“…in a world where photographic images are ubiquitous a photography magazine can seem redundant if not irrelevant.” – Jed Perl, The New Republic, February 14th, 2013

What is the purpose of a photography magazine? After I read that quote from Jed Perl in his review of the re-launched Aperture, I knew this was a question I wanted to try to answer for myself. I’ve written four versions of this article, each one in a different tone and with a different conclusion. In one version I was sure that there was no purpose and concluded that I should just shut down LPV and be done with it. That feeling didn’t last long, but it’s always in the back of my mind.

There are numerous photography magazines out there these days. Some old, some new, some analogue, some digital. Photography is as popular as ever, or so the links on Twitter tell me. Aperture, FOAM, The British Journal of Photography and PDN all do an exceptional job of keeping readers current on trends, ideas, technology and innovative new photography. But can they cover everything? I think that’s doubtful given the current state of photography. There’s just too much out there. But that’s why we have blogs, and Tumblr and independent magazines.

Something Francis Hodgson recently wrote struck a chord:

One of the pleasing things about being interested in photographs is that it is really perfectly OK to admit to not knowing even important groups of pictures. In a narrower specialism, say in craft pottery or in modern literary fiction or in contemporary dance, it’s embarrassing to miss first-rate stuff. In photography you can even turn the whole argument around: far from being embarrassing to have missed something, it may be that to live only with those pictures that have good kudos in your particular neck of the photographic woods is to be limited, to lack curiosity and openness.

That’s something to think about. I know I need to discover a more diverse range of photography perspectives, but it can be tough in the daily information stream. Sometimes you get caught up in a current and it becomes difficult to take the time to look around. My hunch is that there’s plenty of interesting things happening beyond my field of vision.

So, where does LPV fit into the equation? I don’t know for sure. I’ve stopped thinking about it and have decided to embrace the uncertainty. The process is continuously inspiring and challenging, so I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. LPV was born out of the connections I made with other photographers on the internet and continues to evolve because of these connections. Creating these connections and then sharing them with others is the most fulfilling aspect of the process. I never really know what’s going to be in an upcoming issue. I’ve allowed serendipity and the connections I’ve created to guide me to the work I want to publish. I look, I ask friends, I think about it. Gravity brings it all together.

Welcome to LPV 6.

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Issue 6

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

84 pages, published 4/6/2013

Featuring Tony Fouhse, Sand Haber Fifield, Melissa Cantanese, Mark Peter Drolet, Kitai Kazuo, Luigi Ghirri, Daniel Coburn, Lisa Lindvay

“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.

Photographs ©Faulkner Short

Edit by Blake Andrews

When it comes to family, it can be said that one often chooses to photograph what is in front of them as much as possible. Can you tell us what is in front of you in these images?

©Daniel Coburn

I am interested in vernacular photography and the family photo album. The images in the family photo album assembled by my parents provide a glossy facade, disguising occasions of substance abuse, suicide, and domestic violence that are deeply rooted in my family history. In “Next of Kin” I create a series of photographs that supplement my existing family album. These images are made to investigate the tragedies that have happened during this generational, cyclical pattern of domestic trauma.

I photograph my family as I direct them through a series of brief performances. So the photographs that you see in “Next of Kin” are not documents. I am not interested in the photograph as a vessel of truth or evidence. The resulting images represent a tangible manifestation of my own memories, experiences and my understanding of the generations that came before. They are a colored self-portrait of myself and my family. They are way of reconciling the past.

Daniel Coburn

©Mark Peter Drolet

“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

Essay and edit by Dan Abbe 

A few months after arriving in Tokyo, and speaking almost no Japanese, I found myself at a small gallery opening. People were sitting around a table, and at one point a kind woman directed my attention to a sprightly older gentleman. “That’s Kazuo Kitai,” she whispered. “He’s very famous.” I nodded dumbly.

For a photographer from Japan’s celebrated generation of the 1960s and 70s, Kitai has had a relatively subdued reception in the West, and even, to some extent, in Japan. Still, that’s beginning to change; he was included in Martin Parr’s 2011 “Protest Box,” and a book of his early photographs (“Barricade,” designed by John Gossage) was published by the American bookseller Harper’s Books in 2012. Meanwhile, a career retrospective at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography, which just closed in January, will only help to raise his profile at home and abroad. It may have taken some time for audiences to recognize Kitai’s importance to Japanese photography, but then again, it’s nothing new for Kitai to wait around for others to catch up to him. In the 1960′s, he self-published his book “Resistance,” a pioneering document of his experiences in the thick of Japan’s student protest movement, but it met with little response.

Kitai is best known for these protest photographs, and it’s possible that he was the photographer most directly involved in the student movement. At the same time, it’s worth noting that there were other people with cameras who were similarly committed. In the notes for “Barricade,” John Gossage mentions photography books published by university photo clubs that show not just a similar level of engagement with protest movements, but also a similar aesthetic, so perhaps it’s best to say that Kitai is the most well-known photographer to participate actively in the student movement.

Kitai’s early work shows student demonstrations, and clashes with police. Still, in his recent retrospective, among the most powerful work was a series of photographs that Kitai took while living for months inside College of Art at Nihon University alongside fellow demonstrators, who had taken over the building. These images represent objects like a coat hanger or a chair in the context of this activity. Here, Kitai’s photographs are not violent, instead letting the objects—and the anti-government graffiti in the background—speak for themselves.

After the student protests in Tokyo, starting in 1969 Kitai began spending time in farming village of Sanrizuka, on top of which the Japanese government intended to construct Narita International Airport. As he did at Nihon University, Kitai spent months living alongside the farmers who fought against a forcible eviction from their land. It is a great privilege to introduce some of Kitai’s Sanrizuka photographs here.

Many Japanese photographers, even members of what was then considered the “old guard,” captured the raw power (so to speak) of students in the city, but Kitai’s documentation of Sanrizuka reveals a different face of resistance. The smiling face of an old woman appears next to aggressive graffiti declaring “Total Opposition to the Airport.” This woman, a group of children, and a man whose good looks would make him fit right in at any Japanese office all form part of the movement. Among other things, these photographs show that revolution is not the exclusive domain of the young and angry.

Sanrizuka eventually became a kind of stronghold, complete with a lookout tower. But when the government sent in troops to storm the encampments there, the village was taken rather easily. Kitai wryly notes in the text that accompanies these photographs that all of these places “are now beneath the runways of Narita International Airport.” Sanrizuka could be seen as the Altamont of the protest movement in Japan; not just the crushing defeat, but tensions between farmers and students led to a weakening of the movement in general. As for Kitai, he moved farther away from the city, and documented other rural communities like Sanrizuka. The existence of these villages was not threatened directly by government construction projects, but instead by a cultural shift towards urban economic growth. (This work was published as “Mura-e,” or “To the Village.”)

Look carefully at Kitai’s photograph “Old Lady Faces the Water Cannon.” Across the road, in the background, there’s another photographer shooting the scene. It’s entirely possible that he, too, made an image as visually dramatic as this one. That’s secondary, though; what’s significant about Kitai’s photograph is that he’s on one side of the road, and the journalist is on another.

Running With Tabitha Soren

Essay by Bryan Formhals

It’s 90 degrees out and sweat is dripping down my face. I’m tired and anxious. I only slept a few hours the previous night and now, I’m standing under the elevated N/Q line in Astoria, Queens, a few blocks from my apartment. I’m getting ready to sprint, Rangefinder slung over my shoulder, Addidas tied tightly.

Standing a few feet in front of me is my friend Katie Friedman. She’s holding a jimmy-rigged pole with a strobe attached to it. A few feet behind her, Tabitha Soren is crouched down looking straight at me through her Phase 1.

“Anytime Bryan,” she says.

I look directly into the camera and start sprinting.

There’s something primal about running. The cliche “running for your life” is one that I don’t really like to contemplate. I can’t run very fast so I’d rather my life not depend on it. But regardless of the circumstance, at this point in my life, there’s nothing about running that sparks my interest. This hasn’t always been the case, however. I was a jock as a kid. I ran around all the time—not very fast—but I was running. It was part of my daily routine.

Then, in my twenties, after adding a few post-collegiate pounds, I started a jogging routine in the hopes of getting back into shape. But I eventually stopped when I discovered the Hollywood apartment I moved into had an exercise bike.The convenience was too inviting. It was around that time, too, that I started taking long walks with my camera, exploring Los Angeles, the first place outside of Minnesota that I’d ever lived.

Tabitha’s “Running” portraits have appeared on dozens of blogs and websites this year. When I first saw them, they didn’t initially grab my interest primarily because they felt too staged. As they continued to appear on my radar, I saw different selections of photographs, and began to look at them more closely.

The act of running had forced emotions out the subjects that we typically don’t see in portraiture. In most portraiture, the subject is directly confronted with the camera. They are, in many cases, intimately aware of its presence, and the exchange they are having with it, and the photographer.

In Tabitha’s portraits, the physicality of running disrupts this intimacy, leaving the subjects more vulnerable and emotionally exposed. But what emotions do people experience when they’re running? For me, that question is dependent on why they are running, and that’s where Tabitha’s portraits add the element of mystery and ambiguity which are the signatures of really great photography.

There are no answers in the photographs. That mystery, and the emotional state of the subjects, is what drew, and continues to draw, me deeper into these images.

It was only after seeing the photographs on a few blogs that I decided to Google the artist to see if she was the Tabitha Soren of MTV News fame.

I quickly found out that yes, indeed, it was the same person. I was in high school in the early 90s and watched MTV like most people. My memory has faded, but I definitely remember Tabitha as an MTV News anchor. Mostly I have a vision of her with her red hair staring at me on the TV that was in my basement as a teenager.

One morning a few weeks later, I rolled over, grabbed my iPhone and saw I had an email from Tabitha with “submission” in the subject line. The majority of submission emails I receive are cut and paste template jobs. Tabitha’s, however,was one of the rare that was personalized and showed that she follows LPV, and wasn’t simply trying to use it to gain more publicity for herself.

Near the end of her message, she made a suggestion that caught me off guard. She asked if I would want to run for her next time she was in town.

“That could potentially make for an interesting article,” was the first thought that crossed my mind. The next , however, was something along the lines of, “Yeah, but you’re going to look like a fool.”

I accepted the offer anyway, and she told me she’d be in touch next time she was in New York. I figured it’d probably never happen so I forgot about it. A month later, however, she sent an email letting me know that she was going to be in town for a group show at Klompching Gallery. It dawned on me that there was no backing out now.

In the days leading up to the shoot I helped her find specific locations and she provided me with wardrobe guidelines (no logos, have a camera, a hat). She needed an assistant, so I put her in touch with Katie, whom I figured would probably be amused.

After the first take, Tabitha gave me a few specific instructions. She wanted me to exaggerate the swinging of my arms, show more emotion on my face, and rather than looking directly at the camera, I was to look off into the distance, as if I were running toward something or someone.

I shook my head in agreement and made a quip, which impressed no one, about taking improv classes a few years earlier. I don’t want to spoil the illusion of the photos, but I will say I wasn’t required to run any long distances. We busted off about 25 frames at that location. The first few were a bit awkward. I reckon the site of me sprinting caught the attention of a few jaded New Yorkers who are accustom to seeing just about everything.

The next location was the exit that leads onto the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (first photo above.) Tabitha set up on the elevated N/Q station so she had nice a birds-eye view of me. The plan was for me to run into the middle of the street when the light turned red and there were no cars. Katie and I waited on the shoulder, and she signaled to me when it was time to go. I’d sprint and then veer off back onto the shoulder.

We repeated this several times and by tenth run I was starting to get tired and losing both my stamina and enthusiasm for being a subject. Tabitha was wearing me down. I’d basically forgotten about the camera. I was focusing on my sprints and my now aching body.

Tabitha wasn’t getting the shot she wanted, so I continued to run. She would give Katie some instructions, which were then relayed to me. I was certain a cop was going to stop us. As I ran, I started imagining being arrested for breaking some obscure law, and perhaps getting locked up in psychward. I was having a tough time convincing myself that I really wasn’t a bit crazy.

Why was I doing this again? In the name of art? Those were futile questions though because I knew the answers already. I was living in New York and a fantastic photographer wanted to push me outside my comfort zone. Why the hell wouldn’t I do it?

We wrapped it up and decided to head to East River Park in Greenpoint for one last setup. On the way Tabitha, and I talked about photography. In that conversation, I realized that she was a bona fide photography addict. We could have talked for hours about the creative process and what we thought about different photographers.

At one point she asked me about my work. Before this year, I would have had a tough time discussing it primarily because I wasn’t comfortable articulating my ideas, or what motivates me to make photographs. Within the last year though, as I’ve studied more and been more disciplined with my editing, I’ve become more confident in speaking about my photography.

“When did you realize you were good at it?” she asked.

“Well, that I’m not sure about,” I said with a grin. “I do know that I’m motivated primarily by the need for creative fulfillment, and ever since I left Minnesota for California I’ve felt this need to document my experience.”

As we parked and walked to the park I started to think about my role as a subject and how this experience will inform the way I interact with subjects in my own work.

Having a camera pointed at you is uncomfortable, and it makes you self conscious. I’ve always tried to maintain the fly on the wall approach as a photographer because I want to capture unscripted moments. But now that I’ve had the camera pointed at me, I’m starting to understand that there’s an entirely different world of photography to explore, one where photographer and subject collaborate to create something together.

As we arrived at the shores of the East River, the setting sun was barely peeking through a mountain range of clouds, which created an ominous sky over Manhattan.

I was instructed to run toward the water, run toward the city, run toward the setting sun. The metaphors were racing through my mind as the hipsters gawked at me. I didn’t care. I was in the moment.

I’d just had the privilege of working with a talented photographer and a generous human being. Tabitha brought me into her creative world, broke me down, and then made me reveal a part of myself I hadn’t recognized before. I don’t know why she chose me as a subject. That part of the process will remain a mystery. But she did, and she made me run. I’m still trying to figure out where I was running to that day. When I get there, I’ll let you know.

Tabitha Soren is a Berkeley, California based photographer. You can view more photographs from her ‘Running’ series on her website.

You can view the magazine through the ‘web viewer’ below. If you want to BUY a physical copy, or download the PDF, click HERE. The features will also be published right here on the web over the next few days. Special thanks to Alexi Hobbs for all his hard work designing this issue. Thank you for supporting LPV!

LPV 5

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

110 pages, published 11/9/2012

Featuring work from Amani Willett, John MaClean, Nicholas Calcott, Alexi Hobbs & Tabitha Soren. Including an introduction and essay by Bryan Formhals

Alexi Hobbs
Is a photographer living and working in Montreal.
Is available for editorial or commercial work and any other fun project where you think his keen sense for colour and light might be put to good use.
Has both a canadian and a british passport.
Is an avid traveler.
Is also available for scotch, preferably of the smoky kind.

You can view the magazine through the ‘web viewer’ below. If you want to BUY a physical copy, or download the PDF, click HERE. The features will also be published right here on the web over the next few days. Special thanks to Alexi Hobbs for all his hard work designing this issue. Thank you for supporting LPV!

LPV 5

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

110 pages, published 11/9/2012

Featuring work from Amani Willett, John MaClean, Nicholas Calcott, Alex Hobbs & Tabitha Soren. Including an introduction and essay by Bryan Formhals

In our day-to-day lives, colour is largely secondary to form by practical necessity: the shape of a tree is more immediately important than its colour. In art history, colour has rarely been considered a worthwhile subject, but has been a discourse continually expanded by visual artists.

New Colour Guide (NCG) is not intended as a means of understanding colour (even if that were possible), but rather a project where colour was chosen to guide and structure my process of image-making. Why? Because, in a contemporary culture where images that cannot be explained by words are mistrusted, colour remains defiantly ineffable, mysterious and uniquely able to highlight the enigmatic nature of human visual perception.

NCG leads the viewer through a photo-world of schools, markets, offices and museums; forests, rivers and skies; artist’s studios, laboratories and crime-scenes. It is populated by parents, children, teachers, pupils, tourists and spectators. Colour here overlaps art and science; it is added and removed by both the people photographed and the photographer. Outside, only the winter season persists; snow provides a background for colour but can erase it too.

We see that colour can rise from abstraction to suggest narrative and meaning; it can infer value through hierarchies, provide form, depth and resonance and be connected with feelings of order and disorder. Crucially these qualities are only palpable to the viewer because they have acquired the necessary experience and conditioning from early childhood to interpret colour. Colour can create context but, paradoxically, cannot endure without a context itself.

NCG is a wholeheartedly digital photo-guide. It acknowledges the parallel natures of the human light-eye-mind image and the photographic light-lens-processor image.

In making these photographs I first welcomed, and then engineered, the file-transfer errors that can disrupt lines of binary image-code and result in colour distortions. Normally corrupted images would be discarded, but here they expose the digital medium’s chromatic building blocks. They ask: if a photograph is ultimately nothing but a white page, variously graded and spotted with colour, where is the tipping point when a million coloured dots becomes a recognisable image? Furthermore, if a digital photograph of a sky is rendered completely abstract by a file corruption, can it acquire qualities of ‘skyness’ simply by being titled ‘Sky’?

Colour arrangements in nature are largely the result of natural selection but in NCG all colour is contrived and the result of artificial selection. The photographer’s camera generates electric light (flash) which creates reflected light (colour). When recorded, this provides us with a layer of information which helps us construct a photo-world, but the discrepancy between colour’s physical fact and psychic effect is ultimately imponderable. If any meaning can be gleaned it is cultural, leading me back to one, central question: how do we get ideas into photographs?

John MacLean has been a freelance photographer since 1998, using commercial, architectural commissions to support an independent, fine-art practice. His exhibition of Two and Two was a solo show at Flowers Gallery, London. John’s work has appeared widely in books and periodicals and he has self-published seven photo-books. These are held in the National Art Archive at The Victoria and Albert Museum and in private collections around the world.

I read the statement (essay) for New Colour Guide and found it interesting but when I looked at the photos I sort of forgot about it. I just enjoyed them as a sequence of interesting photographs. Sure, colour held them together in a certain way but if you’d come up with a completely different statement with the same photos I’m sure I’d probably buy it. I suppose my question has to do with the relationship between statements and photographs. Did you fully flesh out these ideas before you started making the photographs or did the process of creating them help you develop the ideas? Make sense?

Each project starts with a simple idea or question and the process of taking photographs becomes an investigation of that. Editing the images begins almost immediately and if an interesting direction emerges I follow it.

I tentatively start writing an artist’s statement about two-thirds of the way through a project: putting pen to paper helps me recognise the strongest elements in the work and enables me to start thinking about how I could bring the project to completion. I am comfortable taking photographs that are ahead of my ideas so there is a degree of reverse engineering when it comes to writing (pulling the project apart to see how it works).

When a project is finished my artist’s statement can be means of drawing conclusions but these are personal conclusions and shouldn’t suggest a right or wrong way of interpreting the work. For that reason, I never include text in my photobooks. Ideally, a text should add a layer to my work without the work depending on this layer to function.

“I am comfortable taking photographs that are ahead of my ideas so there is a degree of reverse engineering when it comes to writing (pulling the project apart to see how it works).”

I like that statement. What did you discover once you started to ‘reverse engineer’ the photographs from ‘New Colour Guide?’ I’m curious about the title too. I almost get the sense that you’re using that particular language as a way of throwing off the viewer before they even look at the photographs.

An example: the first of my corrupted digital photographs were accidents but I had an inkling of their potential – so I started to make them in a more controlled way. At this point I hadn’t imagined what their contribution might be but I felt they were questioning something that I wanted to question. Starting to write a statement forced me to try to understand what that question might be; it made me realise that the project was less about colour theory and more about ‘the tipping point when a million coloured dots becomes a recognisable image’.

I decided on the title ‘New Colour Guide’ particularly with the book in mind, and yes, the idea that someone would pick up the book expecting one thing, only to find another, was appealing. The title has a tone of authority but really it explains very little: it’s tongue-in-cheek.

So, what comes after ‘the tipping point when a million coloured dots becomes a recognisable image’? Maybe that’s just a rhetorical question. There’s an interesting blend of photographs of people mixed with the still life images. Why are there so many photographs of people taken from above and behind? Was this intentional or was it a pattern you started to recognize during editing?

…the image fades (sand to sandcastle to sand again)?

I had noticed that people in families or groups often wear colours that are harmonious with each other. Photographing from above seemed to clarify these affinities. I wondered if the photographs could even playfully suggest that people have an unconscious desire for colour harmony, and arrange themselves (and objects) to satisfy it.

An early idea was to make colour charts by compiling photographs of people wearing monochromatic clothing, and the way to get a block of uninterrupted colour was to photograph the person’s back. Finally, it was the accidental colour combinations of bag straps, belts, scarves, and coats that proved more interesting.

Do you ever think about whether your projects are non-fiction or fiction? Does it matter? Or perhaps it’s the blurry line that you’re after?

I think if a photographer is trying to invent a project that is completely fictitious, they will always be struggling with a medium which is repeatedly grounded by its qualities of non-fiction. I would say that my projects are conceived with an awareness of that.

When you start a project do you think about with a book in mind? And how much does the book making process impact the way you edit a project?

Definitely. I start with a title and the knowledge that I have space for about forty photographs in each book – that gives me a useful project framework. In the beginning, I keep my edit down to ten images, then when I have a strong base I start to build on it – but always with that upper limit in mind.

When I first started making photobooks I was shooting in quite a rigid way – only taking photographs in landscape format – now I try to shoot roughly half the images in portrait format so I can create a rhythm within the book’s structure. I compose some images with a full bleed in mind, others that can live with being small on a page, and some as sequences. New Colour Guide is my eighth book and the first where the photographs themselves have influenced the book’s structure. An example of this would be the inclusion of gatefold pages to accommodate the triptychs.

That’s interesting that you changed the way you shoot (adding portrait format) with the book in mind. Do you have any moments of hesitation where you might feel restricted in any way? Meaning, your projects seem to be rather well planned out – specific formats, number of photographs for the book, etc. Does that ever feel restricting in any way or is it more improvisational than I’m thinking? And do you ever make photographs with no project in mind?

I am trying to set myself limitations that require inventive solutions. For instance, in my project Neighbourhood I allowed myself to take photographs within only a five minute walk of my flat. After a few months I was fed up, but it was this frustration that forced me to try new ways of working – I was in a corner and I had to photograph my way out. I think there is a balance to be struck when setting these limitations: rigid enough to stimulate creative responses without being so restrictive as to stifle them.

I am an avid reader of artist’s biographies and it is through these that I became more aware of the influence of limitations. Some limitations, of course, are imposed by circumstance, such as a young De Kooning using black paint because he could not afford to buy expensive materials. However, I am more interested in the self-imposed limitation, as in Arbus preferring to work with difficult cameras, or Rauschenberg walking no further than one block to collect materials for his Combines.

It seems like every other month someone is declaring photography dead for one reason or the other. Digital cameras and the internet are two prime targets. This is mostly rhetorical, and just a way to discuss how photography is progressing, but there does seem to be this sense of perpetual crisis with photography. Part of me thinks this is just a reaction to the explosion of photographs we’ve seen in the digital age but others like Joerg Colberg have stated that they think photographers generally play it too safe. What do you think about the state of medium as 2012 comes to a close?

To my eyes, photography is alive and kicking in 2012 – it is kicking at its own boundaries and looking to move in new directions.

The arrival of the internet and digital photography has clearly made the medium less exclusive (much to the chagrin of some photographers) and consequently more abundant. The camera has become a tool much in the way that a pencil is: it can be used to make a doodle, a list, a diary entry, a record, a quick observation… or something with more intent. And the internet provides a ready audience (or perceived audience) for any image.

However, even though photography is now one of the easiest mediums to become competent in, I think it is still just as difficult to hone it into a form of self-expression. Even though the internet gives the photographer an audience, thinking of an audience can often result in less adventurous work.

Photography’s rapid expansion could be an excuse to feel disorientated but could also be an opportunity to reconsider the medium’s defining qualities and change our ideas about what a photographer can be. It is healthy for contemporary photographers to embrace these new developments and try to push the language of the medium forward.

You can view the magazine through the ‘web viewer’ below. If you want to BUY a physical copy, or download the PDF, click HERE. The features will also be published right here on the web over the next few days. Special thanks to Alexi Hobbs for all his hard work designing this issue. Thank you for supporting LPV!

LPV 5

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

110 pages, published 11/9/2012

Featuring work from Amani Willett, John MaClean, Nicholas Calcott, Alexi Hobbs & Tabitha Soren. Including an introduction and essay by Bryan Formhals

Disquiet is a response to becoming a father in a time of profound uncertainty. It is a metaphoric and meditative journey that tracks this shift in my life with a concurrent shift in American identity.

Amani Willett was recently featured in the books Street Photography Now and New York: In Color and is a long-term member of the influential iN-PUBLiC collective of photographers. His pictures have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and his work has been featured in such publications as American Photography, Newsweek and The New York Times. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Art and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

What made you decide to pursue your MFA?

Having worked in photography for over 10 years, I knew I needed to challenge myself to understand what I wanted out of the image-making process moving forward. I needed to understand which aspects of the photographic process were going to provide me with the passion, focus and drive to keep working.

I had never studied art or photography formally and felt that immersing myself in a new and foreign environment would be a wonderful way to challenge my perceptions and experiences and expose me to a wide range of new and exciting points of view. Luckily I was right – the school environment provided me with the critical engagement I needed to better understand myself and my relationship to my work and to help me understand what I wanted to communicate through my images.

Do you think you would have created a project like Disquiet without going back to school?

I don’t think I would have created a project like Disquiet without having gone back to school. I had hit a creative roadblock, and school was the right choice for me at that point in my career. It provided me with the structure, focus, critical feedback and chance for experimentation that was necessary for me to figure out how to shape my loose shooting style into something with the right balance of legibility – something that was ambiguous while also being concrete.

That said, I have mixed feelings about the recent emphasis on MFA programs – it’s almost seen as a prerequisite for art world success. I don’t think this trend is necessarily positive, as it works to build in more layers of elitism, exclusivity and networks into an already exclusive system. So while school was a good choice for me, it certainly isn’t necessarily the right choice for everyone. Nor do I believe it be thought of as a necessary step in an artist’s career.

How did the idea develop?

Disquiet started out as a feeling. It took quite some time to figure out how to take that feeling and transform it into something that satisfactorily represented the multi-layered idea that was in my head.

Two months before I started school I had a son. As a result, I was making lots of pictures about my family and the way this new experience shifted my perspective on life. I knew these images were an important aspect of what I was interested in focusing on, but not the whole picture. I found myself having an internal dialogue where my personal experiences of family were weaving, merging and converging with my thoughts about the world I was bringing my son in to – the economic trouble, political dysfunction, war and climate disasters. Ultimately, “Disquiet” became about capturing all of these experiences and feelings and condensing them into a unified statement.

I didn’t conceive of the project as a book from the beginning. At first I was experimenting with the idea of creating small groups of images that operated as sentences or even short stories. It was from there that I made the leap to envisioning the project as a book and a more extensive narrative. It might seem like a simple discovery, but since I had never thought about presenting my photographs in book form, it wasn’t a clear path to me. But once I began to think about my photographs this way, I knew it was a good match.

The book form emphasized the cinematic and narrative elements of my pictures and I was able to create a structure in which the complex threads of the subject matter I was interested in could be woven together. I was actually amazed how a book could command such a different kind of viewing experience than looking at images on the wall or on the web. The physical book offered a way to create another layer of control that influenced how the images related to one another. I found that there seems to be a desire for a viewer to make connections between disparate pieces of information when looking at a book and I tried to use that to my advantage.

The dichotomy between the personal and the public is really interesting. I’ve thought about that often and think you pulled it off well in this project. Which do you find more challenging? Photographing your family, or going out in public and photographing strangers?

Thank you. Each situation has its own challenges. I’ve been shooting on the street for many years so I’ve become fairly comfortable working in that environment. For me, the hardest part about working in public is maintaining the patience to keep wandering without giving up, because often the best pictures seem to materialize after I’ve pushed through a barrier of doubt and mental fatigue. To work most effectively on the street, I need to find a state of mind where there is a balance between having some idea of what I’m after while also being open to interpreting what I actually encounter.

I hadn’t ever worked on a project with members of my family. So this aspect of the project was probably the most difficult. The hardest part was finding the objective distance to know if an image was good or completely terrible. It’s often really hard to tell the difference between the two when you are so close to the subject of the pictures. I think this phenomenon is probably similar to the experience many artists go through from time to time . . . . They work intensely on a body of work, get so wrapped up in it that they lose the ability to see their work clearly and eventually need to step back for a period of time in order to regain focus. You have probably experienced this as well. Is that why you chose to step away from your “Genesee Ave” pictures and are revisiting them now after 4 years?

With my Genesee Ave project I never really felt the editing was done. I’ve been looking at the pile of photographs for the last four years and I think over time my perspective on them has evolved. This could probably go on forever but now feels like the time for some closure. Funny thing though is that during this latest editing I realized that these photographs are deeply connected to the photos I made in New York the first couple years I arrived. One set was about leaving, one was about arriving. So through editing I learned much more about the project. It just takes time.

How did you find the editing process with Disquiet? Having a book in mind must have impacted the way you look at and perceive the photographs.

You are completely correct – the editing process was ultimately about looking for images that would work together to best tell the story and convey the mood I was looking to describe. The process was entirely different than anything I had done before. It wasn’t about creating a book to house photographs, rather, it was about using my photographs to create a book and a story.

What’s interesting is that there are many images in the book that I wouldn’t consider hanging on the wall – much of their utility was derived from their descriptive ability and the way they could connect parts of the book to one another. This realization opened up a lot of new possibilities for what my images could be and how they could function.

At the beginning of the editing process, I started out with a lot of images, maybe 250-300 pictures. From there I began playing with sequencing. Once I had a rough sequence, I started to put the images into the book design I had settled on. Some pictures only worked as spreads, some only worked as small images and some simply did not work at all. I realized that I needed to go back and reconsider images that I had too easily rejected because once they were incorporated into the layout, they often had a totally different presence. Honestly, some images that I wouldn’t have thought twice about just worked in the context of the book.

Did you design the book yourself or did you work with someone? Were there any books that you looked at for ideas or that influenced you?

I did design the book myself but I was lucky enough to have input from both an amazing photo book editor and a photo book designer. They each had invaluable insight about ways to refine the physical aspects of the book as well as the sequencing.

Two books that have greatly impacted the way I think about photo books are “A Storybook Life” by Philip Lorca Dicorcia and “Winterreise” by Luc Delahaye. I love the way “A Storybook Life” combines seemingly random images into a cohesive whole. “Winterreise” is the smallest (in length and width) book I own. I love the way to small size creates an intimate experience similar to reading a novel.

You’ve made a rather big leap with your photography the next few years. Now that you have your MFA and this project completed, what are you planning on doing next? I know you’ve mentioned to me that you’re planning on developing a curatorial platform to showcase projects.

I’m excited to get to work on some new ideas that I’ve had on the back burner for a while. One idea I’ve begun researching is the life of a hermit who lived in the woods in New Hampshire – near a town I’ve been going to all my life. I think there may be an interesting way to combine artifacts, historical documents and landscapes in an effort to examine what propelled this individual to decide to live outside of society.

And as we have spoken about previously, I’m hoping to develop a platform for presenting complex, challenging bodies of image-based work in an online environment. I’ll leave it at that for now . . .

You can view the magazine through the ‘web viewer’ below. If you want to BUY a physical copy, or download the PDF, click HERE. The features will also be published right here on the web over the next few days. Special thanks to Alexi Hobbs for all his hard work designing this issue. Thank you for supporting LPV!

LPV 5

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

110 pages, published 11/9/2012

Featuring work from Amani Willett, John MaClean, Nicholas Calcott, Alexi Hobbs & Tabitha Soren. Including an introduction and essay by Bryan Formhals

Italo Calvino once wrote about a city where all connections, real and imagined, were traced out with different colored yarns, from building to building, person to person, and object to object. This had the secondary effect of turning the city into one giant knot, impassible to all who were unable to ignore these relationships made tangible.

All cities are knots of connections, as are all networks. These huge accumulations function precisely because of the connections from one element to another, not in spite of them. Cities gain their character because of the links between the different parts. Sometimes this is mapped out and becomes a part of a city’s normal functions, like a subway or bus line. More often, these connections are left hidden and, through repeated use, become part of a city’s personal or collective mythology.

These connections branch out and inwards, forming an almost living organic being made manifest by creeping layers and time which consume and exhume, leaving traces of individual relationships etched in the rock and soil of a city, like coral fossils endlessly inhabited by unrelated generations.

City of Salt is a metropolis described in photographs, a place that is simultaneously all cities and one imagined city. It is an exploration into the nature of these aggregations of connections – what holds them together and divides them, and the links they share within themselves and with each other. The city as node and the city as fungus and a visual evidence of the network hidden below it.

The city becomes metaphor for our own tangled, globe-spanning knots of relationships; a network made manifest and a creature that consumes, swelling up from below as lines between me and you and us and them catch and snag and agglomerate.

Nicholas Calcott was born in 1983 in Midland, MI. He lives and works between New York City and Paris.

Did you develop the concept for City of Salt before you starting making the photographs? Or was it something you discovered while shooting and editing?

I typically start researching a project (consciously or unconsciously) well before I begin shooting it. I tend to spend months just reading up on a subject and conducting interviews and sketching out visuals and etc.

That being said, all of this work just allows me to begin to live in the world of the work that I’m about to do – once I begin shooting, I just allow the photographs to take me wherever they’re going to take me, even if that’s pretty far from my original idea. I’ll periodically create an edit to kind of see where I am with the work, but it doesn’t really all come together until I make a final edit and try and see what the work has ended up being about…

“City of Salt is a metropolis described in photographs, a place that is simultaneously all cities and one imagined city.” Where in the process did you start thinking about creating an imagined city and what attracted you to that idea?

Well, I’ve always been interested in places and our relationships to them, so this concept was not so far from other work I’ve done in the past… I suppose the seed of it was hatched the first time I read ‘Invisible Cities,’ the Italo Calvino book I mention in the artist statement for the project, but this was years ago. The book is a fantastical description of Marco Polo’s travels through a vast empire, bringing back descriptions of cities he encounters to describe to the emperor. As the reader progresses through the book, he/she realizes that in each description of a particular city, Polo is actually describing elements of all cities… (I once interviewed Ken Schles about this book and its particular interest for photographers which led to a blog post – Invisible Cities is also a book about signs and, by extension, photography – http://www.12thpress.com/?p=777)

This, to me, was the germ of an idea – with this project, I was trying to drill down to an urban essence which should be familiar to any inhabitant of any city in the world. But, with this process, I found that I was unconsciously creating my own imagined city, similar to many cities but unique in its own way.

I first stumbled up on psychogeography a few years ago and have tried to read what I can. I’m not going to pretend I fully understand the concept but the general idea of creating one’s own version of a city by exploring it on foot has always appealed to me as a photographer. Before I moved to Los Angeles in 2004 basically all I knew was the mythology of the city that I learned through art and media. When I started living there though I saw a much different version of the city. What I found interesting was the dichotomy between my version and the mythology. Naturally my version was heavily influenced by the mythology which might say something about my expectations, I don’t know. I could have easily chose to live in the San Fernando Valley rather than West Hollywood which would have yielded a much different experience.

When I moved to New York it was a bit different because there seems to be more of a universal experience in New York than Los Angeles. Perhaps it has something to do with the density, subway system and gravitational pull of a place like Manhattan, I’m not sure, but I’ve always felt there’s more of a shared urban experience in New York than Los Angeles.

With your project, there’s really no historical mythology. You’ve stripped that away which as a viewer is liberating but also creates a bit of an uneasy feeling. We don’t know where we are which forces us to perhaps create our own mythology.

Another important book in my research, on the subject of psychogeography, is Jonathan Rabin’s ‘Soft City’. I highly recommend it…

And yeah, I’m interested in these collective mythologies of cities, but as you note, they can be a bit distracting. It was really important for me not to have Paris seem too much like Paris when I photographed it, or New York too much like New York. Because then the images become about the romance and history of a particular city, and not about the network that we call a city.

That’s another important point – in this project, I’ve been very interested in the social construction of a city. Not just how we think about cities in a social context, but also how cities are a very real coming together of large diverse groups of people. A city as a metaphor for a virtual world, and a city that, in many ways is unmoored in the physical world.

I’m very interested in the idea that photography is developing a new visual vocabulary in the context of the digital age, and this project can be seen as my own contemporary response to the American street photography of the 50s, 60s, and 70s that took the city as its setting and that has gone so far to establishing the photographic vocabulary that we have all come of age in. It’s oblique, but I do think this work comes out of that tradition and is an indirect response to it…

It’s interesting that you mention the street photography tradition. I guess I didn’t really think about that but it’s interesting. As is the idea that “photography is developing a new visual vocabulary in the context of the digital age.” It really is kind of amazing that in one day you can see be exposed to dozens of photographers that you’ve never heard of before. I’m on the internet all day and nearly every single day I find new work that I like. I also think we’re just at the very early stages of developing new ways to present photography on the web. I don’t think we’ve really explored it and used the tools to really develop an immersive experience. How do you see the web impacting photography’s visual vocabulary?

Well, that is the question, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s inevitable that how we picture the world has changed in reaction to a big change in how we physically see the world (through our screens), but I don’t think those changes are really going to be clear to us until we look back on this era with a bit of art-historical distance. I mean, there’s a million photographers experimenting with a million ways to picture our modern world – which of these ways will be important to what comes next is never completely clear at the time, of course.

I suppose the most evident changes have been to the distribution channels – a point that has been touched on by almost everyone. But, I think it is worth noting that the kind of work we see is in many ways dictated by how it’s delivered to us. The boom in self-published photo books and ‘zines is one example of this – Obviously, it wouldn’t have been possible without affordable desktop printing, etc. etc., but I also think that it’s brought forth a generation of photographers that wouldn’t have necessarily been seen beforehand, or, at best, would have been discovered much later in their careers with very different bodies of work.

Do you find yourself looking at work on the internet more or less these days? And did you find any work on the web that inspired City of Salt? (I suppose that might be a bit of a ridiculous question)

Like, I think, a lot of us, my habits of web viewing follow a bit of a sine curve – My rss feed reader will build up, I’ll be looking at a lot of stuff, and then I’ll reach a saturation point and begin deleting feeds until it’s down to a level where it starts building up again.

These days, though, I’m having a hard time looking at work on the web because I’m finding that it tends to run together… Not that everything’s the same, but rather because it all shows up in a similar way, it’s hard for me to view it as anything but one large self-curated show or a series of individual images as opposed to a distinct series assembled with purpose by an artist…

Because of that, I can, I think, reasonably say that though there was a lot of web work that probably influenced me, there’s very little that I can specifically point to… Somewhat ironically, most of my specific reference points come in the form of books, photo and otherwise, and actual conversations I’ve had with people.

I think photographers have an interesting relationship with the internet. For so many of them, it has become their primary distribution platform. On the other hand, I think most still strive for something tangible like a book, or being published in magazines. So, what does that make the web? Just a marketing tool? Maybe tablets can start on the path of changing that but I’m not sure. I try not to pass too much judgement on work until I’ve seen it in the format it was intended, normally a book, or gallery show. But even a gallery show can be limiting because you’re only seeing a select number of images from a project. Where do you stand with this project? Is there a book planned? And if so, how has that impacted how you approach the project?

I think in many ways that part of the reason why it seems like a lot of work we see on the internet is meant as a book or show is because our expectations of what a project is are based on the idea of completion and finality. So when web work doesn’t mimic the finality and succinctness of an exhibition or book, we generally don’t consider it a project, and work that does have that finality and succinctness feels like it would work better in analog form.

That being said, there is a lot of work that is more than just marketing out there that works better on the web than in a show or book (one comes to mind immediately – the work of Patrick Tsai, My Little Dead Dick and now Talking Barnacles but there’s plenty out there), and if you enlarge the boundaries of what we’d consider a project, there’s even more (Jody Rogac’s ‘Lately’ work being another example, appearing semi regularly on her blog and now collected on her website).

As far as City of Salt, it was always shot with the book form in mind, though not necessarily a single book, per se. I’m feeling pretty maximalist with this work, so the idea of limiting it to 40 or so images (which is what was in the show) seems very low. As I mentioned before, the work isn’t quite finished for me, and I like the idea of leaving the work open-ended for the moment. Indeed, even though the show has closed, I’ll be traveling soon and hope to shoot a bunch more stuff…

Since the project is open ended, and you plan on shooting more, how do you expect it to evolve? Are there perhaps new ideas that you want to explore that stick to the general theme but perhaps expand on it?

I don’t really know, to be honest. I’m just going to shoot and see how it evolves. I do feel that most of the main arguments are there in the project as it stands, but I think that a lot of them could be stated in different ways, so I think that’s probably how I’ll approach the next round of shooting…

That being said, our idea of ‘city’ is constantly evolving, so it’s entirely possible that I’ll find something that is missing and needs to be added. For one, I’ve never been to fast growing cities in Africa like Lagos or Johannesburg, and I think that if I were to see that my ideas on this subject might radically change…

It’d be great to see what you come back with from places like Lagos or Johannesburg. Maybe some of those fast growing cities in China too. It’s amazing how many most westerners have never heard of but they’re huge and growing fast. It was mentioned in the Gallerist article, and I agree, that there’s a futuristic vibe to the work. What I like about that vibe is that it’s somewhat neutral. It’s not a dystopia but it’s also not the glittering, technological city of the future. It’s almost a parallel universe, as if you’ve caught a glimpse of another civilization on a planet similar to earth. Maybe I’m reading too much into it! But that’s part of the pleasure of photography for me, the viewer brings their own ideas to the work.

I guess my final question would be, how do you know when a project is done, and what do you hope the viewer takes away from the work?

And then one fun one.

What five photographers do you think people should check out right now?

Oh, I have no idea when the project will be done… The subject is so broad that it could go on forever… Though, conceivably the future could outpace the content and then it’ll be easier to finish than to start over.

And for the photographers to check out, there’re a ton that I really love, but I’ll stick with 5 whose work directly influenced this project – Aglaia Konrad, Bertrand Fleuret, Yutaka Takanashi, Oliver Sieber, and Katje Stuke.

You can view the magazine through the ‘web viewer’ below. If you want to BUY a physical copy, or download the PDF, click HERE. The features will also be published right here on the web over the next few days. Special thanks to Alexi Hobbs for all his hard work designing this issue. Thank you for supporting LPV!

LPV 5

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

110 pages, published 11/9/2012

Featuring work from Amani Willett, John MaClean, Nicholas Calcott, Alexi Hobbs & Tabitha Soren. Including an introduction and essay by Bryan Formhals

It was at Photoville this past June that I discovered Nicholas Calcott’s project City of Salt. I was intrigued by how he created his fictional city using documentary style photographs. His City of Salt has a strange, almost futuristic vibe, as if it exists in a parallel universe, one that we might recognize but still makes us feel uneasy.

Around that same time, I went to the SVA thesis show to see Amani Willett’s book, ‘Disquiet.’ I’d been familiar with his street photography work from In-Public, so was curious about how his MFA experience impacted his work. ‘Disquiet’ is a deeply personal work that addresses his anxiety over becoming a new dad in a time of economic, and political turmoil. With Occupy Wall Street in the backdrop, Amani has woven together a narrative that takes deep into his private life as well as into the streets of New York.

Last year John MacLean was generous enough to send me three of his books. After viewing them numerous times, he quickly became one of those photographers that would roll off my tongue anytime someone asked me for recommendations. When he sent me an email about his new project, ‘New Color Guide,’ I knew I wanted to publish it in the magazine. On the surface of it, this would appear to be an investigation of how color works on our senses, or that’s what he wants you to believe. When you start to dig deeper, a subtle, strange narrative emerges. To me, MacLean is a mad scientist simultaneously conducting multiple experiments at the same time, one dealing with color, the other dealing with humans and how we observe them. The resulting work is a disorienting journey into his photographic universe.

Over the last year I’ve been following Alexi Hobbs work through Tumblr and have come to appreciate the way he traverses the editorial landscape while still producing new, personal work. Many young photographers have a tough time with this balance, but Alexi has excelled. In this edit we showcase selection of new work.

In the final piece of the issue, I write about my experience as a subject for Tabitha Soren’s brilliant Running project.

Bryan Formhals
November 2012

Running With Tabitha Soren
Alexi Hobbs – New Work
John MacLean – New Colour Guide
Amani Willett – Disquiet
Nicholas Calcott – City of Salt

You can view the magazine through the ‘web viewer’ below. If you want to BUY a physical copy, or download the PDF, click HERE.  Special thanks to Alexi Hobbs for all his hard work designing this issue. Thank you for supporting LPV!

LPV 5

By LPV Magazine in LPV Magazine

110 pages, published 11/9/2012

Featuring work from Amani Willett, John MaClean, Nicholas Calcott, Alexi Hobbs & Tabitha Soren. Including an introduction and essay by Bryan Formhals

I’m going to build a box that’s 5 feet in height
a podium
not for preaching
so I can stand up outside
& write while I am smoking cigarettes
and stare off into the distant known

Not too heavy a box
so I can carry it other places
and stand and smoke to
these other places
& write to other present knowns

—

I don’t like to blush so I don’t talk to people

Flash my skeleton face

—

One minute we hadn’t yet
and the next we had.

—

“Is it it?”

“It is. Isn’t it it?”

“It is. It is it, isn’t it?

—

Once I get the green light
to get the green light
I’m gone

—

Helicopter Baby,
that’s my helicopter baby

I laugh with the boss
and even when he’s villain

Smile
that’s my helicopter baby

It doesn’t make me guilty
I’m only guilty
that I’m fortunate
to be so

It makes me feel so young
It reels
I’m real

But that little shovel’s not so innocent
Digging only the boss’ jokes
See
jokes & my boss really go well with each other

And that’s my helicopter baby

—

You can hit those notes
and you can’t always hold them.
It doesn’t drag on [ like you thought ]
and she won’t love you forever,
she’s only sixteen for a second.

Photographs by Anna Shelton; Text by Miki Johnson

Previously

Intro
Story #1
Story #2

My dad recently scanned and emailed a handful of old photos to me, black and whites he’d found of his parents, my grandparents, when they were courting. In one my grandfather is cooking pancakes on a camp stove atop a picnic table in some unidentified woods. He is younger than I am now, handsome and tan in just his shorts, his stand of shiny black hair curling over his forehead just as it did until the day he died of a brain tumor, frequently prompting speculation about “Indian blood.”

My grandmother is not in the picture because she is obviously the one who took it. I say “obviously” because there is something in the ease with which my grandfather stands shirtless, the giddiness of the smile he shines at the camera, that makes it so I can almost see the shy, curly-haired girl my grandmother must have been at 20, with her finger on the shutter.

Before my grandmother died, shortly after I graduated high school, I remember her daily “beauty nap” around two in the afternoon. Grandpa would watch the clock, often while he prepared what would become our dinner, and after 20 minutes he would go back to their bedroom, sit softly on the edge of the bed, and kiss her on the forehead. “Time to wake up,” he would whisper.

I remember her lying with eyes closed in the living room of that same house, on a hospital bed with the metal bars along the sides, probably the last time I saw her. She was comatose from a series of strokes and at home because my family had decided not to force her body to live any longer. I was leaving for a 10-month exchange program in Costa Rica and everyone said I should go anyway. There was nothing more to do. I remember grandpa leaning over her and kissing her on the forehead. I remember thinking it was time to wake up.

*****
The year my college friends and I held our annual reunion in a cabin near Mt. Rainier, we never once saw the peak for all the fog laying on top of the pines that surrounded us. Who knows what we were expecting, visiting the northwestern-most state in late May. We drove up the mountain one day to go hiking and suddenly found ourselves, many in tennis shoes, walking through snow pack. I love the pictures from that hike: all of us atop a lush green boulder, hoods and sleeves pulled tight to protect our tender skin.

I remember everyone in the hot tub later (there must always be a hot tub), retelling the story of Dave and Erin’s engagement. Although we’d all known Dave for years, we had a loose rule that no significant other would be invited to reunion until a ring was involved, so this was his first year joining us. Erin and I went to high school together, then college, then NYC, but I had moved to San Francisco that year and missed the engagement, which involved all our friends and a surprise sail around Manhattan. Below my excitement and happiness for them, I felt a loneliness, the pang of being left behind, rising like fog.

My second spring in SF was a magical one. The day after my March 12 birthday that year was a hot, sunny Saturday that seemed to have have gotten confused and wandered up from Southern California. I woke up with a hangover from complementary Kir Royals at the French bistro my girlfriends and I closed out the night before. Laying in bed, I texted my friends to tell them my birthday wish was not to have to leave my apartment that day but to see all of them. They trickled in over the next few hours, bearing gifts of candy and blood oranges and ‘80s sci-fi movies. We sunbathed and took Polaroid photos of each other and made a nest of pillows and blankets on the living room floor where we fell asleep on each others shoulders as the credits rolled.

My friends and I that spring frequently referred to ourselves as “The Thon,” a diminutive of “marathon” denoting a friend group where everyone routinely spends days in each others presence and lovingly shames those who want to leave early to, say, sleep in their own bed. There were seven of us, four girls, three boys, and all single. A typical weekend might consist of camping in Big Sur Friday night, waking at 1am to drive to the hot cliff baths at Esalen, where we would soak and whisper for two hours, then return to our tents, sleep late, and wake for brunch on the sunny patio of the Big Sur Bakery. We would nap in human size “bird nests” lined with mattresses and perfumed by wild flowers. We would lounge on the porch at the Henry Miller Library, drinking complementary tea and reading Kerouac’s haiku to one another. Or we would take our new books to a restaurant-bar where seating included heavy wood Adirondack chairs placed in the bed of a sunny, ice-cold stream.

Our love for each other then was a current that ran stronger for running equally between us all, though it was constantly waxing and waning between any two of us at any given moment. Several of us ended up dating, two couples moved in together, one broke up and moved back out. One of us was abruptly married after a few months of dating when a Green Card was needed. The Thon has shifted again, mostly to those who are still unattached. The love of a group and the love of a single person are difficult to balance. Neither can stay magic for long.

The summer after college, I went to Europe for a month. A tour of Spain, France, and Luxembourg with my cousin, a meet-up with my parents in Edinburgh, and a week touring Ireland in a van, staying in cheap hostels and cooking Ramen meals with five other young and/or frugal travelers. Our guide had grown up in Belfast and never once took us to a tourist attraction that we paid for. I remember hopping fences and hiking through sheep pastures to find disintegrating castles, or ignoring “unsafe path” signs to climb to the edge of “fairy caves” where people wished on pennies and I accidentally cast my new bracelet into the clear pools along with my coin.

In particular I remember the Cliffs of Moher. We pulled off the road a mile or so from the tour-bus turn-around and the glassed-in observation deck and crawled onto a precipice on our hands and knees. We took turns laying on our stomachs and peeking over the edge of the cliff, a dizzying drop into tiny waves like the white half-moons of my fingernails. The sheer height scared me less than the question my mind refused to stop asking: What would it feel like to throw myself into that abyss? I could feel my stomach pulling toward the buffeting sea breeze, feel my legs twitch to know the sensation of weightlessness.

Later, as we passed a thermos of hot chocolate around the van, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” came on the radio. With the wind coming in from the rolled-down driver-side window and the pink afternoon light on my face, I suddenly understood those lyrics in a new way: not that he hadn’t found the thing he was looking for, but that he hadn’t even figured out what he was supposed to be looking for in the first place. I was 23 and I didn’t know either.

In less than two weeks I’ll be 30. I don’t think as much about finding things now as I do about losing the things I’ve found.