peripheral vision - the yellowknife project

the suburbs as a state of mind (a mild retrospective continued....)

There no longer appears to be a clear division between the suburbs and either the urban or rural environment. There now seems to be a generic suburban condition that may be a potential quality for all inhabited spaces. This extended suburban condition does not easily show up on maps, it is in many ways more of a suburban state of mind than a topographic location.

Yellowknife - a city perched on the Canadian Shield and surrounded by Boreal forest is like an isolated specimen of this condition - the idea of the suburbs. Wherever you are in Canada (or indeed, North America) there is a mundane, yet reassuring familiarity to the suburbs and the strip malls and the big box stores that results from the pressure of market forces and from blunt expediency. And while each place often displays subtle individual differences, the movement is away from difference towards similarity and the success of homogenization. What dominates is the generic.

In photographing Yellowknife I find myself looking at things that are somewhat off centre, off to the side - a peripheral vision. Things that are often unnoticed and just below our level of perception. Things seen that are in plain sight yet so familiar or obvious they are usually ignored, unseen, and their existence barely registered - attention no longer paid to them.

The landscape is forced to conform to the construction of standardised suburban sub-divisions and the exposed Canadian Shield, some of the oldest rock in the world, is blasted and flattened to accommodate familiar suburban housing rather than the housing being designed to conform to the landscape.

This project conveys everyday North America and the infiltration of the city by suburban culture - the place seen on the way to the office or the supermarket - viewing these familiar environments from an off-centre perspective, revealing the ambiguities and artifice of everyday life.

All images © 2005 Timothy Atherton

Spring Time - A Mild Retrospective

Spring time is here and things seem to be slowly coming back to life (including me).

I've going through boxes of stuff in a form of forced spring cleaning recently. Plenty of things to throw out but also coming across many things that I'd forgotten about but were a joy to rediscover.

In that spirit I'm going to post some pictures on here over the next while that I hadn't really looked at for some time. I find I often put pictures together for an exhibition or for a web page or whatever - pictures from a project that I might have spent some good time working on - and get so caught up with that often frantic end presentation process that it finishes with a sort of "fire and forget" conclusion. A quick glance, a sigh of relief and then on to whatever is next.

So I've been taking some time to go back over some of my pictures and projects and will be posting some selections on here - A Mild Retrospective.

Today a few pictures from Immersive Landscapes - boreal forest/precambrian shield

All images © 2005 Timothy Atherton

"Mining the Photo Archive"

"...the archive is never closed, it opens out of the future." Jacques Derrida - Archive Fever

I must say I find it mildly annoying when someone discovers something which is in fact old hat but then proceeds to trumpet it far and wide as the next best thing.

Such seems to be the idea of "mining the photo archive". I've seen versions of this come up in a couple of places in the last year or so, but most recently in two posts on Conscientious. One entitled "The case for mining photography archives" and the other a review of the book "Photographic Memory - The Album in the Age of Photography" by Verna Posever Curtis of the Library of Congress

Now the idea that Colberg suggests in the first post is that there are large collections of photo archives in various forms - some such as Flickr as a sort of informal contemporaneous photo-archive and others which are more formalized photo-archives from the massive - such as the Library of Congress (or indeed just about any other national archive) to small local archives and historical societies.

His suggestion being that;

"Having new eyes look at older archives of photographs of course could also lead to fantastic insights into a photographer’s work. This is not to say that the old edits are bad. But who knows what kinds of new edits someone smart, with a great eye, might come up with? Of course, the old edit is always informed by its times and circumstances - but maybe an old, classic edit could get radically transformed into something that suddenly looks fresh again?"

(He goes on to add that another possibility would be to develop fluid ways of changing the original edit in photo-books which would likewise be a way of re-envisioning the original set of photographs).

Colberg concludes by saying;

"But still, I think there are interesting, largely unexplored opportunities here… and some agency, foundation, publisher and/or photographer might just pick them up."

In reviewing Photographic Memory (an excellent book, beautifully put together btw) the idea of mining the archive is picked up again;

"This new book could also be seen as a prime example of the mining of an archive that I discussed earlier on this site. The Library of Congress’ website offer access to their collection via digitized documents and images (which, btw, essentially provides a free additional way to look at the albums in the book), and one can only hope that there will be more projects such as Curtis’ "

Which sounds like a very interesting and quite wonderful set of ideas. What an intriguing new direction to take photography. The problem being that of course nothing at all in this is in any way new.

Archivists have been working for at least the last 15 to 20 years to find ways to make use of the new advantages provided by digitization and digital media in being able to ("data") mine the archive - both visual and non-visual. There are numerous projects online (including, but not only, on Flickr) where repositories have made large chunks of their collections available and have encouraged their broader access and use in a wide variety of ways, social tagging, commenting, various forms of crowdsourcing, new arrangements (or "edits" as Colberg calls them) and more, far beyond what the originators of the projects potentially imagined. In fact that latter idea is very much at the core of many of these projects - to put these photographic archives out there, make them available, encourage people to access and use them and then see what people do with them.

Indeed this has been one of the more exciting aspects of how such projects have developed. Photographers, artists and others - down to schoolchildren doing school projects - have been able to mine these archives for their own many and varied projects - creatively remaking the archive in ways that were previously neither imagined nor really possible. And as these projects grow and develop, new ways of using these records continue to explored, encouraged and developed.

So while there are still undoubtedly unexplored possibilities still to come from mining such archives there are already many agencies from UNESCO, to the International Council for Archives to archivists and curators in museums, archives, universities and institutions, to photographers and artists, and many more already up and running with this and who have already been doing this for some good time. The usual constraint, of course, being funding...

Which finally brings me to the book Photographic Memory. While this is indeed a rather fine new book on the place and role of the photographic album, it certainly isn't the first. As well as books on the photographic album in general there are books - drawing on the photographic archive - on women in photo albums; women's roles in making photographic albums, photo albums and travel, death in the photographic album etc etc. Then there are books which mined the photo archive looking at postcards, the roles of postcards in society, the carte de visite, funereal photographs and so on, again, "mining" the archive and putting pictures together in new ways and remaking the archive.

Opening up of the archive - photographic or otherwise - thanks to the opportunities afforded by digitization and the Internet is indeed a wonderful idea. As is the enabling and encouraging of people to access those archives, to comment on the image, to tag them, to draw on them and remake the archive. But please, let's not suddenly think that 2011 is the year we could start going ahead and doing this. Instead let's put our shoulders behind the longstanding work that already taken this in exciting new directions.

The Library of Congress

Venus of the Hydrants - Brilliant!

Love it - from Miscellanea/Onsite Review:

"Never let it be said that city utilities workers don't have a finely honed sense of humour
Mme Vionnet
bondage
surrealism
the erotic."

Cairo Geeks Survive Tahrir Square Assault

From Wired:

CAIRO — For three days, the geeks and online activists and DIY filmmakers protested peacefully here in Tahrir Square. For three nights, they slept in tents with their laptops by their sides and kept their mobile phones charged by hacking into one of Tahrir’s street lights. On the fourth day, Wednesday, the lynch mob came and encircled them.

Thousands of people supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak laid siege to the central plaza, pressing themselves into the four streets that lead into Tahrir. They attacked the unarmed crowds with clubs, knives, stones and Molotov cocktails. As I write this, reports put the death toll at three with around 1,500 injured.

“This was a real battle, a real Egyptian street fight, but we kept them back with stones and barricades and fire,” computer security specialist Ahmad Gharbeia, 34, tells me over the phone. “They never reached our camp.”

“I need to preserve my phone battery,” he adds, “so let’s talk later.”

For the past six years, Gharbeia has been training Arab world activists, journalists and human rights lawyers to hide their internet communications from prying eyes. “We use encryption techniques and PGP for e-mail,” he says. “We use proxies such as Tor that circumvent blocking. I was the Arabic editor of a tools set called Security in a Box. It’s a tool kit of open and free software that helps advocates and human rights activists achieve security, privacy and anonymity.” ...

more...

“This is private property - we're here to sell art"

Incident In Art Land

From the New Yorker:

"Quietly moving through the Anselm Kiefer show at the Gagosian gallery on its final afternoon were eight people wearing black T-shirts that bore the show's portentous title—“Next Year in Jerusalem”—in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. They didn't speak unless spoken to; they took pictures of themselves standing before some equally portentous works of Holocaust-evoking art. (Everyone was taking pictures; the catalogue cost a hundred dollars.)

Only if approached did one of the group explain that they were part of an organization called U.S. Boat to Gaza, which plans to sponsor a ship in the next flotilla to sail against the Israeli blockade. Half of the group had left, and they were reduced to four by the time that gallery representatives asked them to leave, unimpressed by their claims to be extending the discussion that Kiefer had begun. Morality. Guilt. Jewish tragedy, past and present. (“This is private property,” a gallerista in towering heels shot back. “We're here to sell art.”)

A call to the police was threatened. In response, the activists put on their jackets—covering the offending Passover phrase, even while complaining that it had not, to their knowledge, been copyrighted—and asked if they might stay. Without reply, the representatives walked away...

Ingrid Homberg had gone to Gagosian that day to lift her spirits. A delicate blonde woman in her late fifties, she grew up in Germany—she is roughly of Kiefer's generation—but never felt that she belonged there; she moved to New York with her young daughter in 1980, and the city has proved a much happier fit. In recent years, however, she has been ill (fibromyalgia, arthritis) and suffers frequent pain. Still, she was immediately buoyed by Kiefer's magisterial landscapes, in which massive wings overhead suggest the judgment of God. The gallery was filled with such disturbing images. She had earlier noticed the people in the T-shirts, and now she approached them, hoping to discuss the feelings that the artist's work provoked.

But there was no discussion. Two police officers arrived just a moment after Homberg did, and ordered the group out. Including Homberg. She said that she had no reason to leave. She asked one of the officers—“Young man,” she addressed him, and he did look very young—why they did not allow the group to speak. And that was it. His partner grabbed her by the arm and began to pull her out..."

More here

Considering the nature of Anselm Kiefer's work and the themes of history, destruction, rembering and forgetting, societal guilt, judgement, atonement and more that run through it like strata, I find this story not only particularly ironic but also damningly telling.

I think that one phrase says it all; “This is private property... we're here to sell art"



Anselm Kiefer, Flying Fortress (2010), foreground, with Cetus (2010), in "Next Year in Jerusalem" at Gagosian Gallery

TRACES - alleyways & spandrels: An Exhibition

I have an exhibition of some work from my project TRACES - alleyways & spandrels up at the McMullen Art Gallery in Edmonton until January 28th.

TRACES alleyways & spandrels

Edmonton's 1100 km of urban and suburban alleyways are like the backbone of the city's identity. Unnoticed and unregarded routes and pathways through the city, much of the time un-peopled yet full of the evidence of people.

Back yards often seem less regarded than front gardens, more off-guard and by the time the alley is reached, it is dustbins and recycling boxes, left over bricks and spare siding - every now and then punctuated by a garden of beauty and pride, unrestrained nature or some peculiar product of whimsy.

The alleyways are the pathways through the city's identity. Still public, yet intimate. Domain of dog walkers, jogging soccer moms, garbage collectors, handymen repairing fences, fierce old ladies on solitary walks, afternoon gardeners and schoolboys dreaming and imagining adventures. Yet all encountered only infrequently - more often it is the traces, the evidence of these lives that is encountered.

"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand,
written in the corners of the street, the gratings of the windows,
the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning-rods, the poles of the flags.
Every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls"

Italo Calvino, Cities & Memory

The McMullen Art Gallery is located at the University of Alberta Hospital
(TRACES is in the After-Hours Gallery which is the exhibition space
which runs along the wall of the main corridor)

After-Hours Gallery (McMullen Art Gallery),
University of Alberta Hospital (next to the east entrance),
8440 – 112
Street,
Edmonton, AB

Winter 2010 - Anselm Kiefer

The last (?) of Anselm Kiefer's four seasons from the New York Times:

Anselm Kiefer, "Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich)" 2010 (Text on the work is translated as follows: "Wreck of Hope."), Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Happy Xmas (Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas etc etc...)

Bethlehem 1884

Gerry Badger, John Gossage and The Pond (update)

A quick update to the recent post on the re-publication of "The Pond" by John Gossage.

The book now appears to have reached the bookstore shelves and be widely available.

The other thing is that I found that Aperture has a three-part podcast (Part1, Part 2, Part 3) of a discussion between John Gossage and Gerry Badger (he of The Photobook: A History among other things).

It's part interview with Gossage, part interview with Badger about his new book The Pleasures of Good Photographs, and part general shooting the breeze session about photography in general.

(I'm currently reading The Pleasures of Good Photographs and plan to post about it in a little while).

Three Ghetto Photographers

An interesting post by Colin Pantall that references three different photographers in the Lodz Ghetto - Walter Genewein, Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross.

(Walter Genewein)

Genewein was a German accountant working for the Nazis and uniquely, in what remains, photographed in colour. Grossman and Ross were Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto

There is a Polish documentary about Genewein which is quite revealing and well worth watching (part1 below).

Ross's photography documented the life and reality of the ghetto and was part official in his work as a photographer for the Jewish department of statistics and part unofficial - he hid a whole day in a shed at the railway sidings to record Jews from the ghetto being loaded onto trains for deportation to the camps. Ross recovered his photographs after the war from where he had buried them in the Ghetto and later testified with his photographs at the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

(Henryk Ross)

Grossman secretly photographed in the Ghetto, continuing even when he was deported to the Konigs Wusterhausen camp but he did not survive the final forced death march as the Russians approached the camp.

(Mendel Grossman)

Photographs from all three men show life and death in the Lodz Ghetto from three different perspectives including that of the Nazis. (Ross's book Lodz Ghetto Album is widely available in libraries is especially compelling along with My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto about Grossman)

(Henryk Ross)

I am particularly intrigued by what and how Genewein's photographs show and how we may or may not regard them because of who he was - an accountant and one of the bland but essential cogs in the successful running of the ghetto as a business or industry. The pictures, while informative about the inhabitants of the ghetto, speak much more to the nature of Genewien and the Germans running the whole "project" of the Volkish expansion eastwards:

"Genewein was a skilled amateur, and his Movex 12 was confiscated from its Jewish owner. The scarce colour stock came from Agfa. Thus equipped, the accountant went into factories where hats or Wehrmacht uniforms were being made, and he stood beside the lines of Jewish children as they waited to be fed.

In much the same way as August Sander, the accountant was fascinated by the principles of visual taxonomy and social hierarchy. His subjects stand awkwardly at their workbenches, in groups or singly, glaring out of hollow eye-sockets. These anonymous Jewish workers are exhausted and helpless, and it is intolerable even to think of them being made to pose for the camera.

Genewein's self-portraits, taken in an office beside an adding machine, have the same stilted, literal quality. He is playing the role to which he believed his own status as artist entitles him. Like Hitler - who displayed a consuming interest in the precise way in which he was depicted photographically, not just at every rally, but in private, too - Genewein thinks that he represents the forces of civilisation.

And like Leni Riefenstahl's work, with the same absence of hypocrisy or misgivings, these photographs express the true nature of power. The Germans are engaged in the grand project of reclaiming Jews from their criminal, dissolute ways. The photographs are testimony to the Nazi belief in the ennobling value of labour.

Where Germans are present, as the numerous trainloads of Jews arrive, they stand slightly apart. They are the masters now, and it isn't relevant that what lies in store for their charges is not benign.There are Jewish middlemen to make the contact with the inferior race less onerous. When Himmler visits the ghetto, Genewein is at hand to record the tribute paid to him by the collaborationist Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the ghetto on behalf of the Germans. No imperial photographer would more accurately have captured the complex of emotions implied by the arrival of a proconsul in a remote outpost of Empire."... from Cold Gaze of a Nazi Camera

(Henryk Ross)

Consumed by Fire

"The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed."

From The Fire Sermon - The Waste Land
by T.S. Eliot

(© 2006 timothy atherton)

Anselm Kiefer's Opinions - The Seasons

Anselm Kiefer is one of my favourite contemporary artists. Jim Johnson (who runs one of my favourite blogs) posted these works by Kiefer that were published in the Opinion pages of the NY Times (what a great idea btw - kudos to the Times).

It's been a while since I felt the thrill of excitement upon seeing some pictures, but I did when I saw these.

Before Spring

"Snow melt in the Odenwald. Goodbye, winter, parting hurts but your departure makes my heart cheer. Gladly I forget thee, may you always be far away. Goodbye, winter, parting hurts."
(March 2010)

Summer

“Summer in Barjac — the renowned orders of the night.”
(June 2010)

Autumn

“Ygdrasil, Autumn in Auvergne.”
(September 2010)

(All works © Anselm Kiefer, courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery)

ELEPHANT - The Art and Visual Clutter Magazine

Or at least that's what I thought it said when my eyes scanned over it's cover in the magazines at Chapters.

But then again maybe we need a visual clutter magazine?

Panasonic Lumix GF1 - any good or a waste of money?

Is this camera any good? (I don't have the energy to keep up with which new digital camera is out this week)

Are there any better alternatives - of a similar size and flexibility?

Uses will be: aside from family snapshots, a certain amount of urban/suburban photography. It may replace - but not supplant - a certain amount of Rolleiflex photography. An available aperture of at least 2.0 would be helpful. Among other things...

All comments welcome.


UPDATE: Oh bugger. I hadn't seen the Sigma DP2/DP2s (I remember when the Foveon sensor was vaporware...). Anyone out there using this little beastie?


(jeesh - how many typos can I get in one short post)

John Gossage - The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler / Map of Babylon

(reposted due to html getting corrupted)

John Gossage's new book(s) The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler / Map of Babylon is notable for at least a couple of firsts. It's his first book produced and published in cooperation with Gerhard Steidl and it's also his first full body of work in colour.

First things first - publishing with Steidl. Over the last few years John Gossage has published a number of books through his own imprint Loostrife Editions. John is a real believer in the importance of the photo book, as well as a first rate book designer and Loostrife has produced some fantastic books. But I would also imagine that it's a heck of a job (as well as a money black hole?) running a small press - even if it gives a certain level of freedom and control as far as your own books go. So I would imagine that if a good working, creative relationship can be developed with someone like Gerhard Steidl then that is probably a good place to be.

But on to the book(s).

I keep saying book(s) because The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon is actually two books in one. If you start with The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler it finishes two thirds of the way through the book. At that point the pictures are upside down. So just flip the book over and start at the back (now the front) and you are in Map of Babylon. A nice added touch being that you can reverse the dust-cover and you get the cover for Map of Babylon if you prefer to view the book that way round. It all runs together nicely and the whole book works beautifully. There is plenty of the feel of John's precise and careful design, along with (and I've always tended tp liked the the design of most Steidl books) a bit of the Steidl/Göttingen touch as well. Design-wise this is a very nice, beautifully printed, book.

Photography-wise this is a bit more enigmatic than many of Gossage's books, although not quite as enigmatic as a select few (e.g Dance Card or Hey Fuckface!). So it takes a bit of context and some careful, extended, reading of the pictures as a whole to get a real sense of it. It takes time for the pictures to sink in - while at the same time still being able to get lost in any particular single photograph.

The context the publisher provides us with is this:

"John Gossage, the renowned American photographer and photography book-maker, presents two companion volumes and his first ever books in color. Engaged in a dance, neither book comes first, there is no hierarchy or sequence to the pair of volumes.

Gossage is one of the most literary of photographic book authors and in The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler, the narrative, whilst not autobiographical, is about a neighborhood in which he lives; one that is singular in the United States. At the same time provincial and international, it is a neighborhood populated by ambassadorial residences, embassies, and the lavish private homes of those who are in positions of power and influence in Washington. A project he began with the arrival of a new neighbor, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and made over a full year’s cycle of seasons, these are images from the drift of privilege. The streets, cars, homes and yards of this neighborhood are photographed on perfect spring or autumn days, with sparklingly clear blue skies, and flowers or foliage accenting the order. These are photographs about how one might wish the world to be, how beauty might be seen as desire. In the same year Gossage made the Map of Babylon, photographing digitally from Washington, to Germany, to China and places in-between. This look away, to places beyond the immediate and local, is a classic exploration of particulars of the outside world."

I must say I found the accumulation of the pictures in Thirty-Two Inch Ruler conveyed a sense of dread, of oppression after looking through them two or three times, even without having dug any deeper into the context beyond the short publishers comment. Which surprised me for a couple of reasons.

First, the pictures being in colour. During the 1980's and 1990's Gossage didn't seem to get sidetracked by the whole New Colour thing or massive painting sized photographs or such, but continued with his black and white work which continued to be a valid, contemporary and creative way of seeing, of investigation.

The way he has seen and shown us the Berlin of the Wall, or Maghera or the streets and neighbourhoods of several American cities has always seemed absolutely contemporary - yet rarely threatening. They may be a bit grim; they may be beautiful in ways that surprise us, in ways we normally rarely notice; but even the view Gossage gave of the Berlin Wall, while often dark, was very rarely as ominous as these delicately lit suburban views. Yet that's the sense that developed as I looked through these pictures. And that John should chose this particular subject for his first full body of work in colour seemed almost perverse. Surely it's so much easier to convey 'dread', 'oppressive', 'ominous' in black and white? But then, on reflection, I realised what better way to convey such things. What better way to convey what appears at first glance to be an ordinary upper middle class, civil service sort of neighbourhood than in the ordinary, everyday colours of a suburban summer or fall. An ordinary place with ordinary (if rather well appointed) homes yet which contains within it - more than partially veiled or partly hidden - aspects of a global conflict which reach far beyond the suburb or city and with consequences and ramifications still as yet unknown.

And as for John Gossage in colour - that's just what these pictures are - John Gossage in colour. It's as if he has just taken a step sideways and there he is in the dimension of colour. There are many of his usual touches - a way of seeing that is both unique and familiar - and yet he has also been able to use colour as colour - to let it break out of the dominance of line or form so that the colour itself is allowed to be. He seems very much at ease with being able to "colour outside the lines" as it were. In this way each individual picture can hold its own ground as well as being an integral part of the story being told.

But returning to the unease, after a few pages I also found that the pictures started to feel quite voyeuristic so intimate do they become. Then I read one reviewer who made perfect sense of it when he described Gossage as a spy, working undercover as it were, reporting back to us on this strange yet ordinary place. (Besides which, of course, almost all photography is voyeuristic to one degree or another - usually far more so than most photographers like to admit. Indeed one of the great attractions of photography is that it allows us to be voyeurs, peering over the photographer's shoulder, but from a nice safe distance - in time as well as space).

Rather more briefly on Map of Babylon. These seem a collection of related yet unrelated pictures - "Photographs with qualities, but no real explanation" - pictures taken as Gossage has travelled over the last while. They are fascinating in that they show his experimenting with colour as he goes and - I believe I'm correct - his first real experiments with a digital camera (did that old Texas Leica finally wear out and die I wonder??). It has the intriguing feel of a photographer's sketchbook or workbook.

Overall a very worthwhile book to get hold of (and I don't know large the print runs is in this case, but Gossage's books often go out of print pretty quickly).

There is also a good review and conversation here: The Devil in Kalorama: A Tour of John Gossage’s Neighborhood as Hell

(Oh - and as far as I can tell Babylon was photographed with print film not digital? But I may well be wrong on that.) Well, I was wrong. I just heard from John and all the photographs in the book were taken with a digital camera.

All Photographs - John Gossage

Summer (Autumn...) Book Sale

Regarding my Summer Book Sale, it turned out to be bit time consuming/convoluted trying to sell the books through the blog so I've started loading them up on Ebay.

All have comparatively low starting bids - so you might get a bargain... Anyway you can find them by linking through here.

Up now:

Luigi Ghirri - Paesaggio italiano/Italian landscape

Lee Friedlander - Factory Valleys

Sally Eauclaire - The New Color Photography and New Color/New Work

Stephen Shore - Fotografien 1973 bis 1993

Andrea Modica - Treadwell

Josef Sudek - Smutná krajina/Sad Landscape

A few more to come over the next few days.

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.