“Sandi Haber Fifield’s photographs float on the colors of memory, mood, feeling, and suggestion. They combine the indistinctness of memory with the imperfections of photography to produce elusive, incomplete reconstructions of times, events, and sentiments at the far reaches of perception.”—Vicki Goldberg

Last November I was invited to review portfolios at PhotoNola in New Orleans. It was exciting to get out of New York to view interesting photography. It was something I needed, and of course, It also provided a new avenue for discovering photography and stories to publish in the magazine.

By the second day, I’d seen an impressive series of projects and met some interesting photographers that I’m sure I’ll collaborate with in the future. It was inspiring to be around passionate people dedicated to their photography.

The constant conversations and exchanging of ideas kept my mind swirling. I was starting to get mentally exhausted by the time Sandi Haber Fifield sat down across from me. With her was the dummy for her latest book After the Threshold (Kehrer Verlag).

We chatted for a minute and then I sat silently as she flipped through the book. I was quickly transfixed, intently focussing on the photographs that were flickering before my eyes. The photographs were sequenced in a series of four, sometimes three per page. So each time she flipped it was like looking at a new puzzle, or short story. I watched attentively, studying the way the images played off against each other. It was a real photographic treat.

When she finished I didn’t have much to say. I mustered up a few words of admiration but beyond that I couldn’t find anything to say. The first rush of seeing a good photobook is a wonderful feeling. The work resonated with me so strongly that my mind began racing, flooded with questions and ideas.

“How has diaristic photography evolved in the internet age? Are more photographers digging into their archives to re-interpret their photography? How are photographers using sequencing and multiple photographs to communicate their ideas? Do we focus too much attention on single images?”

The flashes of inspiration were coming quickly. It made me want to get to work. It’s impossible to know when you’ll encounter something that will crystallize ideas floating around in your head and force you to ask new questions. That’s what happened when I encountered After the Threshold. It was the right series of photographs at the right time. Another reviewer might have shrugged them off, but for me, they opened a creative door.

Sandi and I chatted for a few more minutes, and then she and the photographs were gone.

—

In the months after encountering After the Threshold, I managed to finish editing my first book, Genesee Ave. It changed the way I think about photography. Editing and sequencing are how you unlock the potential from a series of photographs. It’s an aspect of photography that I knew was critically important, but it wasn’t until after I did it myself that I realized how challenging it was to do in an interesting way. You have to make so many small decisions to assure the whole is unified body of photographs.

Sandi’s book and sequencing were consistently on my mind. We exchanged emails and planned a feature for the magazine but I couldn’t figure out the right questions I wanted to ask her. I started to feel that reading her words might change that visceral feeling I had about the book. I wanted it to remain a mystery. I was imagining the book in my head and after seeing some of the spreads I knew it would be one of those books that I look at over and over again for a few months.

A few weeks before the scheduled publication date for Issue 6, Sandi mailed me a review copy of the book. It was thrilling to hold it in my hands and look at the completed version. It’s a beautifully made object.

And this time I was able to page through it at my own pace. I could put it down and return to it a day later. I could live with the photographs for a few weeks. It’s strange how your view of a book changes once you own it. The photographs you live with are the most important.

With each viewing I started to learn more hints about the version of Sandi’s life she wants to show us through her photography. The version I view is serene, calm and meditative. We jump through her travels and daily life. The seasons change, sometimes in the same sequence of photographs. We catch glimpses of the people in her life but we’re never certain about the relationship. They are visually in harmony with the rest of her subject matter.

I laugh when she comes across the odd street scene. It’s not a big deal. It’s something that happens when you have a camera with you. A single photograph is never allowed to stand out. They all have their proper place as equals. Each turn of the book introduces a new story or memory. You want to stop and take a closer look but when you try the moment is gone.

Luck, 2012

White Sun, 2011

Sunday Morning, 2012

Montauk Blue, 2011

Improbable Night, 2012

Pained Smile, 2012

Hannah, 2012

Dreaming in Blue, 2012

“My work is born of collisions and alignments. I gather images from experiences exceptional and mundane, intentional and spontaneous. A visit to the Louvre might find its place alongside a glance through my kitchen window. I work from an inventory of images created and collected over time and am always looking for the small parts that make the whole. Through the process of combining disparate moments of vision, formal connections reveal themselves and suggest the reassuring possibility of meaning and order in the apparent randomness of experience.”

On the social web, the stream has become the default analogy for the way we view new information. Those of us that spend too much time on Tumblr have grown accustom to the seemingly random photographs that scroll through our dashboards.

Something I’ve been paying closer attention to is the diaristic way many photographers are using Tumblr. It can be fascinating to watch them work out their visual ideas in their stream over a series of months. It’s like breaking down a crucial aspect of their editing process. It might be good enough for the stream, but is it good enough for the portfolio or for the book?

It’s a critical editing question. What photographs do you choose to show, and where?

From one perspective, I view ‘After The Threshold’ as a stream. The subject matter of the photographs jumps around but the sequencing always demands that we view a series of photographs together. Meaning is created through this precision sequencing.

On the web, sequencing often doesn’t matter. It’s the bites, and the killer photographs, that gain traction, but this really isn’t a very interesting way to view photography, and I think most reasonable people in photoland understand this by now.

But there is something intriguing about the concept of the stream, and I think ‘After the Threshold’ is a good example of a photographer that either consciously, or unconsciously is engaging the way we consume photograph on the web.

After viewing the book several times now, I’m left wondering about the pace at which I page through it. I’ve been browsing through like I’d view a Tumblr. It’s a brisk pace. But the process of turning the pages slows me down enough to linger on the photographs. It’s almost perfect.

I pause long enough to reflect but not long enough to get bogged down. I’m still not sure why it resonates with me so strongly. When I think I have the right words, I turn the page and they suddenly slip my mind. I’m lost in the photography, and that’s a great feeling.

After the Threshold.

Photographs by Sandi Haber Fifield.

Text by Vicki Goldberg.

Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2013.

80 pp., 100 color illustrations, 11¾x9½”.

Will be released on April 16th

Book signing at AIPAD Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue & 66th St Saturday, April 6th, 11:30-1:00

RWFA Booth #117

Exhibition opens at Rick Wester Fine Art

New Address: 526 West 26th St., Suite 417

May 2nd – June 15th

Opening reception: Thurs, May 2nd 6-8

 ©Sandi Haber Fifield and are courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art.

“Photographer and bookseller Melissa Catanese has been editing the vast photography collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular and found anonymous photographs from the early to mid-twentieth century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and Ebay, these prints have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications. In organizing the archive into a series of thematic catalogues, she has pursued an alternate reading of the collection, drifting away from simple typology into something more personal, intuitive and openly poetic. Her magical new artist’s book, Dive Dark Dream Slow, is rooted in the mystery and delight of the “found” image and the “snapshot” aesthetic, but pushes beyond the nostalgic surface of these pictures and reimagines them as luminous transmissions of anxious sensuality. Through a series of abandoned visual clues, from the sepia-infused shadow of a little girl running along a beach to silhouettes of a group of distant figures pausing upon a steep and snowy hill, a dreamlike journey is evoked. Like an album of pop songs about a girl (or a civilization) hovering on the verge of transformation, the book cycles through overlapping themes and counter-themes–moon and ocean; violence and tenderness; innocence and experience; masks and nakedness–that sparkle with deep psychic longing and apocalyptic comedy.” – Dive Dark Dream Slow - The Ice Plant, October 2012

Melissa Catanese lives in Pittsburgh and is the founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run photobook gallery opened in October 2011.  

Interview by Bryan Formhals

When did you first become interested in vernacular photography and working with archives? One of the first photography books I bought was Evidence, and it’s still one of my favorites. Was that one of the books you used as inspiration? Were there others?

My interest in vernacular photography began to really grow when I started working with Peter Cohen’s collection and until then, I didn’t have much interest in it, and certainly not within my own photographic pursuits. Although Evidence was definitely an early influence, I was drawn more to what happened when those images were removed from their original contexts. What really inspired me about this work was the simple pleasure of getting lost in those elusive images and the mysterious associations that arose from the edit and sequence. This experience has certainly shaped the way I began to put together my own photographs. As far as other books go, I’m always hunting for new books that inspire me, but the book that stands out the most during this time was The Mushroom Collector by Jason Fulford. I found the process of trying to ‘decode’ this work really engaging. In general, Fulford’s books are so playful and clever. I also revisited Floh by Tacita Dean. I think I was trying to figure out what I was doing and how it was different.

How difficult was it to find a ‘narrative’ and I use ‘narrative’ very loosely there. For me, the challenge with this type of work or working any large body of work is that there a literally endless different avenues you can pursue in an edit. Did you ever think you were creating a sequence that too obscure and abstract? Or did you find yourself gravitating MORE toward that direction?

I do gravitate to elliptical and abstract ‘narratives’, looking for pictures that are somehow incomplete and mysterious. It usually begins on a subconscious level and I try to let the pictures guide me. I’ll have a really simple visual idea, mood or atmosphere in mind and that’s the foundation for the ‘narrative’. If I didn’t use these abstract elements as a base, then there’s no doubt the sequence would have turned out much differently. An important part of the process is defining the tone and then playing around with the patterns that emerge. A lot of trial and error takes place and a lot of time is spent looking and moving pictures around – searching for the chord that you’re hoping to hit.

It’s strange how at times it seems as if the photographs are sequencing themselves. I’m curious about how you put an edit together. Do you just start with a pile of photographs and then start putting the puzzle together? Do you start the beginning? Or the end?

There are usually two or three photographs that I’ve been looking at for a while. Sometimes they are orphans from an earlier edit that I keep going back to. Thinking on those key photos is what helps determine the foundation. I’m usually guided by a few simple visual cues, like a color or a pattern, or something that I find beautiful in the content. Once a basic edit is compiled, usually in a stack of photographs, I’ll start the sequence. I work in small edits of three to five photographs. Threading those groups together, I sequence forward from the beginning and backward from the end and sometimes I start in the middle, working outward. But it’s always in a line. I’ll leave spaces where I feel there’s a natural break. I like to flip the ‘beginning’ with the ‘end’ once I’m close to completion. When I feel good about the sequence I’ve started, I start working in InDesign and depending on where I am in the edit, I’ll either import the images as a line on one long page or I’ll begin a book with many pages.

How does working with other people’s photographs as an editor impact the way you make photographs?

I think about this in reverse actually. My interest in making photographs and editing from my own archive has always been the driving force. When I edited Dive Dark Dream Slow, it was really important that the mood felt like an extension of work from my photographs and initially, when I started the project, I intended to include some of them as well. They’re inherently different ‘genres’ I guess, but I wanted to experiment with the possibilities. If I considered my snapshots as raw material that I would later build something from, then what happens if I try to do the same thing from this massive vernacular archive? I was told once that the hardest part of editing is the ability to remove your ‘self’ from the pictures, to create enough emotional distance from the work where you could see objectively. I think about this a lot when I’m looking at pictures and editing. But I’m not entirely sure if its ever really possible, no matter who the author is, and I’m not sure I would ever really want to do that anyway.

That’s very interesting about trying to remove yourself from the pictures. The dogma is that photographers are the worst editors of their work, but I question that to some degree. I’m probably wrong! I think with some or maybe most fine art photography, the edit is the vision, if that makes any sense. I don’t think I really started to evolve as a photographer until I really started to get my hands dirty in the editing process. It’s very difficult because you have no other option but to make choices: Yes, this photograph! Yes, these ten photographs! Once you start doing that, you begin to understand more clearly what you’re doing which I think helps you immensely when you’re out making photographs.

It does make sense to me that the edit is the ‘vision’ and I would completely agree. It’s become so easy to make pictures and accumulate huge archives that it’s interesting to see how others organize and edit their work. I think because it’s so common for people to have this challenge of figuring out how to manage hundreds of photos at once, they’re beginning to really appreciate the invisible art of editing now more than ever. There’s also a lot more dialogue about these concerns – in many online magazines like LPV and with publications out like Aperture’s The Photobook Review.

I do think it’s an interesting time to talk about editing. I know it can probably seem hermetic to outsiders but I’ve found most photographers get excited when they can talk about it because editing opens up creative doors. With the ease of self-publishing it feels like we’re living through a period of great experimentation. Of course, only time will tell if that’s true or not. It could also be a great period of homogenization. The way the internet brings people together often means we’re all looking at very similar work. Do you look at much photography on the web? How do you balance your consumption between online and offline? What are some of the aspects of the web that you find problematic for photography?

I spend a lot of time on social media, like Tumblr and Facebook, and I enjoy it, but it’s often hard to break out of the voyeurism of it all and actually participate in the dialogue. Everything online moves really fast and adapting to this constant recycling of images and ideas takes visual dexterity and can be exhausting. It doesn’t feel totally natural or fluid yet. This is why it’s nice to take refuge in a book.

You founded Spaces Corners in Pittsburgh, which you call “an artist-run photobook gallery and project space.” I’m also interested in how people describe their activities these days because most of us are engaged with the medium on multiple levels. It’s hard these days to narrowly define people. What made you want to open up Spaces Corners? How has the reception been in Pittsburgh?

We love our city, but there’s nothing like Spaces Corners here. We saw this as an opportunity to fill a void, cultivate local curiosity, and maintain some international resonance. We wanted our experience as artists to reflect our approach to curating the shop, but we also wanted to be able to integrate our own work. We’re constantly evolving and redefining ourselves which I think is an important part of the learning process. Right now, we’re in the early stages of beginning a small publishing program. Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes by Ed Panar was printed here in Pittsburgh in January and is our first experiment with this. We have a pretty small local audience and a growing online community, but all-in-all support has been overwhelming and a source of great energy for us.

Dive Dark Dream Slow

88 pages, hardcover, 7.5′ x 9.25′
57 photographs
The Ice Plant, October 2012

Photographs ©Melissa Catanese.

“Live Through This” tells the story of drug addict Stephanie MacDonald’s struggle to get clean. Typically a topic for documentary photographers pursuing reportage through candid shots, This project instead relies mostly on collaborative portraits, in which Tony Fouhse enlists MacDonald to sometimes mimic the conventions of documentary and anthropological photography. The images of MacDonald, like the world she inhabits, are both banal and extraordinary, conveying psychological, and sometimes physiological, states with an affecting economy of detail. The inclusion of medical documents and text by MacDonald, both written on scraps of paper and from later emails, provides the viewer with a broken and incomplete narrative that nonetheless directs our comprehension of Fouhse’s disturbing but sympathetic photographs. – STRAYLIGHT Press

Live Through This
Softcover, 9×9 inches, 72 pages,
Published by STRAYLIGHT Press

tonyfoto.com

Left: Steph injecting heroin, November 2, 2010; Right: Steph in her room, November 19, 2010

I discovered your work through Pete Brook of Prions Photography. I believe it was tweet about drool. Naturally I dug in and learned about Stephanie and your project. I was skeptical at first. I’m a tad cynical when it comes drug addiction stories, but I hooked you up on my RSS and started following along. After a few weeks, I began to look forward to your Sunday posts. And soon after that, I started to get hooked on Stefanie’s story. Your passion and transparency drew me into the story and the work. I’m sure many people have had a similar experience.

I suppose I’m getting to a question about your blog. How important a role did it play in telling the story? Why did you choose to share the story and project in progress, rather than waiting until it was done? Is this an approach you see yourself repeating in the future?

Yes, well I thought long and hard about blogging about our “project” (in quotation marks because it’s not really the right word, but I don’t know what else to call it).

First, you’d have to know Stephanie. Obviously I would never blog about what went on between us without her consent. And one of the things that initially attracted me to her was her unwavering honesty. And not only honesty, but her transparency and her courage, not to mention her fatalism (which seems to me to be a common trait of most of the addicts I know, fatalism).

We had many, many talks about whether what we were doing should be made public in a serialized way. I was much more worried about it that she was. I didn’t want to turn what we were doing into a reality show and I didn’t want to jeopardize her safety in any way, either on the street amongst her peers or with the police (who, after a while, were following the blog).

It seemed to me that what was going on here was a perfect use of “new” media, if you want to call blogging a new media. Here was this story that progressed, took twists and turns, was visually appealing and very close to one of the subtexts of my work (the morals and ethics of working with certain subject matter).

I thought that by blogging about it, and by me being as honest about what I was feeling and going through as Steph was, it could shine a light on the processes we, Steph and I, were involved in.

Regarding whether I’d do something like this again. . . .certainly. Given the right circumstances.

One thing the weekly blogging did for LIVE THROUGH THIS was it made the final edit of the book extremely difficult. I came to realize that blogging once a week about something, as it is unfolding, is very different from assembling an edit and sequence for a book. The blog contains all sorts of side stories, banalities that seemed important at the time, videos, navel gazing and so on. Plus it’s really, really long.These are things that serialization can support and is actually good at. I wanted the book, on the other hand, to tell the story mostly through portraiture, with a much greater economy of detail.

I see the blog and the book as related, but completely different. And I believe that that’s fine. They are, after all, different media.

Basement, December 17, 2010

That’s interesting that the police started following along, but also terrifying.

I think one of the big mistakes that people have made in the social media age is that they try to create the same experience online as they would in a book. For me, it just simply doesn’t work that way. When I view a project on a website I can handle about 25 photographs and that’s about it. I tend to view books quickly but will come back to them frequently, sometimes just opening them up randomly.

I think the edit in the book is brilliant. There’s no artifice to it. It’s lean, direct and gets the viewer from point A to point B smoothly. There’s no bullshit. It’s impossible not to have compassion for Stephanie as you turn the pages. But the real beauty for me is that there’s no pity. She doesn’t seem to pity herself and you certainly don’t pity her. It’s almost darwinian in a weird way. She’s struggling for her life and you’re there to help her. Nothing more really.

Your relationship has to be very complicated. The impression I come away with is that you’ve created a life time bond. There’s no turning back. 

I certainly leaned a lot about social media’s strengths by blogging this thing. Problem is. . . .how often does such a compelling narrative, ongoing and evolving, present itself? This project was very different from, say, going to Ohio, meeting various people, photographing them and telling their stories and posting as you go along. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But in a case like that there is rarely any actual progression to the “story”, so the serialization of the trip on social media seems somehow less necessary.

Thanks for your kind words about the edit of the book. What you said was just about my aim with that. These days there’s a trend in photobooks to tell the story in a very elliptical way, using allusion more that actual description. I believe that there is a trace of this approach in LIVE THROUGH THIS. . . almost all context has been stripped away, most of the fotos are of Steph standing against more or less plain backgrounds. But there is no denying that even these simple portraits, given the loaded subject matter and Steph’s openness, are quite descriptive. And the story is fleshed out by the shots of her notes and medical documents and the inclusion of Steph’s words. The idea was to be straightforward but not too “documentary”. The story is told, mostly, through Steph’s body.

Interesting, too, what you say about me not having pity for Steph. I didn’t. That’s not to say that I didn’t have compassion and understanding. But in my mind Steph and I are more alike than we are different, so where can pity enter? And, yes, our relationship was (and remains) intense and complicated, not to mention maddening.

Steph in my studio, March 11, 2011

“The story is told, mostly, through Steph’s body.”

And that body is very hard to look at. It’s hard not be judgmental. Or worse, simply gawk at the horror. I wonder how aware she was of her physical plight. Or did the addiction basically make her blind to what was going on?

What’s interesting as well is that hope is symbolized in the way her body began to heal itself. For me, this makes the book something very visceral. You feel it in your gut. There isn’t much space for intellectual meandering.

I was talking to Steph the other day, she told me she had just been to the hospital for some stomach flu thing and proceeded to fill me in, in great detail, about just what came out of her body then. We laughed because one of the things about her was that, when she was a junkie, she was always squeezing some weird shit or effluvium out of her body. Drugs, man.

And this is one of the things Steph wrote about her body:

And at first i was thinking it was cool until i seen the photos and seen how grosse i looked and just thought that if people that started this drug could see theese photos maybe could change their minds a bit…

We both knew that if she got in to and completed rehab her body would change and we made a point, from time to time, of just taking pretty plain shots of her body, as a record, more than anything.

But when you are a junkie it’s very hard to separate what your body looks like from the general vibe and look and feel and juju of the stress of your life. It didn’t take much to show that because, like I say, Steph was willing to be open and honest and she can’t help but be transparent.

But you’re right when you say that the addiction really changes an addicts perspective about body image and stuff like that.

Steph’s walking around weight when she was an addict was about 105 pounds, when they operated on her she weighed 88 pounds and 4 months later, when I went to visit her in Nova Scotia she weighed (a correct) 125 pounds.

I’m astounded by how quickly her body (and her face) changed during those 3 weeks she stayed at my house and kicked heroin.

Emergency waiting room, March 22, 2011

I’m curious. Now that she’s kicked heroin, how does she view herself? I’m guessing that her identity for the last few years has been associated with her addiction. There probably wasn’t much room in her life for anything else. What are her dreams? Hopes for the future? Has this project turned her into an advocate?

It’s difficult to tell from here, a thousand miles away, how she sees herself. She’s been moving around some, no fixed address, and has relapsed a few times. But she sounds good and strong on the phone and as wild and energetic as ever.

Drugs, and the ritual surrounding them, are so powerful because they work. I’ve always thought that there was a beauty and purity to addiction. Sure, there’s a huge down-side, too, but. . . .

She’s living in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and when Canadian news wants to do a piece on hard drugs they often go there to do it, seeing as the place is rife with them, drugs. There is also a large unemployment problem there making it difficult to see a prosperous and meaningful future. (I don’t want to paint that whole county in that way, but the fact remains. . . .)

I’d say her dreams are to get over her addiction, finish high school and become a contributing member of society. But the one thing that this project drove home to me was that the future is unwritten, every day seems much like the one before. Sure, we all evolve, but so slowly we can’t detect the changes. Then, every so often, WHAM!!!, something seismic happens.

Left: Writing diary in my studio, March 30, 2011; Right: Site of the operation, March 22, 2011

You decided to publish the book independently, and in fact, launched your own imprint, STRAYLIGHT press. Why did you decided to go that route and what type of plans do you have for it?

I knew I wanted to do a book of LIVE THROUGH THIS (as well as one of USER), so I started doing some research about the foto-book-publishing thing.

Much to my surprise I discovered that most foto-book publishers place onerous weight on the photographer, asking them to contribute to, or pay the full amount of, printing the book. For this money the photographer gets a book, some unknown amount of publicity and distribution and an ego rub.

I’m not sure how the photographer get’s their money back, what that end of the deal might be, because I never got past the idea that most publishers were asking the photographer to take all the risk.

So I began to think about other ways and means. The most obvious one would be a KickStarter-type of thing, raise money by offering the book and other bits and pieces to folks who wanted to kick in to the endeavor. In fact, I used this approach to finance my trip to Nova Scotia to complete LIVE THROUGH THIS.

But that approach seemed kind of selfish and like a one-off. So I began to look at entities like Rob Hornstra’s The Sochi Project and Soth’s Little Brown Mushroom and decided that in this day and age those approaches made a lot of sense. Do it yourself, use the internet, cut out the middleman.

From there it was a short leap to decide that, if I was going to design, start and maintain an online e-commerce site I should ask other photographers whose work I like and fits in with my (or STRAYLIGHT’s) political and aesthetic philosophy if they would like to do a project that we could offer for sale. Not only to support them, but also to help to create a community so more people might be drawn to the site.

STRAYLIGHT launched in June of 2012 and we’re still finding our way, making it up as we go along and learning from our (many) mistakes. It’s a lot like photography, if you ask me. We started with 4 or 5 ‘zines, a couple of mine, one by Shannon Delmonico and one by Josh Hotz. These are limited run zines that cost 8 bucks but also come in Special Editions that include an original, signed print and are a bit more expensive. STRAYLIGHT believes it’s better to sell 50 things for $10 each than one, similar, thing for $500, so we try to keep the prices as reasonable as possible.

We have slightly more ambitious plans for the future, including a book by Adam Luis Amengual, of his work HOMIES, which should be available late February. We’re also doing a book with Scot Sothern, who’s book LowLife lit up the internet a year or so ago. With Scot we’re doing a thing titled SadCity, which, like LowLife, will contain photographs and stories. These will both be limited to an editions with the first 10 will be Special Editions that will come with a print.

It’s a hard row to how, this book publishing biz but so far things are working out. All the ‘zines, with the exception of The Units, by Josh Hotz, are sold out and LIVE THROUGH THIS seems to be on the way to breaking even and turning a profit. Any profits we might realize will be spent on producing more books.

From my (publishing) end I can’t stress enough how important it is to have support in terms of people buying product, supporting independent publishers and voices. It makes me giggle every time I sell something and the other photographers who’s books and ‘zines we distribute are tickled, too. We’ve sold STRAYLIGHT publications around the world and there’s something warming about knowing that there’s a bookshelf in someone’s apartment in Barcelona and NYC and Vancouver and Berlin and Tokyo and so on that holds the fruits of your labour.

I must say, too, that one of the other things about actually printing your photos and making books of projects is that that process brings everything into sharper focus, forces the creator to make more difficult decisions vis-a-vis whatever it is they want to say. It makes the “problem” more difficult but I’ve never been a fan of easy. Shooting stuff, or writing stuff, and throwing it up onto the web has its place, but to really get to the meat of the matter there needs to be more commitment, and that’s what publishing is: commitment.

Site of the operation, 3 months later, New Glasgow, June 22, 2011

It’s been encouraging to see the number of small imprints that are popping up. I think we’re starting to build an infrastructure that will make it easier to market and distribute indie books and zines. Naturally, it’s something I firmly believe in. When I started publishing a print issue my perspective completely changed. Doing stuff purely on the web has become too disposable. To take it to the next level I think you have to be creating objects. A thriving independent publishing scene can only be good for photography in my estimation. Although, it does perhaps make it difficult to easily elevate certain photographers and bodies of work. But I’m ok with that. I think there’s enough good stuff out there that can attract a decent audience to keep us all busy.

I suppose my last question would be to ask what you have in store for the next couple of years. What’s your next project? What excites you about photography in 2013? What do you wish would change?

In terms of my next project, well, I’m already into it. It’s called OTTAWA, a survey, and is, I think, a reaction to all the pain and hyper-drama the my last 2 projects entailed. I’m trying to shoot my hometown, Ottawa, the capital of Canada, in a way that re-contextualizes it. I plan on pecking away at this for 3 or 4 years. The first bit is done, under the sub-head of OFFICIAL OTTAWA, which looks at the Capital City aspects of the place, the clichés shot from a different angle. For instance, I took a shot of press photographers, not in action, but waiting for something to happen. I also shot the Prime Minister’s bulletproof limo in the middle of nowhere with 2 secret service agents standing around, and so on. . . .

All shot very quietly with a 4×5 camera, it’s more an intellectual pursuit that an experiential one, just a matter of coming up with an alternate take on a cliché and quietly pointing a camera at it. So there’s definitely a drama-deficit in my life.

I like to work on a few things at once but really, really needed some time to recover from all the drug stuff I was immersed in. So now I’m looking around for some subject that will provide me with the experience I crave. But I don’t want to force it so I’ll do what I always do in these situations, I’ll put myself about, turn over stones to see what kind of bugs crawl out and wait until one of them grabs me by the throat.

Steph in her room, New Glasgow, June 23, 2011

Review by Blake Andrews

Since the inclusion of his book Kodachrome in Parr/Badger Vol. 1 (Phaidon: 2004), Luigi Ghirri’s photography has achieved a posthumous revival. Aperture’s 2008 retrospective It’s Beautiful Here Isn’t It… offered a glimpse of his talent, inspiring comparisons to the 1970s color snapshots of Eggleston (who wrote the preface) and Shore. The photos were wonderful. The book was great. But all were edited and reconsidered from a contemporary perspective.

Kodachrome’s 2012 republication offers a new twist: photobook as time capsule. These are the photos selected by Ghirri during his lifetime, in the sequence he wanted, published (Punto e Virgola: 1978) in the book form he envisioned. The new edition has some slight alterations to the original. A few words and dates have been added to clarify the different publishing situation. An explanatory text (Titled –I’m not kidding– “The Inner World of The Outer World of The Inner World”) has been added. But Mack has kept Kodachrome intact by adding this an a supplementary pamphlet. Fealty to the original seems to have been the main concern here. In fact MACK’s reprint is a virtually perfect replica.

Perfect replicas are not the norm in the book world. Typically when a photobook is reprinted, things change the second time around. Time has passed. Ideas have been reconsidered. Maybe new photos are added or subtracted, or a new foreword is commissioned. In some cases, for example with the publisher Errata, the entire book is spread on the examining table for dissection. Such a reprint is a replica of sorts, but of course it’s not. It’s a book about a book, not the book itself.

©Luigi Ghirri, courtesy MACK / www.mackbooks.co.uk

But MACK’s Kodachrome is a replica, and the form seems to be a play on its content. Ghirri was interested in many visual subjects, but mostly with Simulacra. I suppose all photographers wrestle with the tension between real and represented, but with Ghirri it bordered on obsession. Over and over in the book he shows pictures of mirrors, paintings, trompe l’ oeils, fake sets, postcards, and the constructed world. These subjects are combined with “real” objects by Ghirri, translated into photographs, and thus achieve even further removal from reality. OK, this is what photos do. We know that. But with Ghirri that realization is the subject itself. At the end of the process, along comes Mack treating the entire book as hyperreal simulation.

If it sounds like I’ve been reading too much Baudrillard, you’re close. Instead I’ve had my face buried in writing that’s even more impenetrable: Kodachrome’s explanatory texts. There are three included, the original introduction and foreword, by Piero Berengo Gardin and Ghirri, respectively. And the supplementary text, written in 2012 by Fracesco Zanot. Normally I would look to such writing to shed some light on the images. But alas, I have poured over each one several times and I’m still not sure they say. Here is a sampling (courtesy of the worst offender, Gardin):

“The cancellation is: presence of doubt, personal conscience examinations, existence-choice, strategy of knowledge. The picture-card of the suburbs with its landscape in cardboard, becomes as a Model of behavior so far from the <> and from the neurosis of the group…It is the explicit, explained ego that perceiving the traps of the removed elements in the presence of the Collective, beats himself for the survival.”

In Gardin’s defense he’s an architect not a photographer. In fact it’s unclear if he knows anything about photography. But I don’t think Ghirri or Zanot can use the same excuse. They work in the field, yet their essays are equally dense. Part of the problem may be that we’re reading a poor translation into English. Perhaps the texts are more legible in their original Italian. Or if not, French or German, which the book also helpfully includes, perhaps knowing that the English wouldn’t hold up. In any case I haven’t seen too many photobooks with internal translations into four languages, and I can’t help thinking that the whole thing is another playful twist by Mack, toying with the tension between real and represented. What could be more a fundamental Simulacrum than a translation, at once reflecting an exact copy and yet something completely different? As an ironic twist, the original publisher Punto e Virgola is long gone, but its name now heads a small translation company in Italy.

©Luigi Ghirri, courtesy MACK / www.mackbooks.co.uk

Ghirri was born in 1943. He died in 1992. His life and photographic oeuvre circumscribed almost exactly the rise and fall of the snapshot aesthetic in photography, and Kodachrome narrows the range even further, covering a period from 1971 to 1978. . He was basically a flaneur with basic tools –F1 and Kodachrome– shooting in a wide range of locations and whatever caught his eye. Although he did not focus on projects while shooting, for Kodachrome Ghirri sequenced his photographs roughly into categories. First sky, then beach, then mirrors, artificial landscapes, screened forms, domestic life. But it’s the final third of the book which seems to bring his vision to life, with pictures of photographs, cards, cutouts, paintings, and visual trickery –sometimes four to a spread– before morphing into a small flurry of pure formal abstractions.

There’s no telling for sure, but I suspect this final third –the consummation of Kodachrome– represents the work which most excited Ghirri. One of the final images (Calvi, 1976) shows a rack of postcards, each one depicting a sunset. It’s a play on many things, the photo within a photo, preconceptions of picturesque, and questions of image size, informality, and the art market. It’s now thirty-five years later and those issues remain unsettled, but the postcard photo now seems remarkably prescient. To me it’s the perfect median connecting Walker Evans’s and Penelope Umbrico. What is worth photographing? What do people like to photograph? How can a photo best express those questions? Evans, Ghirri, and Umbrico all took a stab at it, along with many others. Ghirri’s photo depicts the center postcard –the median, if you will– missing.

Ghirri tried to pack a lot into Kodachrome. This was the only monograph published in his lifetime, and he may have felt some pressure to cover every base. Perhaps too many bases. Ordering subjects X, Y, Z into chapters is not the way most photobooks are now edited. It’s the sequencing more typical of a retrospective than a contemporary monograph. Most monographs are far more calculating. Book-as-art-vehicle is now part of the photographic equation, often from before the point of exposure.

In contrast, Kodachrome has a raw and innocent feeling. Even quaint. Remember, it’s a time capsule. Just as every photograph ever made is a time capsule.

Kodachrome by Luigi Ghirri
104 pages
92 colour plates
20.2 cm x 27 cm
Paperback with booklet insert
MACK

©Luigi Ghirri, courtesy MACK / www.mackbooks.co.uk

I’ve owned Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude since March of last year. After I first browsed through the book I was going to write this article. There was a problem though. I had no idea what I wanted to say. I didn’t know if I liked the book or hated it. I couldn’t articulate how I felt about it. This wasn’t indifference. No, this was something else. This was one of those rare encounters with a body of work that forced me to ruminate on it for a much longer period of time.

I often get annoyed when people preach that you need to take your time to appreciate a body of work. That’s bullshit dogma. I can browse through a book in 2 minutes and know whether I like the photos or not. That’s one of the beauties of photography in my estimation! It’s not like reading a novel or watching a film. The time it takes to consume a photobook is completely subjective. Some may like to take an hour, some may take 5 minutes.

So I put the book down and didn’t open it again for a few months. In that time I had a few brief conversations with people about it. I read some reviews. I saw images pop up on Tumblr. It was consistently re-appearing on my radar in one form or another.

When I sat down to review the book again I was determined to come to a conclusion about the book. It was time to formulate an opinion. I slowly paged through the book. Taking my time, soaking in the images and the narrative. I knew what was going on. There’s a trapper. He lives a solitary life in the woods. It’s a quiet existence. Nothing much happens. He’s a zen trapper. Who is he? I don’t know. We can never get a good glimpse, and when we do, it’s almost by accident, as if it shouldn’t happened. We aren’t meant to really know this man.

As I started to get to the end, the dread started to creep in. No modern existence could be this harmonious. No, something awful has to happen. And then that photograph appears. We see the construction workers. They’re working on a lodge. One horrifying image. So mundane, and yet so powerful in the right context. Progress can not be escaped. Civilization will find you in one way or another.

Now I was pissed.

“SCREW YOU RON JUDE! You’re messing with my mind and I don’t like it.”

I determined I didn’t like the book. “What a bunch of garbage,” I thought. “I’m not falling for this crap!”

I was doomed though and I knew it. Whenever I have that strong of a reaction toward a body of work I know I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. It’ll be with me until I understand why I’m so agitated. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that when I get frustrated with a work of art, especially photography, it’s because intellectually I know I’m not getting it. It’s the type of mental roadblock you can’t get pass no matter what. I don’t think all works of art need to work this way though.

Most of the time when I look at a book or series of photographs I’ll get what’s going on right away. When it’s good, or very good, I simply allow the artist to take me on the ride. I trust them. I might have some questions, but I know they’re not trying to dupe me.

Was Ron Jude trying to dupe me? I thought so, but I wasn’t about to give up. The book was gnawing at my mind. What the hell was I missing? So I did what I always do when I can’t solve a problem. I tried to forget about it. I went outside to make photographs. I worked. I worked some more. I allowed the book to sit there in plain sight as I fucked around on Tumblr. At times I contemplated picking it up again, but I would always catch myself. “Nope, not yet. You’re not ready.”

Lick Creek Line sat there for a few months. I was about to give up on it. I just didn’t have the energy.

This year Joerg Colberg wrote an article about how to make a photobook. One particular passage stuck with me throughout the year (bold/italics mine.)

My personal approach is the following: When you look at your photographs – what experience do you want people to have when being exposed to them? This aspect is where it usually gets a little iffy talking about details, since there is such a large variety of photography. But ask yourself, if your book already existed – regardless of what it might look like – what is it that you’d want people to take away from it? What is the experience?

I thought about this all year, especially as I was editing and laying out my own book. It was something I thought about in relation to Lick Creek Line too. Then Joerg, followed up that article with a series on ‘How to tell a story with pictures.’ For experienced photographers and book makers much of this might be common sense. For me though, it hit home. The series articulated much of what I’ve always thought about photobooks.

I’m an internet junkie and enjoy looking at photographs online but there certainly is a dark side to doing that habitually. The internet is generally about stripped down edits and photographs that grab you right away. Most photographers limit an edit of a series to about 10-25 on their website. A book might contain anywhere from 40-60 photographs. So what exactly are we viewing online? I’ve touched on this in the past (sorry, don’t know the exact article!) and have said that edits on the web are often the equivalent of a movie trailer. Not a perfect analogy, but it’s in the right ballpark. Naturally many photographs work as singles and can be enjoyed that way. Context is crucial, right?

After reading these articles my mental block over LCL began to loosen. I was ready to look at it again, hoping to experience the book in a different way. The opening sequence knocked me over this time. The trapper walking away, followed by the four images of turbulent water. Then we get into the book. Beautiful.

I focussed less on individual photographs, allowing the sequencing and my pacing to carry me through the book. It started to feel less like a book of photographs and more like a piece of cinema. Malick, Altman, Jarmusch, Gordon Green, The Coen Brothers, oh yes, some of my favorites. I started to dread that one photograph I knew would eventually arrive. When it did, I quickly finished the book. What just happened?

It was a new experience. I allowed it to remain enigmatic and just out of reach from full comprehension. Photography fucks with you that way. You might experience photographs in a completely different way in December than you did in March.

One of the first thoughts I started to have was that it was basically impossible to represent this book on the web in anyway. You have to experience the book. There are certainly some single photographs that are very beautiful and would get OMG reblogged like a hundred times, but that has nothing to do with what I believe Jude is communicating through the book.

After browsing through the book several more times I started to feel differently about my own work and the book I was editing.

“To hell with focussing on a handful the killer images!,” I thought. I started to tell myself, think about the book, not just the individual photographs.

More than any other book I’ve looked at this year, Lick Creek Line and Ron Jude have kicked around my mental furniture. It’s in disarray and now I’m finally starting to figure out where I want all the pieces to settle. This doesn’t always happen with art and you never really known when it will occur. You just need to be ready and willing to allow it to happen.

Lick Creek Line, photographs by Ron Jude, essay by Nicholas Muellner, 112 pages, MACK, 2012

EDITIONS FP&CF has released a book of Don Hudson’s photographs called ‘From the Archives.’ I’ve admired Don’s work for several years now and edited a feature of it in 2010 here on LPV. Don asked me to write a piece for the book. I was honored to do so.

You can buy ‘From the Archives HERE

The Patient Photographer

One of the frequent complaints about contemporary photography, especially on the internet, is that we’re flooded with a constant stream of images, most of which don’t deserve our attention. While that complaint certainly has merit, I think the benefits of this stream of photographs outweighs the challenges it presents. If it weren’t for this stream of photographs, many of us would never have seen Don Hudson’s archives. Or Vivian Maier’s archives, or the archives of all those other photographers out there who have spent years documenting their cities, towns, communities and families.

I discovered Don’s work on Flickr. I can’t remember when exactly, or how really, but somehow his work made it into my daily stream of images. It’s interesting how we choose to construct our streams on the internet? For years, I spent most of my time looking at images on the web. The bad far outweighed the good, but when you find your way to the archives of someone like Don Hudson, then the web becomes magical and you realize there’s a whole new universe of photography to explore.

It’s been amazing to watch Don thrive on Flickr. It’s as if all his hard work was leading up to this point. For many serious minded fine art and documentary photographers, building a following on Flickr sounds more insulting than something to be proud of. But for Don, and many others who now have the opportunity to share their work with an audience, the internet has been their big break so to speak, not that they’re necessarily seeking recognition for their work, but finally finding an audience that appreciates it after all these years, must be a great feeling.

Where does work like Don’s fit in the great history of photography? I’m not sure and I’m not sure you’d find any consensus amongst experts. It’s mostly a state of perpetual confusion these days. Don has spent years documenting his community of South Lyon, Michigan which is a suburb of Detroit. The majority of the photographs were made from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. From Don’s perspective life in Middle America is rather leisurely. You spend your free time going to parades, the Friday night football game, fairs, carnivals, rodeos and the family vacation.

Through Don’s wry wit and freewheeling compositions these events and moments come alive in a way that illuminates life’s absurd little moments. In Don’s photographs the order and calmness of life in Middle America starts to unravel, providing a small glimpse of the chaos beneath. In these photographs we live on the edge that exists between the order we create for ourselves and the chaos that always threatens to undermine our tranquil lives.

Don’s photographs are out in the world now. Where they fit into the history of photography is anybody’s guess. Some people will find them interesting, others may find them derivative and boring. For me, this type of documentary work, from the archives of studios and thoughtful photographers like Don Hudson, are invaluable to our culture. In Don’s work we have a vibrant document of a time and place from an individual that knows it intimately.

Bryan Formhals
Queens, New York – May, 2012

….if you are like me as you look at these pictures, you pay more attention to the way passengers, their relatives, and friends inhabit these vast public spaces with a kind of emotional abandon. They laugh and flirt and cry. They remind us of actors onstage, showing emotions that are like our own, but somehow more acutely felt and beautifully expressed. Even their boredom is fully nuanced. And they act as if flying were an adventure, like saying goodbye to a relative at the gate were the saddest thing they could imagine. – Alex Harris

I hate flying. I avoid if at all possible. It’s not a debilitating phobia or anything. Once I’m up in the air I’m generally calm and all is fine. One way I try to alleviate my anxiety is to arrive at the airport several hours before my flight. Why? Because I’m fascinated by airports and their strange energy. The sense of flux is palpable. The airport is a gateway, an intermediary stop before arriving someplace you really want to go; a visit home, a vacation, the bed a significant other, to Europe or Asia for the first time. On the other side of the coin, it’s also a place filled with dread; the long lines, weary business travelers, families traveling because of tragedy, the overwhelming security.

I always enjoy walking around so I can see as much as possible, observing all the people coming and going, trying to read their emotions, creating stories about their destinations and reasons for going to them. The airport bar might be my favorite spot to sit around and people watch. Some travelers probably spend too much time at them, others are stuck there so they might as well drink. I need a few beers because of the dread and anxiety I feel about flying. It’s always a strange setting. People seem more willing to talk to strangers than your average bar, which makes sense since you’ll likely never see each other again. I know there are books and films about airports but I’m not really interested in fictional interpretations. Each time I go to the airport, I create a new personal fiction.

Apparently Garry Winogrand hated to fly as well, thankfully for us he alleviated his anxiety by making photographs and not by sipping beers and daydreaming. When I first became interested in street photography, Winogrand’s work naturally arrived on my radar rather quickly. After I bought ‘Figments in the Real World’ I became fascinated with his airport photographs. Sure, his New York street work was good but there was a different vibe to his airport photographs. I quickly went out and bought ‘Arrivals and Departures’ and from that point, it’s been my favorite body of work by Winogrand.

Unfortunately Winogrand died before he could edit his airport photographs. It would have been interesting to see what he would have come up with. Although, I’m not sure it would have been better than what Lee Friedlander and Alex Harris put together in Arrivals and Departures. I do wonder how Winogrand would have edited his work if he’d lived longer. Maybe he’d refute his early books in favor of new, more sophisticated edits? It seems like his mind was always working towards something, always moving forward.

The book has some of those recognizable Winogrand type photos. You’ll know them when you see them but what I find interesting are the photos where Winogrand is a bit back from the action and incorporates the architecture of the airport into the composition. There’s also a perfect mix of coming and going, inside and outside. The pace of the edit keeps you moving around which adds a bit of a frenetic feel. It creates a perfect vibe for the photographs. In a sense, paging through the book feels like pacing through the airport.

I always feel that Winogrand is chuckling at the good ole United States. It feels as if he’s in awe of these humans that call themselves Americans. I think he was probably a proud but not overly patriotic guy. I’m speculating naturally and that’s part of the fun of looking at photographs. What was this guy thinking? Why was he making THESE PHOTOS in THOSE PLACES?

Winogrand loved being out in public and I think that America from 50s to 80s is right where Winogrand wanted to be. Maybe one reason I find the airport pictures so compelling is that I sense in them Winogrand’s desire to perhaps leave America and go somewhere else and see something new. There’s a sense of energetic possibility flowing through these photos that for me adds a layer of optimism which is refreshing. It’s also very possible that Winogrand made all of these photos in airports just to kill time. We’ll never know but I’m glad that we have Friedlander and Harris’ edit.

You can get Arrivals and Departures on Amazon

This is a nice book to own. I was contemplating leaving it at that but I’m not sure we really sure we need book reviews in the form of Tweets just yet. I first saw Bertien’s work on LightBox back in January and then checked out the show at Yancey Richardson. I’ve had the book for a few weeks now and have browsed through it several times. I’ve been more cognizant of the photobook viewing experience recently and think it’d be interesting for people to share their routines. Do you pour a scotch, pick out music, then grab a chair to slowly browse the book? Do you have a shelf filled with photobooks in your bathroom? Are there certain books you look at every month?

I’ve been grabbing Bertien’s book at random times. One time, I browsed through it five minutes before running out the door to catch the subway to work. I quickly flipped through it, stopping instinctively at only a few images. Most of the time I grab a few books from the shelf and browse through in one sitting. There are never enough though. Sometime after browsing a few books, I’ll head to Tumblr or Flickr, hoping to get a fix. It normally makes my head hurt. The experience becomes disorienting and jarring, so I generally try to stay away from the internet after viewing a bunch of photography books.

I liked Bertien’s photographs when I saw them in Chelsea and I like them even more after owning the book.

Between 1991 and 2009 van Manen travelled across Asia and Eastern Europe with a small, analogue camera, learning the local language and engaging with the people who would become the subject of this collection. Let’s sit down before we go is a portrait of the places van Manen visited and the people she met, stayed with and became friends with during her travels across Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Siberia, Tatarstan and Uzbekistan. Across nearly two decades, with the exception of big cities, little about the scenery in van Manen’s photographs has changed. The relative sameness of Russia’s appearance binds the images together, leaving us no indication of the time lapse from one photograph to another.

The title, Let’s sit down before we go represents an old Russian tradition, the practice of taking a moment, stopping to think before embarking on a journey, to consider where we will be travelling to and why.

One thing I find interesting is that there’s no text or introduction, so if you didn’t bother to do some online research you’d probably really have no idea what’s going on. I think this excerpt from Ladd’s LightBox article might explain why there was not text.

When van Manen speaks of her books, she uses the word “album” frequently. An album, a family album in particular, makes little claim for aspiring to great art. Its purpose seems to be our desire to access memory, history, personal feelings (both good and bad) and perhaps even serve as proof of our existences. There is a shorthand of language in the gestures, faces that can be universal even if we do not know who is in the picture. Her work seems familiar because it is art that slyly poses as photographs that could sit alongside our own memories in such an album. It is such that we can feel the gift of the company Bertien van Manen keeps.

And today, most of our family albums are now Facebook Galleries. I don’t think this is a big deal, but might change how we view the term album. I like Ladd’s definition and naturally music albums come to mind as well. For photographers who don’t have big aspirations to create books, but just enjoy documenting their life, perhaps the album concept is a good way for them to organize their work. Another example are photographers who put up monthly or seasonal edits on their websites.

The other day as I was walking to the laundromat, I started thinking about perspective. I’ve been thinking about it frequently the last few months. Bertien’s perspective resonates with me. Not only where she physically positions herself when making photographs but also her approach and perspective toward photography.

“Traveling with expensive Leicas or Nikons in Russia at that time was asking for trouble,” she says. “They considered my cameras as toys… and they did not feel threatened by them, they considered me as a tourist or friend, who liked to take pictures.”

So, could she have made the same photographs if she had a Leica and told them she was working on a serious documentary project? Something to think about for sure. How do people view documentary photographers when everyone has a camera and many consider themselves photographers? There’s clearly evidence that there’s a certain level of paranoia of people making photographs in the public. The big question as always is “why are you making those photographs?” The most simple question, but also the hardest to answer at times. Ask yourself right now.

I don’t want to speculate but from the photographs that Bertien has created in this book, I get the impression that she really wanted to remember the people she encountered on the journey. These photographs she’s created feel like they’re stuck in a strange time warp. At times I forgot that they were made in the last 20 years and maybe that doesn’t matter all that much, but I kind of think it’s important. In our hyper-connected, visually saturated world, there are still many places where the technology doesn’t dominate life and people still take a moment to sit down before for they set off for a new journey.

I think one of the reason’s I like Bertien’s book so much is that she was perfectly fine with being the tourist and the friend as well as the exceptional photographer.

Bertien van Manen – Lets sit down before we go

Edited by Stephen Gill

104 pages
96 colour plates
23.8 cm x 20 cm
Colour printed linen hardcover

Publication date: October 2011

Published by MACK

One to Nothing depicts an Israel we do not see on the news. These images go beyond politics: they do not defend a side or critique the conflict. Here, Israel is seen in an unexpected light, a mythological backdrop to the age long struggle between man and the dusty, sun bleached landscape of his origin. The score to this existential battle is locked at 1– 0, with no finish line in sight. A loose, subtle, and open-ended narrative One to Nothing describes a historic tension with striking and unusual observations.

irinar.com

I had the chance to meet up with Irina a few weeks ago to take a look at her book One to Nothing which was published by Kehrer Verlag. As I paged through it, I asked her how long it took her to make the photographs. I’m not sure why that came to mind, or why it matters, but she told me that it was made in a pair of two week trips to Israel. I was a bit surprised. Why? Despite knowing better, I think I’ve come to expect that projects are generally created over a few years time. This probably comes from repeatedly hearing photographers talk about how it’s necessary to take a few years to finish projects. I’m not really sure there’s much to debate on that issue. A project is completed when it’s completed. There are no rules. But it was refreshing to hear Irina was very economical in the time she spent make the photographs.

Looking at the work naturally, there’s not way to tell anyway. The book is a mix of landscapes, candid moments of humans and animals in public, vegetation, etc. Basically, they type of mix that I’m generally drawn too. There’s a good amount of subtle humor involved as well which I appreciated. Sly visual wit you might call it. Was I thinking much about Israel or any subtext? Not really. It’s there but not obvious which I think is one of the strengths of the book.

After finishing the book it left me with that good feeling of wanting more. I’ve probably said this numerous times but for me he best photography books require multiple viewings and allow you find new nuances each time. I look forward to viewing One to Nothing again, if I can get my hands on it.

The book was on Alec Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks of 2011 , as well photo eye Magazine’s Best Photo Books of 2011 . You can read an extended interview with Irina on fototazo. Jorg Colberg also did a video review. And lastly, her latest project, In Plain Air, about Prospect Park in New York City was recently featured in Ahorn Magazine.

Before sitting down to write this article I browsed through ‘Fred Herzog Photographs’ again. As I expected I discovered a few photographs that I’d forgotten about. The photographs that held my attention this time around, are not the same photographs that held my attention when I looked at the book two weeks ago. This tendency to ‘discover new’ photographs with each reading is one sure sign that I have a great photography book in my possession.

Herzog’s Ambition and Dedication

The question of switching paths to work as a photojournalist was never seriously entertained, or not for long. “I tried,” he remembers. “I went to the agencies. But I was married with children. I needed to make a living, and I didn’t have the constitution to do what Robert Capa or James Nachtwey had done,” referring to two of photography’s most intrepid war photographers. “Also, if a magazine like Life wanted to do a story about Kansas, they wanted to see a wheat field, a pretty woman in a kitchen and horses. They beautified the world into a Family of Man that didn’t exist,” he says, alluding to the landmark exhibition by that name curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. “I wanted to show the world the way it is. By doing it only a few hours a day and not every day, I had the freedom to what I wanted.”

What a wonderful excerpt. Contained within a few plain spoken sentences is what I’d call his photographic philosophy. Would he have enjoyed making his living making photographs? Sure, but he was smart enough to realize that it wasn’t going to happen, and more importantly he made providing for his family his top priority.

Once his priorities were aligned, he got to work. And work he did, consistently for decades. Vancouver was his project, and he never strayed from his goal of showing it the way it the way he saw it. Photograph after photograph you can see his curiosity and passion for his adopted hometown. I’ve only spent a few years wandering around with a camera but I know for certain that if it’s not something you’re passionate about day in an day out, you’ll quickly get bored and give up. Herzog never gave up.

His work is often categorized as street photography. I can see why, but for me he’s a pure documentary photography. His subject was Vancouver and it’s people. Sure, he photographed candidly on the street but he also photographed the urban landscape, billboards, inside storefronts, interiors, still lives, and made portraits. He could do it all.

I use the word pure which sometimes can get distorted. What I mean is that his pursuit was pure, at least in the body of work that’s been published. He never strayed off course or flirted with other types of photography. For some, perhaps that means his photography may have never evolved. I’m fine with that because there’s something incredibly inspiring about a photographer who can remain focused and follow their vision for decades. Hell, it’s miraculous.

The Color of The City

Herzog is considered a pioneer of color photography. His Vancouver is filled with colorful cars, bright lights and saturated billboards. The color brings the vibrancy of the city to life. Browsing through the book, I imagine a HBO drama set in 1960′s Vancouver based on Herzog’s work. What was this growing city like back then? It must have been exciting.

Beyond the colorful cityscapes and billboards, Herzog shows us the human color of the city as well. Sure, it’s a city where the majority of people are white, but Herzog shows us it’s also a city of Chinese immigrants and African-Canadians. Through these photographs we get a glimpse of the cosmopolitan city that Vancouver was becoming. Through his photographs, I can sense that Herzog saw the type of city Vancouver would become today.

Some of my favorite photographs in the book are the candid street portraits. I wonder if Herzog became a regular sight in the neighborhoods he roamed? There’s a certain comfort you can sense in the photographs. A photographer comfortable in his city and a city comfortable with its photographer doing his work. That relationship creates an intimacy in the photographs that lures you in deeper, wanting to know more, wanting to visit those streets, at those moments in time.

I might be getting a bit sentimental and nostalgic. I’m fine with that. The nostalgia of the photographs is difficult to escape so I just go with it. What’s also difficult to escape is Herzog’s passion and dedication to showing the world the way it was. I think he succeeded and I think every documentary photographer can learn from his brilliant body of work.

James Turnley introduced me to A by Greg Halpern. He bought the book spontaneously and shared it at the first photobook meetup in New York. I didn’t get a chance to look at it that night but the name stuck in my mind. James and I exchanged a few emails about the work, making plans to review it, or feature it here. It didn’t come together.

Then Halpern’s interview on Vice appeared on my radar. Interviews with photographers are everywhere on the internet these days, but it’s rare that you come across one with the type of insight that alters the way you think about photography. Halpern did that in this interview.

VICE: Is this book fiction or non-fiction?
Gregory Halpern: If the images are examined individually, they are in a literal sense closest to non-fiction. The people, places, and animals in the book really did exist—in the singular ways that I experienced them when I photographed them. As for how it all adds up—the book’s particular and subjective edit—the work is closer to fiction. The book was intended to come from the American Rust Belt without being about it.

A few weeks ago I went to Dashwood books for the first time to pick up three books that I’d eventually giveaway to our 2011 subscribers. While browsing the inventory I found Halpern’s A. There was no way I couldn’t page through it. After I closed the book I decided to buy it. Not for the giveaway, but for myself.

I told the nice Asian lady at the counter that I’d heard it was a good book. She asked me what it was about. I tried to describe it as best I could. I mumbled something about it being bleak and depressing.

“But at the end there’s hope, no?” she replied.

I didn’t have an answer. I muttered, “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know. Did you read the interview with him in Vice?”

She hadn’t but wrote down ‘Vice’ on a piece of paper so she could check it out later.

Vice: Are you an optimist?
Gregory Halpern: I think so. And at first it might not look it, but I think the book is ultimately optimistic as well. Many of the images in the book reference death. At the same time, I wanted to punctuate that inevitability with images that are, at least to me, very hopeful. Ultimately we all fail, but there is beauty in the effort to avoid it. Hope and despair are intimately related. Hope is the envisioning of that which is not present. At times I think the creation of a photograph can function that way.

As I rode the train home I thought about the book. The ambiguity and sparse edit hooked me. Halpern sets the tone early in the book. In parts of this country, everything is falling apart and there’s not much the people who live in those places can do about it except keep moving along, bloody noses and all. We feel the full brunt of the forces of nature and what the world looks like as it slowly crumbles. At this point, it’s tough not to view the work as Halpern’s reaction to the ‘great recession,’ but I think it points at problems that transcend this particular period of time.

These photographs are ‘tough’ as Winnogrand might say, and yet have a certain visual harmony to them that can’t be removed from the equation. And here’s where I think Halpern is holding his cards closest to his chest. He knows these photographs have a magnetic visual appeal outside the context of the subject matter. Context be damned. I think this is probably why there’s no text in the book. He doesn’t want to give anything away. We don’t have a clue where or when these photographs were made. We can piece it together if we do the research online, but that’s about it. They were made in “Buffalo, Rochester, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Memphis, Detroit, and other small cities in between.” That’s all we really know and all we really need to know.

Gregory Halpern: Initially, we conceived of the book as seven or eight chapters, each separated by distinct breaks, but in practice, we found the breaks too jarring. Ultimately, we kept the basic structure of the chapters but eliminated the breaks. This allows the reader to have the experience of being sucked into an uninterrupted stream.

After two weeks with the book I’d become completely sucked into the “uninterrupted stream” of Halpern’s vision. I knew this feeling. It’s the way I feel anytime a work of art gets under my skin, and sticks with me for a prolonged period of time.

A few days after buying the book I realized Halpern’s work was showing at CLAMPART, so I made a plan to head to Chelsea to check it out, as well as a few other shows.

Saturday, January 21st, 2012 was a cold snowy, slushy day. I met Richard Bram on the corner of 23rd St. and 10th Ave. We checked out a few shows, Weegee, Joel Sternfeld, and Bertien van Manen. Each very good, but I was waiting for Halpern.

As we walked into CLAMPART and I immediately gravitated to the prints, inspecting them closely. I noticed a few that I didn’t recognize from the book, or at least that I couldn’t remember.

“That’s a great photograph to see as you walk in,” Richard said as he pointed to Halpern’s feral kitten photograph.

I walked around looking for the optimism in the photographs. It had started to emerge a bit in the last few weeks but I wasn’t fully convinced. The work was still veered toward bleak and pessimistic for me. If you’re poor in the United States, you’re fucked. The system is broken. Shit is crumbling around you. What do you have to look forward to? I didn’t see the hope.

Vice: What do you look for in the photography that you like?
Gregory Halpern: It is often said that photography is uniquely suited to portray or reflect the world around us. And yet our surroundings are complex, in my opinion, to the point of being visually or verbally indescribable. I want my photographs to reflect that impossibility, to respond to that complexity and to create an equally complex, perhaps impenetrable, thing.

I think he succeeds in his desire to create a “complex, perhaps impenetrable, thing.” As I left the gallery a few of the photographs lingered with me. I tried to decide if the work was ultimately hopeful. I didn’t arrive at an answer, and still haven’t. Maybe hope is just as complex and impenetrable as Halpern’s photographs.

Photographs ©Joerg Colberg – More photos on Conscientious

Last Friday, was the first Photobook Meetup New York, organized by Noah Kalina, Joerg Colberg and myself. I decided to walk to Kalina’s place instead of taking the bus. My Bessa was strapped around my shoulder so I ended up making a few photographs along the way while I thought about how the evening might unfold. I wasn’t nervous or anything but was very interested to see how many people would show up, what books they’d bring, and how the socializing would unfold.

When I arrived, Noah was having a smoke outside his place. We went inside and started to move the ping-pong table into place. It was to be the book table for the evening. Shortly after we started, there was a knock on the door. It was Joerg.

We finished setting up the table and then Joerg and I walked a few blocks to pick up some beer. We weren’t exactly sure how much we needed. It was a minor struggle but we figured people would bring some as well.

A few minutes before 7pm people started to arrive. Introductions were made and books started to take their place on the table. Soon, we had a nice group of around 20+ or so mingling and looking at books. Noah, Joerg and I convened and decided we just let it go for awhile before starting the very informal presentation.

At around 8pm we started the presentation. I thanked everyone for attending. Then thanked Noah for being so “hospititiablbleble.” Not the first time I’ve butchered a word and won’t be the last time. Thankfully it was a forgiving audience.

I talked briefly about the book I brought, ‘Edges’ by Dolores Marat. When I was finished speaking someone asked if I could show a few pages of the book…because I forgot.

After I finished, everyone else followed. Each person who brought a book, spoke. It was a great. Great people, great books, great experiment, great night. As people started to head home for the evening, Joerg, Noah and I posed for one photograph, taken with Noah’s Contax T2 I believe.

It didn’t take us much effort to organize the event. Really simple actually, so I encourage anyone whose thinking about it, to give it a try. Maybe your event will be smaller, maybe even just a few friends. That’s fine. It’ll be worth it. My sense was that the people who showed up really wanted to share their books and talk about photography with other people that were just as passionate.

We’ll keep you posted about event #2.

Here’s a partial list of the books that were presented (next time we’ll make sure to get a full list.)

Rockaway, NY – Roe Ethridge
Edges – Dolores Marat
A – Greg Halpern
Portraits of Native America Life – Edward Curtis
Sightwalk – Gueorgui Pinkhassov
A Road Divided – Todd Hido
One Thousand – Phillip Lorca diCorcia
Redheaded Peckerwood – Christian Patterson
Liberia Retold – Tim Hetherington
The Printed Picture – Richard Benson
It’s all good – Boogie
Photographs – Gabriel Orozco
Moll 31 – Wiebke Loeper
White Sea Black Sea – Jens Olof Lasthein
Earth From Above – Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Back in June, I wrote an article about “All the Photobooks I’ll Never See” which lead to an interesting Twitter conversation with Jorg Colberg about photobook meetups. I thought the idea was great at the time, but wasn’t prepared to organize such a meetup. Then a few weeks ago Joerg sent me an email mentioning the idea. We got to chatting about the logistics and ended up approaching Noah Kalina about hosting it at his studio. He liked the idea and agreed to host. I’m excited about the event and look forward to checking out all the interesting photobooks.

There has never been a better time for the photobook. Hundreds, if not thousands, are currently made every year. How to keep up? How and where to see photobooks? This is where Photobook Meetup New York steps in: You pick a book – any book you want – and you bring it to the inaugural meetup, to briefly present it, talk about it. Five minutes, just you and the book (no fancy presentation, projections or anything like that). Everybody else will simply listen, maybe ask questions, and look. If twenty people show up at the end of the night everybody will have seen 19 presentations of photobooks. Maybe you’ll know some of the books, but you might not know the different perspective or take you’ll hear. Maybe you have never heard of some of the books. Anything is possible. Photobook Meetup New York is about the photobook as much as it is about the community of people who love looking at and discovering new books.

Friday, December 9th – 6pm at Noah Kalina’s studio.

Some beer and wine will be provided. BYOB ok. There will be a donation jar to cover clean up expenses (white floors!).

Space is limited to 30 attendees. First come, first serve.

You can RSVP through the Facebook Event, or by sending an email to jmcolberg@gmail.com or editors@lpvmagazine.com

Once you RSVP, you’ll receive the address via private email.

REMAINS TO BE SEEN (LEGEND)

‘Remains to be Seen’ is a personal work which explores grief, loss and memory and the emotional impact these experiences have had on the way I have come to perceive the world here in the present. It’s a book of clues, keys, symbols, echoes and traces. Like latent fingerprints lifted from the psyche – made thousands of miles away from the graves of which it speaks of and recorded several years ‘after the facts’.

Because of a lack of direct access to perhaps more concrete ‘evidence’ which still remains stored in a barn in England, a basement in Norway and a spare bedroom in Wales, this book has become very much a history of the present. Because of this, my only resources for making this work have been internal in nature – accompanied by a certain awareness, like a frequency that was tuned into and the series as a whole has been, to some extent, something of a ghost hunt.

The sad events which have silently surrounded this project have consequently altered who I am today in ways which I am still discovering and has been part of the secret drive behind the books creation. It is not an exorcism because the possession (if this is what it is to be called) is permanent – dissolved into the self and is present more as an evolution in progress. There are seven stages of grief and this book, I believe, marks for me its final stage; Acceptance.

It’s always nice receiving books in the mail. As I paged through Simon’s book I was conscious of his statement and had a fairly decent idea about the underlying mood that inspired it, but that really didn’t impact how I viewed the photographs too much. He emailed a few days ago to ask what I thought about the book, and I responded  that “I liked the photographs but thought it was a bit esoteric conceptually.”

In response,  he said he didn’t think that was “necessarily a bad thing” and I agree. I’m sure most of us have experienced the grief of breaking up with or losing a loved one. Through photography we can articulate that emotion in interesting ways that don’t necessarily force the viewer to face the trauma head on.

I don’t know how Simon’s work will be interpreted in photoland but he’s one of those photographer/thinkers I’m proud to collaborate with….

You can buy the book HERE. 

Kramer O’Neill recently published a new zine, the first in what sounds like a long series. I asked him a few questions about the zine and some of the thoughts behind it.

Your statement says you’re planning to make “one or two volumes a year, every year, from now until I’m dead.” Why did you decide to organize your work this way as opposed to in a longer, multi-year book? I like the idea. Raoul (Gatepin) and I would often talk about organizing our work into chapters in a very similar way. I think there’s something appealing to archiving the work this way. It speaks to the history buff in me as well.

I was in the middle of putting together the water series [Till Human Voices Wake Us] in book form, taking out shots that had been in there before, thinking some of them worked perfectly well, but not in the context of that project. At the same time, I was learning the technical part of constructing a book by making that one, and I thought maybe these orphaned shots could be fit together with other ones, and now that I had the necessary skills, why not make that other, looser book? As it turned out, there’s a little image overlap between this book, Till Human Voices, and another project I did called ‘Same Time Every Day,’ but it didn’t really matter, because this set is its own thing; I was looking for a unique flow, and thinking about the page-to-page juxtapositions (James Turnley’s Two For The Road blog was definitely on my mind).

Amusingly, the spin-off book got printed before the book from whence it spun, and I ended up cutting a bunch of pictures out of Pictures of People and Things 1as the edit tightened. So then it’s like I’m back where I started: now those shots are orphaned from this project, and shouldn’t they have a home, too? It’s the kind of obsessive categorization that can drive you crazy, like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, chopping up those brooms into ever-smaller brooms. I see why people favor more thematically-focused projects.

I’m very interested in the way words interact with photographs. How did you come up with the title? It seems to me to have a certain blunt neutrality to it, almost like you’re telling people they shouldn’t expect too much out it, which I kind of like. You put it pretty simply in your statement: “They are records of how the photons were moving around me at certain times in my life.”

Blunt and neutral: yes, that’s what I was looking for. I wanted a title that had no reference (possibly a side effect of working on a book with title stolen from T.S. Eliot), and I didn’t want to categorize it, because I wasn’t sure what it was. It’s not a “street” book, although there’s a lot of street photography in it. There’s also a lot of shots of people I know in relatively intimate settings, and of objects that I either saw for a second or that I’ve spent huge amounts of time with. And you can’t necessarily tell which are which; all are rendered strangely equal in book form. That bluntness and neutrality is what I wanted for the title. The concept is that there is no concept…which is itself a kind of concept, I guess.

Like my friend James (Luckett) says (paraphrasing of course), “It’s all conceptual.” That said, I’m really drawn to projects that openly embrace ‘time’ and ‘place’ which are two inescapable qualities of photography. Sure, I guess you can say the same about all art, but with photography (at least documentary) the influence of time and place are nearly impossible to avoid. I guess one could argue that the work should have an element of timelessness to it, but I kind of think that’s BS. Fixing projects around time and place, that might not have any other central theme is interesting. I think it’s definitely something we could see develop out of the street photography community but also the type of photographers that just go about photographing their lives day in and day out. I’m not saying this way of working is in reaction to long term thematic projects, but I definitely think the rise of the internet and the interconnectedness that develops around it could make this way of working much more visible. Not really a question, but I see some of those ideas in this zine.

I guess this might be a version of what you’re saying in a microcosm. Working on one very-tightly-edited, very location-specific project made me want to make this one. Which is not to say I call bullshit on “time and place” projects, but they sure can leave out a lot of interesting stuff. But then again, how do you work the orphaned material into something that works on its own terms? Time and place may be an arbitrary way to arrange things, but rules are useful; they can even lead to more creativity, as our minds try to work around constraints. And they tell us what to cut out, which is a really good thing to know, because damn, I am terrified of being boring.

But one kind of project leads to the other, and maybe the other leads you back again. Which is a bit like my initial concession: I’ll keep making these, because I’ll never know when the project is finished. Possibly because it never will be, until I am.

When should we expect the next one?

I’ve essentially already started it; it was the shadow book constructing itself from this one’s rejections while I was making it. But really, I need to finish Till Human Voices before I touch this series again, so I’ll say…winter. If I can keep myself away.

A5 sized paperback, 170gsm paper with 81 images. Printed in Italy. €15, worldwide shipping included. [It can also be purchased on his site or at Librairie La Manoeuvre in Paris.]

Lay Flat’s venture into photo book publishing  has launched with titles from Sam Falls and Misha de Ridder, both of which are currently available for pre-sale. Founder Shane Lavalette generously answered a few questions about the books and new endeavor.

Visible Library by Sam Falls

In a departure from the colorful still life photographs he is known for, artist Sam Falls brings together a series of black and white images for the first time in his limited-edition artist book Visible Library. With a large format camera and a few boxes of expired film, Falls spent a day making these beautiful and haunting pictures in the stacks above the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Like “walking alone in the woods,” as he refers to it, Falls created what can easily be considered his most intimate body of work, a personal meditation on art, history, preservation and the photographic medium.

DUNE by Misha de Ridder

Somewhere in densely populated Holland exists a twilight zone where it is possible to travel in time: a small strip of dunes separating polder and sea, just a twenty minute drive from the city of Amsterdam. In DUNE, Misha de Ridder unveils natural scenes so estranged and mysterious that they could be described as unreal realities. Lushly presented in this limited-edition artist book, De Ridder’s precise and highly detailed photographs call to mind Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century and Romantic Era. In the barren and tormented nature of the dunes, it is light, color and atmosphere that salvage the memory of a wilderness lost.

We seem to be in a new golden age for self-publishing for photography. What made you decide to pursue publishing books?

My love of photography in many ways began with books. It was by way of photography books that I discovered a special depth to the medium. They have continued to play an important role for me personally, and I’ve learned to see the role they play in contrast to galleries or the computer screen. Publishing photography books is fulfilling for a number of reasons but one of the big ones is this, knowing that I’m providing a people with a unique, intimate experience.

Do you think there’s going to be demand for all the new magazines and books hitting the market? What do you think can be done to help expand the audience for fine art and documentary photography?

In ways, the ubiquity of publishing (both online and offline) can easily make things feel competitive, however I think a lot of artists and publishers are working together to build a community. For example, Lay Flat took part in the exhibition “Picture Books” at F.L.O.A.T. Gallery, which brought together four independent book publishers. And then there are communal projects popping up all over, such as The Indie Photobook Library or Self Publish, Be Happy, which are helping to rapidly expand the audience. At present, I think there is a great energy.

How did you go about selecting the artists for the first two books? And how did you go about choosing the projects that would be published?

I’ve followed the work of Sam Falls and Misha de Ridder for many years, and have maintained conversations with both of them about their pictures. So when I opened dialogues about books, we had a nice starting point already.

In the case of Sam, he is an avid self-publisher who has produced a variety of books already, so for me it was important to find a direction that was entirely its own, distinct from all of his other work and books. We landed on Visible Library, a project which Sam produced with a large format camera and using expired black and white film. The work is personal and dark – very different from the colorful still lifes he has become recognized for.

Misha approached me with the idea for DUNE, which was a project he had been working on for a number of years. It contained a few images of his that I had been struck by in the past, but also an underlying social thread. In my opinion, his work with nature had never been published in a way that elevated the photographs themselves. His images are so sublime that they almost become sinister. There’s a sense of this in the book – the more you look the darker they become.

The process is very organic – when an idea is ready, you begin to see how it can be a book, and when a book is ready, it becomes more than just a sequence of photographs.

What are the plans for the future? Do you have more books in the pipeline?

Yes, there are many more artist books to come as well as Lay Flat 03, the latest edition of the annual magazine, which will be announced this fall.