend?

RM: Frequenting secondhand bookstores is not an obsession, but I leave myself open to discovery. I recently came across the title Minna and Myself, containing the poetry of Maxwell Bodenheim. I immediately placed my daughter in the role of Minna, and I imagined my wife using the first person voice. The book was originally published in 1918, and Bodenheim’s verse drips from the page like sap. Here are some of the lines: “Twilight pushes down your eyes, with shimmering, pregnant fingers, that leave you covered with still-born touch. With little whips of dead words”. And, “your cheeks are spent diminuendos, sheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips”.

Needless to say, I had to use the verse sparingly, which left space for my own interpretation in pictures. This became my collaboration with Maxwell Bodenheim, who died in Manhattan in 1954. I hadn’t known of Bodenheim previous to the discovery of Minna and Myself and I imagined, in a narcissistic way perhaps, that I might renew his words. I trust that he might approve of our posthumous collaboration. I genuinely took his words to heart and spent a number of days with prints and negatives, trying to work with his pace and rhythm. In the end though, it’s just a book that’s already had a life and it’s indulgent to think about the book now in a new way. At times I feel it doesn’t exist for anyone else, really, apart from myself."

Raymond Meeks’ work has a looseness in style that I envy combined with an intriguing way of seeing. If you can't find any of his books to look at first hand at least go and hunt around his website where you can find his different books and projects (as well as the photoeye galleries)

Now I just need to find a reasonably priced copy of Carousel or Orchard or at least A Clearing somewhere...

(© Raymond Meeks from amwell | continuum)

(note: please excuse any typos or strange forms of sentence construction. My brain still isn't currently quite working as it should do and I don't always catch them...)

New Likea Camera - $19.95

A new (cardboard) pinhole Leica - just the thing. From Wired:

"The Likea camera is like a Leica camera. Specifically, the Likea MPH is a stripped down version of Leica’s already frill-less MP rangefinder. How stripped down? Try these anti-specs:

No battery, no light meter, no mechanical shutter, no embellishment –
just your eye, a lightproof box and the emulsion.

It is also $20, and made from cardboard. The MPH is in fact just a pinhole camera, although so sparsely equipped is the kit that it doesn’t even include the pinhole: you will have to cut your own from a soda-can. One thing it does share with every real Leica ever made is the sensor: it uses the exact-same 35mm film as the legendary German rangefinders have always used."

The Seed Cathedral - British Shanghai Expo Pavilion

photo © Daniele Mattioli

Whether it actually "works" or not as a piece of architecture, visually I think this looks just fantastic. (Plenty more here and here). I also like the combined concepts of "seed cathedral" and "blur building"

photo © Daniele Mattioli

"The Seed Cathedral is 20 meters tall and is formed from 60,000 slender transparent fiber optic rods. Each fiber optic rod is 7.5 meters long and encloses one or more seeds at its tip. During the day, they draw daylight inwards to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources inside each rod allowing the entire structure to glow. When the wind blows the optic “hairs” gently move as they create a dynamic effect for the viewers. Inside the darkened inner chamber of the Seed Cathedral” the tips of the fiber optic filaments form an apparently hovering galaxy of slim vitrines containing a vast array of embedded seeds.”

photo © Daniele Mattioli

Thousand and One Words

Great photo commentary and critique blog - Thousand and One Words - by "Ryan Howard" ؟

From his Artists Statement

"They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but my photographs strive for more. I document life--capturing emotions and provoking thought. My pictures serve as a mirror, not only reflecting the truth in existence, but also providing the viewer a glimpse back through my lens, past the viewfinder, and straight into my spirit/soul.."

Here are a couple of posts:

Block Drive

"The eye is drawn to the sign and its cry for help. "Do not block drive." It begs us to examine what is blocking our drive. It's easy to believe we are resigned to this black and white life, but look closely at the picture. Notice how the letters go outside the lines just like the writer is trying to break free of the locked door. Delve deeper to see the play between light and dark highlighting the symbolism of the text. The washed out effect from the letters is our light within trying to break through. I could have shot this head on, but I choose the angle to emphasize the padlock - the darkest part of the photo...the darkest part of life. The lock in the shadows is the darkest parts of our lives; addiction, abandonment, orphanages, greed, metaphorical blindness. That darkness is the secrets and secrets locked deep within each of us - the darkness chaining our drive."

Mysterious Pipes

"Protruding out from the coarse stucco, these three holes are a mystery. Where do they lead? What flows through them? The observer cannot know for sure, giving them license to draw up their own interpretations. Looking at them, the viewer can easily conjure up images spanning from pollution to sex to Ninja Turtles and beyond... The true mystery comes from your imagination."

Ryan is also doing open critiques where you can send your own work in: It seems like anyone with an SLR camera seems to fancy themselves a "photographer," but there's a huge difference between "taking pictures" and "being an artistic chronicler." I could rant for hours about all the terrible photographs I've been subjected to--instead I'm going to do something about it. I plan to offer you unprecedented access to my brain, eyes, heart, and yes, even my soul. Every few weeks I'll pick a theme and you'll have the opportunity to submit your photos to my blog; a few lucky individuals will have theirs critiqued by me. The tips and insight I'm offering are sure to make anyone who pays careful attention to what I say (and what I don't say), fantastically better. And who knows, maybe you'll even teach me something in the process.

I'm surprised I haven't already seen Ryan interviewed on Conscientious yet.


(Link via Jon Feinstein via Joy Drury Cox - Jon, I hope you are considering Ryan as a juror for a show at Humble Arts Foundation?)

Working in the Print Media Today

A short film about how to conduct yourself when offered a photo assignment

NOTE: Language NSFW...

Starbucks Listens to Customer Request for More Sizes - including the 128 fl oz "Plenta"

From the Starbucks company blog:

'SEATTLE, April 1, 2010 –Starbucks announced today the introduction of two new beverage sizes in stores in the U. S. and Canada this Fall. The announcement follows a year of research and direct customer feedback through MyStarbucksIdea.com requesting even more choice in beverage size.

“Whether customers are looking for a large or small size, the Plenta and the Micra satisfy all U.S. and Canada customers’ needs for more and less coffee,” said Hugh Mungis, Starbucks VP of Volume. “Our size selection is now plentiful.”

Plenta™ (128 fl oz) and Micra™ (2 fl oz) cups arrive in Starbucks stores this Fall. Derived from Italian word for plentiful or small, the Plenta™ delivers coffee lovers record amounts of the world’s finest coffee beverages while the Micra™ delivers a quick and satisfying morsel of goodness.

Recognizing the potential impact the Plenta™ presents for municipal waste collection, Starbucks is also suggesting several subsequent uses for the Plenta™ cup post coffee enjoyment. Suggested usage options include popcorn receptacle, rain hat, perennial planter, lampshade or yoga block. The Micra also serves as a convenient milk dish for kittens, soft boiled egg cup or paper clip holder."

well - my favourite April Fool Day joke of the day so far. Mind you. as a coffee lover/addict (even if Starbucks isn't usually my number 1 choice) I'm quite drawn to the idea of a Plenta Latte....

"The measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself" - Paul Graham

- when you form the meaningless world into photographs, then form those photographs into a meaningful world -
Paul Graham - The Unreasonable Apple

(Paul Graham from "Troubled Land")

Last month photographer Paul Graham gave a presentation at the first MOMA Photography Forum that deserves to be widely read by creative photographers as well as those who promote and curate photography.

It's certainly one of the most succinct and clear arguments I've come across in recent years about the place and value of creative (or "art") photography.

In particular Graham makes an unapologetic case for the importance of "...photography that is taken from the world as it is" (my emphasis), as opposed to photography that is constructed from an artist's vision.

The text of the presentation can be found on Graham's website and deserves to be read in full, but here are a few extracts.

"...there remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who deploy the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself -photographs taken from the world as it is– are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ‘documentary’tag".

What I find so refreshing about the whole presentation is that Graham essentially says is that its not an argument about the photography world versus the photography world. This form of photography is as creatively important as painting or sculpture or whatever and it's simply time for the curators and the critics to unblinker themselves and wake up to the fact. And it's also time for the best of them to bring their skills and intelligence to bear on conveying to the wider art world and the public at large what it is that such photography is about:

"I have to say that the position of ‘straight’ photography in the art world reminds me of the parable of an isolated community who grew up eating potatoes all their life, and when presented with an apple, though it unreasonable and useless, because it didn’t taste like a potato...

...The point is that we need the smart, erudite and eloquent people in the art world, the clever curators and writers, those who do get it, to take the time to speak seriously about the nature of such photography, and articulate something of its dazzlingly unique qualities, to help the greater art world, and the public itself understand the nature of the creative act when you dance with life itself - when you form the meaningless world into photographs, then form those photographs into a meaningful world."

Graham concludes with a final statement which he correctly (in my view) describes as an astonishing description at the heart of creative photography:

"So, what is it we are discussing here - how do we describe the nature of this photographic creativity? My modest skills are insufficient for such things. However let me make an opening offer: perhaps we can agree that through force of vision these artists strive to pierce the opaque threshold of the now, to express something of the thus and so of life at the point they recognised it. They struggle through photography to define these moments and bring them forward in time to us, to the here and now, so that with the clarity of hindsight, we may glimpse something of what it was they perceived. Perhaps here we have stumbled upon a partial, but nonetheless astonishing description of the creative act at the heart of serious photography: nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself."

So go read it, email it around and print it off and stick it on the wall by your computer.


(and thanks to Terri Weifenbach for pointing me to this)

Unhappy Hipsters and the deadpan aesthic

"Drink in hand, he settled into the numb nothingness of his self-imposed isolation".

(Photo: Daniel Hennessy; Dwell, November 2006)

On a mildly serious note, over the last few years it's been interesting to note how the "deadpan" aesthetic in photography - applied to both people and places - has eventually made its way from the edges through to illustration and advertising. From the New Topographics by way of New Colour and the "Dusseldorf School" etc. it has been showing up more and more often in ads and magazine articles. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of architecture, design and "lifestyle" magazines.

At first seen mainly in the more hipster magazines such as Azure or Dwell or ID or Wallpaper this style is now found in even the most staunchly traditional architectural magazines. Check the architecture and design magazine section at Chapters, Borders or Barnes & Noble and you will find no end of articles apparently illustrated by the combined team of Thomas Struth (huh - I can't believe I've never done a full post on Struth), Rineke Dijkstra, Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shoren Ltd.

We are presented with models or owners - not a smile among them whether adult or child - with their deadpan gaze lit by diffuse and slightly unsaturated colour, as is the rest of their dwelling - usually on an overcast day - seen fair and square by the camera. Rarely pretty or beautiful or stunning but always understated. Somber and mildly sublime but never harsh or bold or brash.

Now this happens to be a look and a type of photography that I actually quite like. At first I was excited as I started to see it effecting main stream commercial photography and especially as it started to fracture the dominance of a style of architectural photography that had been in place since sometime in the 1970's. But now I'm coming to realise that it can become rather tiring in such quantity (if not downright depressing) after flicking through the third or fifth or tenth magazine with article after article illustrated in a similar deadpan style - even if meticulously executed, as they usually are.

And while I know that many of the photographers also pursue their own personal projects alongside their commercial work (wherein the latter has become a happy subsidising side-effect; making hay while the sunshine lasts) I find that once this approach moves too far into the commercial realm it also seems to take on a deadening effect. Whereas the personal work, the art projects, may appear deadpan and impassive they are often in fact suffused with a sense of real irony or genuine affection or fascination or criticism or even subtle humour. Yet with most of the commercial work this more often seems lacking and all we are left with is the austere, sober deadpan.

Which is why I was happy to run across the site "Unhappy Hipsters" - subtitle: "It's lonely in the modern world" (thanks for the link Shafraz). The (anonymous??) author takes a sample of these pictures and adds his own humorous (though often highly believable) take on them by adding his own captions. Some are gut-achingly funny. Most are wry. Some beautifully satirical. Many are tellingly accurate - at least as far as the current urban middle class condition goes.

"The emotional distance was immeasurable.

(Photo: Noah Webb; Dwell, February 2007)"

Really, I enjoyed the site as just being very funny but it did prompt me to do a bit of musing on photographic style as well as (a mildly humorous take) on meaning in photographs - how images contain a multiplicity of meanings independent of the original creator (I know adding captions to change meaning - intentionally or unintentionally - is nothing new, but this seemed a particularly well done example). So just enjoy Unhappy Hipsters

"He deeply resented her insistence that their wardrobes coordinate.

(Photo: Stephen Oxenbury; Dwell, March 2009)"

BTW the competition posts (they start about halfway down the page), where readers were invited to send in their own captions had me creased up in part because of the wonderful brilliance of the subject photograph by Gregg Segal (who must have a beautifully humorous sense of irony):

(Photo: Gregg Segal; Dwell,
October 2009)

And a couple of sample captions:

Zen had come easily to him—sparse interior, shaved head, “rug-garden.”
It was motorcycle maintenance he was having problems with.
-Sebastian Biot

He knew she would be happy that he had adhered to the “NO SHOES ON
THE CARPET” policy. Finally, he was getting their relationship right.
-Brilliant Anonymous

He had no intention of ever riding it, or even fixing it. But he decided
from this moment forward, all visitors would enter to find him in
exactly this position.
-SteveZ.

Binder Clip cable catcher

Off-topic (well, sort of), but this is so blindingly (bindingly?) simple I had to post it.

How many times have you crawled around in the dust bunnies under you desk trying to find the business end of a scanner or printer USB cable, external hard-drive cable, camera download cable, ipod cable, charger cable etc etc.

Well, here's the solution - using cheap and ubiquitous binder clips (or foldback clips as I think we called them in the UK?)

Now, why didn't I think of that - doh

(via Lifehacker - where I also learned how to make fantastically tasty but very quick - 5 minutes a day - and easy to make artisan bread...)