Who Cares About Books? DARIUS HIMES

Who Cares About Books?
DARIUS HIMES
All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books. —Bishop Richard de Bury, chancellor of England, 14th century
Photography books have never commanded greater interest than they do today. Each year they are published by the hundreds worldwide, collected and hunted down by the obsessed (this writer included), and sold at triple and quadruple their retail value. They provide an artist with a passport to the international photography scene and create occasions for exhibitions, talks, gallery walks, and reviews. Both the supply and the demand seem to be increasing unabated.
The bald statement “I want a book of my photographs” is on the lips of nearly every photographer I speak with, but few have more than a tentative grasp of the component parts of a book or an understanding
of what they want to express in book form—of why this body of work needs to be seen in book form as opposed to on the gallery wall or in a magazine.
In our personal lives, both photography and books are often burdened with sentimental value, becoming loaded symbols of our private histories and complex social relationships.1 My intent in this essay is to take a close look at the significance of books, how photography and books are intertwined, and what that relationship means for contemporary photography. I will also address the newly laid foundation for the study of the history of photography books, surveying the criteria offered for determining what makes a great photography book. Lastly, I will examine two particular titles that serve as examples of a happy marriage between photography and books.

LYNNE COHEN - THE IRREPRESENTABLE

LYNNE COHEN. THE IRREPRESENTABLE by Jean-Louis Poitevin
The titles of Lynne Cohen’s photographs tell us very little about what the pictures show us. They in fact point to each photograph’s belonging to a type of space that fits into one or another of the series making up the work No Man's Land—a spa, a laboratory, a classroom, among others. While each of these names denotes the function of the photographed site, it tells us nothing else—nothing about the country or the city it is located in, nothing about the date the photograph was taken, and nothing about any specific feature of the site.
This paucity of information in the titles confers de facto another function upon them, inciting the observer (in the Duchampian sense of the participant-spectator) to question the relevance of the titles; that is, the relationships between what is shown in the photograph and what is signified in the title. In other words, what we see may correspond to the idea of have of such-and-such a type of place, with the titles acting as a simple filing system; but if we look at the pictures without paying attention to the titles and then try to find out to which series such-and-such a photograph belongs, we begin to realize that the spaces we are shown have a great many features in common and that they are all somewhat alike. What emerges is a world of formal resemblances, reflecting one another in a sort of infinite play of echoes.

Vivian Maier

An incredible story. Vivian Maier was a nanny who lived in Chicago for most of her life and passed away in 2009 at the age of 83. Little more is known about her, except that she was an avid street photographer. Her work was discovered at an auction in 2007, more than 100,000 negatives and undeveloped rolls of film, sold by a storage facility who were cleaning out her locker for delinquent rent.

Government offices around the world

Jan Banning was able to capture government officials in the wild, taking pictures in 8 vastly different countries. All of these people may have desks to sit at, but the offices range from plush to just a table outside.

“Bureaucratics is a project consisting of a book and exhibition containing 50 photographs, the product of an anarchist’s heart, a historian’s mind and an artist’s eye. It is a comparative photographic study of the culture, rituals and symbols of state civil administrations and its servants in eight countries on five continents, selected on the basis of polical, historical and cultural considerations: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen.” – Jan Banning

Somewhere To Disappear - A film with Alec Soth

Teaser - Somewhere To Dissapear from Arnaud Uyttenhove on Vimeo.

Somewhere To Disappear - A film with Alec Soth

• Posted 5 hours ago by Jack Lowe · film · news
• "Somewhere To Disappear" is a new documentary by Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove which explores the desire to run away. For two years Flammarion and Uyttenhove followed world-renowned photographer Alec Soth on his journey across America - documenting people who have retreated from society for his series "Broken Manual". These modern-day hermits and monks live in caves, mountain cabins and deserts, which Soth feels is "in the culture right now" and is, in some ways, "preparation for the decline of the American empire."
  "This film is about men, America, Alec Soth and the dream to disappear."
  If you want to see this and you live in either Minneapolis, Toronto or New York - you're in luck! Screening dates are below:
  Minneapolis: 2 May, 7pm at the St. Paul Film Festival.
  Toronto: 5 May at 7pm and 7 May at 1:15pm at the HotDocs Festival.
  New York: 9 May, 8pm at The New School.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  www.somewheretodisappearthefilm.com

PIETER HUGO: "The Dog's Master" (2007)

Alhaji Hassan with Ajasco, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria 2007

The Dog's Master

By Pieter Hugo

These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption 'The Streets of Lagos'. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.

Through a journalist friend I eventually tracked down a Nigerian reporter, Adetokunbo Abiola, who said that he knew the 'Gadawan Kura' as they are known in Hausa (a rough translation: 'hyena handlers/guides').

A few weeks later I was on a plane to Lagos. Abiola met me at the airport and together we took a bus to Benin City where the 'hyena men' had agreed to meet us. However, when we got there they had already departed for Abuja.

PAUL GRAHAM: "The Unreasonable Apple" (2010)

From A1 - The Great North Road, 1981-1982

By Paul Graham

This month I read a review in a leading US Art Magazine of a Jeff Wall survey book, praising how he had distinguished himself from previous art photography by:

“Carefully constructing his pictures as provocative often open ended vignettes, instead of just snapping his surroundings”

Anyone who cares about photography‘s unique and astonishing qualities as a medium should be insulted by such remarks, especially here, now, in 2010, in this country, in this city, which has embraced photography like no other.

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

This is tremendously sad, for if we look back, the simple truth is that the majority of the great photographic works of art of the 20th century operate in precisely this territory: from Walker Evans to Robert Frank, Diane Arbus to Garry Winogrand, from Stephen Shore traveling across America in Uncommon Places; Robert Adams navigating the freshly minted suburbs of Denver in The New West, or William Eggleston spiraling towards Jimmy Carter’s hometown in Election Eve, who would seriously propose that these sincere photographic artists were merely “snapping their surroundings”?

JH Engstrom Interview - HUH Magazine

• JH Engstrom

• Posted 7 months ago by Milene Larsson · Art & Design · art

• JH Engström started photographing the woods when he was 15, to express how beautiful he found them. Then, in his early 20s, he landed a job as Mario Testino's assistant in Paris and, upon moving back to Sweden, Anders Petersen (who in turn was mentored by Christer Strömholm) took him under his wing. Talk about photographic legacy, eh? JH is one of the rare photographers to actually spend years on his projects and putting his soul into each and every one of his award-winning, collectible books. His eye for detail, ability to capture a moment's emotions and eclectic use of photographic styles makes him responsible for some of the most interesting photography to ever come out of Sweden. PS. He has two new books coming out this fall.
  

Hello JH, how are you?
Good. I'm in Paris. 

On vacation?
No, I have access to a studio here. I've been travelling back and forth between here and Varmland, the region in Sweden where I grew up, basically all my life. My dad got a job here when I was 10, so the whole family moved to Paris for three years. 

 

Charlotte Cotton @ Foam What's Next