ADAM BELL / blog

blogger

2010-02-04T10:12:00.000-05:00

I've received word from Blogger that they will no longer be supporting SFTP/FTP blogs by the end of March. This means I will need to find a publishing method for my blog - either switching to WordPress or Moveable Type, migrating my blog to a stand-alone blogger blog with it's own url or retiring my blog. I'm not sure what I will do - but my address and Atom/RSS feed will likely change.

That said, I will keep you posted.

Adam Schreiber

2010-01-25T17:12:00.007-05:00

© Adam Schreiber, All Rights Reserved

Adam Schreiber has a show coming up at Sasha Wolfe Gallery this March. There is not much out there about his work - but it looks pretty interesting. Like many contemporary photographers, his work seems to skirt easy definition, but seems to draw playfully on the history and multifaceted nature of the medium from corporate and scientific photography to conceptual art photography. Referring to his recent work, one press release states,

[Adam draws] much of his imagery and inspiration from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a library and museum dedicated to the humanities. There, he has photographed cultural artifacts ranging from the first known photograph taken in 1826 to a variety of other industrial and historical oddities.

© Adam Schreiber, All Rights Reserved

© Adam Schreiber, All Rights Reserved

© Adam Schreiber, All Rights Reserved

You can see more here, here and here.

Lay Flat 02: Meta

2009-11-16T15:24:00.003-05:00

Lay Flat 02: Meta, the second issue of Lay Flat is currently in production and is in need to additional funds. If you can, make a donation to help print and distribute the issue. Any donations of $50 or over will receive a tote bag with the Lay Flat logo, but no donation is too small. Issue 01 was great, and is already sold out, and this new issue looks even better. I am very excited to have an essay in the upcoming issue and can't wait to see it.

----------------------

Lay Flat 02: Meta

Lay Flat 02: Meta
Edition of 1,000
ISSN 1948-2876
ISBN 978-0-9842973-1-3

Release date: TBA

Edited by Shane Lavalette and Michael Bühler-Rose.

Lay Flat 02: Meta brings together the works of contemporary photographers whose images are conceptually engaged with the history, process and conventions of the medium itself. Photographs by Claudia Angelmaier, Semâ Bekirovic, Charles Benton, Lucas Blalock, Talia Chetrit, Anne Collier, Natalie Czech, Jessica Eaton, Roe Ethridge, Stephen Gill, Daniel Gordon, David Haxton, Matt Keegan, Elad Lassry, Katja Mater, Laurel Nakadate, Lisa Oppenheim, Torbjørn Rødland, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Joachim Schmid, Penelope Umbrico, Useful Photography, Charlie White, Ann Woo and Mark Wyse are accompanied by the textual contributions of Lesley A. Martin (Publisher/Editor, Aperture Foundation), Adam Bell (Co-editor, The Education of a Photographer), Noel Rodo-Vankeulen and Arthur Ou, as well as an interview with artist James Welling by Lyle Rexer (Author, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography).

JL editions

2009-11-05T10:54:00.010-05:00

© Michael Schmelling and JL Books, All Rights Reserved

JL Books has a number of great limited editions and artists books now available that are all very reasonably priced - especially given many are only in editions of 10-30. All of them look pretty great, but some stand outs are: Michael Schmelling's mystery envelope, which contains a small collection of prints; David La Spina's xeroxed book on Mamaroneck, with hand-tipped photos; Ed Panar's collection of prints enclosed in a glassine envelope, Relics; Darin Mickey's collection of prints in a HR envelope; and finally Gregory Halpern's Omaha Sketchbook.

© David La Spina and JL Books, All Rights Reserved

© David La Spina and JL Books, All Rights Reserved

© Ed Panar and JL Books, All Rights Reserved

© Darin Mickey and JL Books, All Rights Reserved

© Greg Halpern and JL Books, All Rights Reserved

Space is the Place

2009-10-15T13:18:00.002-04:00

Fun and Games

2009-10-05T11:36:00.002-04:00

Sad lonely arcades, tattered carnival attractions, haunted houses and threadbare strip clubs. Lisa Kerezsi new book, Fun and Games, has just been released by Nazraeli Press, and is the culmination of a large ongoing project investigating the odd and mysterious places we go for amusement. With the closure of Astroland in Coney Island, space like those photographer by Kereszi are fast disappearing, but nevertheless, remain a vital part of the American landscape.

What is remarkable about Kereszi is her subject often seems so common (abandoned spaces and kitschy spaces), especially among photographers, yet her attention and keen eye make the work wholly her own. As she states, "when you look at a nocturnal place in the light of day, it looks strange and uncanny. Reality becomes surreal. I look at those banal details that I find (a rip or tear, some dirt, a crack) with a documentary, deadpan view, but colored with emotion and desire and a longing for something beyond." Like the curtain pulled back on the wizard of Oz, the attention to detail in these images reveal all the longing, hope and desperation that imbues these spaces.

The book itself is gorgeous. At 14x12 inches, the images have a power and presence that is difficult to achieve in smaller books. At only fifty images, the book is also tightly edited and sequenced to great effect. Humorous, smart and affectionate, Fun and Games shows how even a clichéd subject can be transformed by a great photographer.

© Lisa Kereszi, All Rights Reserved

© Lisa Kereszi, All Rights Reserved

Robert Bergman

2009-09-21T15:03:00.011-04:00

Robert Bergman, who I wrote about a couple of years ago, is having a much deserved revival this fall. After his knock-out inclusion in the MoMA exhibition, The Printed Picture, Bergman is having three major shows this November at Yossi Milo, PS1 and the National Gallery in DC.

UPDATE: Bergman's PS1 show opens Oct. 25th and runs until Jan. 4th. There is an excellent interview in this month's Brooklyn Rail, which you can read here.

Words Without Pictures - Event (9/17/09)

2009-09-14T13:06:00.004-04:00

WWP is hosting an event this Thursday the 17th at the New School that should be great. I'll be participating as a special guest along with a few other people. If you are free, come check it out. Given the star caliber, it should be packed.

Words Without Pictures
Thursday, September 17, 2009, 7:00 pm
Panel Discussion

FREE

The New School
Tishman Auditorium

66 West 12th Street
New York, New York

Aperture Foundation at The New School presents this panel discussion as part of the Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context series. This event is the first in series VI, celebrating the launch of the innovative Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) book project Words Without Pictures, which documents roughly one year of conversations about the most pressing issues shaping contemporary photography.

Featuring moderator Charlotte Cotton, curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, LACMA; and panelists Alex Klein, artist and Ralph M. Parsons Curatorial Fellow in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, LACMA; Matt Keegan, artist and editor of North Drive Press; David Reinfurt, graphic designer and co-founder of Dexter Sinister; Denise Wolff, Aperture Editor, plus special guests including Fia Backström, Adam Bell, Johanna Burton, Melissa Catanese, Sarah Charlesworth, Moyra Davey, Darius Himes, John Lehr, Miranda Lichtenstein, Arthur Ou, Ed Panar, Laurel Ptak, and others to be announced.

More info here.

Words Without Pictures

2009-08-06T11:14:00.005-04:00

Words Without Pictures, the online essay, discussion and interview site created by the LAMCA Photo. Department, Charlotte Cotton, Alex Klein and Stephanie Ford, is now available as a book. While originally available as PDFs on the site, the essays along with new content, transcripts of discussions at the LAMCA, and reader responses, have been compiled into a fantastic book. Evolving out of Cotton's equally engaging, but now defunct site, Tip of the Tongue, the anthology brings together some of the most prominent contemporary photographers and critics - including Walead Beshty, Jason Evans, Charlotte Cotton, George Baker, Sze Tsung Leong, Paul Graham, Shannon Ebner, James Welling and many more. Rather than seek a publisher, the editors have taken the rather brilliant move and used lulu, the print-on-demand service, to print and distribute the book. Considering the project's effort to offer a contemporary assessment of photography and photographic practice, the effort to bypass a more institutional publisher, and publishing's frequent lag time, is smart.

As probably the most interesting, and fiercely contemporary, book on photography I've read in a while, I love the risk the book takes. Rather than offer safe assessments of photography, the essays map and explore new territory in photography. Charles Traub and I were lucky enough to contribute a small part with an excerpt from our book - The Education of a Photographer - in the questionnaire section. While very different from our somewhat theory-averse book, WWP led me to reflect on the challenges of putting together a book of this nature and more broadly how texts shape the medium.

One of the difficulties of editing any book on photography, where accepted truths and texts are well established and entrenched, is creating something new. By staking a claim in the present, WWP does not attempt to usurp the canonical texts of photography, but rather offer new ones that grapple with the issues shaping contemporary practice. For our own book, TEOP, we intentionally excluded certain texts that still dominate most photography anthologies (i.e., Sontag, Barthes etc...) and tried to compile something more idiosyncratic, diverse and unique. Limited by budget, we could not get a lot of the pieces or include certain photographers we wanted. Given these limitations, we made an effort to get pieces that didn't just discuss someone's work or retread know issues, but touched on something deeper about what it means to be a photographer.

It's often hard to follow the life of a book as it enters the world. Is it possible to shake off the ghosts of the past, or does one just learn to live with ghosts? Even with a publisher, understanding how, when or if a book has been received and digested can be hard to parse. My only concern with WWP, as a print-on-demand book, is that enough copies enter the world, so that its prescient and diverse discussions, raised so eloquently, have the opportunity to percolate, ferment and enter the contemporary dialogue shaping it for years to come.

blurb, photobooks etc...

2009-07-21T18:21:00.023-04:00

If a blurb photobook is printed, sells a few copies, and is subsequently deleted and no longer available, does anyone read it? what is its life, influence and significance to the medium?

One of the exciting aspects of services like blurb is that they allow photographers and artists to create their own books. As much as self-publishing has a bad rap, for photographers it is worth noting that self-publishing has long been a liberating tool of necessity - Lee Friedlander's Haywire Press is a prominent example. Although photobook publishing has grown tremendously over the past fifteen years or so, the costs and hurdles to getting a book published are still great. Without the large overhead of self-publishing, blurb, and other similar services, allow photographers to publish their books and transfer the cost onto their audience. However, for all its democratic appeal, these books are often expensive and have an uncertain future. Lacking the certainty of an edition of 1000 or more and a publisher with distribution, a book may sell well or may not sell at all. A book may also only have fifty copies printed before an author deletes it from the servers, or blurb goes out of business, leaving the book homeless.

I was thinking about these issues when looking at this years Photobook.Now competition at blurb and reexaming the one book I bought from last year's competition winners - John Lehr's Something is Happening. Unfortunately, the book is no longer available and seems to have an uncertain future. While blurb printed a number for the competition, how many were bought? Did it sell out? Was it pulled from blurb? Does it have a future or beyond its short life? Will books like it become prized limited editions or artist books hoarded by future (and current) book collectors, whose carefully detective work has determined exactly how many copies were actually printed and sold?

Sifting through the endless books of nudes and sunsets, there are a number of excellent books, which are worth mentioning from this years entries. Ed Panar, whose book Johnstown, was a winner last year, has offered two books, one of which continue his obsessive documentation and exploration of Johnstown, PA, 574 Views of Johnstown, and City of Champions, which turns his gaze to Pittsburgh.

Ed Panar, City of Champions

Ed Panar, 574 Views of Johnstown

Emily Shur, a photographer based in California, has created a smart book of idiosyncratic landscapes and landscape fragments from around the world entitled The Woods.

Emily Shur, The Woods

Hannah Allen Smith's book, The Battle Of Monmouth, is a subtle and poetic exploration of place and history.

Hannah Smith Allen, The Battle of Monmouth

Irina Rozovsky's quiet and beautiful images of Israel in One Too Many are reminiscent of last years critically acclaimed Naini and the Sea of Wolves by Trinidad Carrillo.

Irina Rozovsky, One To Nothing

Ofer Wolberger's Life With Maggie, which has already deservedly won awards and is currently on exhibit at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London, is a smart and funny travelogue/photo-album in the tradition of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

Ofer Wolberger, Life With Maggie

In the recent tradition of Jason Fulford's Crushed and Raising Frogs for $ $ $, Mike Flemming's Vague Vagaries is an idosyncratic collection of smart and funny photographs.

Mike Flemming, Vague Vagaries

Steve Smith, whose first book, The Weather And A Place to Live, was the recipient of the Honickman First Book Prize, has created another book which continues and expands his exploration of the man-altered landscape of western landscape - albeit this time in color.

Steve Smith, Close To Nature

Other excellent books include Maureen Dreenan's Meet Me In The Green Glen, Jacqueline Bate's La Vita Americana, Sarah Palmer's Heart's Desire, Susan Worsham's Some Fox Trails In Virginia, Sean Hanratty's Photosynthesis and Mike Sinclair's City Beautiful. There are others I've missed, I'm sure, but it is daunting sifting through the 2000+ entries. I'll post more as I go through them.

What exciting is that you can preview most books, so take some time and have a look.

[Update: Please note the revision above about Ed Panar's books. City of Champions is based on Pittsburgh, not Johnstown. Thanks Ed, and sorry for the confusion.]

Cold Souls

2009-06-28T12:30:00.007-04:00

About a year and half ago, I was fortunate enough be the still-photographer on the upcoming movie Cold Souls (dir. Sophie Barthes, Samuel Goldwyn). Produced by Journeyman Pictures and Touchy Feely Films, the movie is finally coming out August 7th - and looks great. A cross between Woody Allen's Sleeper, Godard and Gogol, the movie is a black comedy with a sci-fi twist. Unfortunately, I missed the movie at the New Directors/New Films Festival, but am excited to finally see the film.

A lot has already been written about the movie since it first screened at Sundance, but here is an interesting interview with Sophie Barthes, the director.

UPDATE: The official site and trailer is now up here.

Ahorn Magazine - Issue 2

2009-04-13T19:30:00.007-04:00

The most recent issue of Ahorn Magazine is now online. Created by Daniel Augschoell and Anya Jasbar, Ahorn is a great collection of reviews, portfolios and essays. I was honored to be asked to include a book review in the latest issue. Having recently discovered the strange and enigmatic work of Bertrand Fleuret, I choose to write about his most recent book - Landmasses and Railways (J&L Books, 2009). Also included in the issue are the photographs, writings and reviews of Shawn Gust, Daniel Shea, Ben Alper, Andrea Diefenbach, Ian Aleksander Adams and Nicola Kast.

Check out the essay here along with the rest of the magazine.

© Bertrand Fleuret and J&L Books, All Rights Reserved

Lay Flat 01: Remain in the Light

2009-03-16T16:59:00.003-04:00

© Ed Panar — featured in Lay Flat 01: Remain in Light

I just received my copy of Lay Flat 01: Remain in the Light and it looks great. Shane Lavalette and Karly Wildenhaus have both done a great job bringing the project to fruition. The essays and interview are an especially nice addition to the well-curated collection. I also like the fact that the photos are loose. Unbound, the magazine and its images feel rooted to their online origins. Ready to enter the world as postcards, frame-ready prints, or however else their owner sees fit, the pictures are free to circulate widely. Hopefully, they will make it far.

If you haven't already, get your copy here.

Wounded Cities

2008-12-15T11:51:00.006-05:00

As a graduate student, I had the great fortune to work with Leo Rubinfien my thesis year. I was already a huge fan of his woefully under-appreciated book, A Map of the East, and was just discovering his insightful essays on Winogrand, Robert Adams and August Sanders written for Art In America. Leo has a fantastic new book and traveling exhibition, called Wounded Cities, which combines his talent as a photographer and writer. Just published by Steidl, and currently showing at the Corcoran, Wounded Cities begins as a personal meditation on the psychological wounds of 9/11, but broadens to a larger exploration of cities, their inhabitants and the trauma of terrorism, religious violence and urban anxiety.

© Leo Rubinfien, All Rights Reserved

Having moved to downtown Manhattan in the shadows of the Twin Towers less than a week before 9/11, Rubinfien reflects on the violence that unfolded on the doorstep of his new home, its effects on him and his family, but also the lingering wounds and political anguish of the years to come. As he writes,

...I found myself searching the faces on each street corner where, as people waited for the light to change, masked as at any other time, I would hope to discover indications of who they really were... to peel out of this stranger here or the next one over... some foretelling of what — if I extrapolated madly — was going to happen...

Rubinfien moved from searching and photographing the faces of New Yorkers, to traveling to cities like Tokyo, Karachi, Bombay, London, Madrid, Nairobi, Tel Aviv and others, which had similarly been affected by acts of terrorism.

© Leo Rubinfien, All Rights Reserved

It is worth noting that Rubinfien never includes the rubble or any physical evidence of the attacks in his images and instead looks to the witnesses, the survivors. Projecting the complexities of 9/11 and other terror attacks on the inscrutable expressions of strangers photographed in passing is problematic at best. However, Rubinfien makes no attempts to account for their expressions or their meaning, which he admits could reflect any of a miriad of different personal worries. As actors, they become witnesses to terror - grappling with it's aftermath. Like the essay in which Rubinfien reflects on the personal effects of the tragedy, the anonymous faces on the streets become a mirror reflecting Rubinfien's conflicting emotions and struggle for meaning in the face of unspeakable horror and lingering terror - where did we go wrong, how did this happen?....

© Leo Rubinfien, All Rights Reserved

While the images are all striking and evocative, what binds the work together is the book's unique format and eloquent writing. As a traditional monograph with an essay, the book would have failed and lacked the personal and emotional weight necessary to carry the heavy subject. Instead, the book is essentially a personal essay, divided into four chapters, with over 80 gate-fold portraits interspersed. The first chapter considers 9/11 and events it triggered; the second chapter reflects on the the generation conflicts and political turmoil into which Rubinfien was born; the third chapter reflects on Islam, jihad and the predominantly young men who are drawn to groups as disparate as al-Qaida, Hamas etc...; the final chapter reflects on the 9/11 lingering political consequences around the world and the growing divisions around the world.

Largely influenced by Japanese photographers, Fukhase and Tomatsu come to mind, Rubinfien's personal and poetic exploration of the events surrounding 9/11 elevates the work above a mere document of the tragedy, making it one of the best, and most evocative, photobooks to deal with 9/11 and it's aftermath.

© Leo Rubinfien, All Rights Reserved

Wounded Cities is currently up in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC and Robert Mann Gallery in NYC. The book can also be purchased here and here.

Try To Praise The Mutilated World

2008-11-20T10:52:00.002-05:00

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Darker Diamond, the work of John Opera

2008-11-19T11:52:00.006-05:00

© John Opera, All Rights Reserved

I discovered John Opera's work the other day when looking at the forthcoming MP3 book by Aperture this spring. Combining Romantic landscape and modernist abstractions, Opera's photographs toy with the historicized themes of the sublime landscape and modernist abstract photography. While mixing these two disparate modes of photographic representation may seem odd, or jarring, at first, together the different images highlight the messy convergence and construct of both the exterior, natural world, and the interior, personal abstracted world.

Like artists such as Walead Beshty or Florian Maier-Aichen, the work cleverly draws on and critiques historical modes of photographic representation to explore and challenge the medium. As Opera states in an interview,

There is the photo ghetto: the photo world that folds in on itself that is only really serving itself. It’s associated with the grand failures of photography in the twentieth-century, and it includes the whole feminist critique of photography being a machismo mode of representation, or the myth of the “decisive moment,” or staging. There’s part of photography that’s still closely connected to failures in late Modernism that most other art forms have recognized and moved on from.

Find out more about his work here and here.

© John Opera, All Rights Reserved

© John Opera, All Rights Reserved

spring book spring

2008-11-13T15:14:00.009-05:00

© Doug DuBois, All Rights Reserved

Being an unrepentant bibliophile, I can't resist being excited about the latest crop of Aperture books. They've just released their Spring Catalog, and they've got a number of cool books coming out. Among the books are Thomas Ruff's book JPGS, The Edge of Vision (Lyle Rexer's exploration of contemporary photographic abstraction), Vol. 2 of the MP3 Project (Curtis Mann, John Opera and Stacia Yeapanis), a Magnum compilation on the effect of AIDS wordlwide, and a book called Photography After Frank, an essay compilation which explores Robert Frank's neverending influence.

However, there are a couple of books I'm most excited to see. The first is entitled Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s, and is edited by Ryuichi Kaneko, the curator of the Tokyo's Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Riding on the success of Parr and Badger's books, as well as Roth's book, 101 Photography Books, this is another in a growing list of photobooks on photobooks. Hopefully, along with more recent re-publications of important Provoke and other seminal Japanese photobooks, this book will help fill the gap in the West's knowledge about Japanese photography and books, and their profound significance for the medium. Although I'm admittedly often perplexed by the faint trickle of tomes that make their way to the US, the wealth, volume and variety of work in Japanese photobooks is exciting. Given the often narrow range of creative influence for young photographers in the US, the variety and radically different nature of the work is welcome.

I'm also excited to see books by both Eirik Johnson and Doug Dubois. Eirik Johnson won the Santa Fe Prize a couple of years ago for his project Borderlands, which was subsequently published as a book by Twin Palms. His new body of work, entitled Sawdust Mountain, explores the fragile relationship between man, industry and nature in the Pacific Northwest. Although travelling well-worn paths, Johnson manages to offer fresh and interesting images that further probe our conflicted relationship with nature. Likewise, Doug Dubois' book All The Nights And Days, is another exciting publication by a well-deserving and excellent photographer on a familiar subject. The culmination of over twenty-years, DuBois' tender and smart pictures of his family manage to avoid the ready clichés of photographing the family while remaining evocative and touching. Began after his father suffered an on a commuter train, the work explores the subtle frailties and daily emotion struggles of a family. Sadly, we have to wait all winter to see these treasures.

Here Comes The Sun, or Obama Has a Posse

2008-11-10T12:07:00.007-05:00

Get yours here.

the past is a foreign country

2008-10-08T17:34:00.008-04:00

Although I'm a bit late on this on due to my lax and sporadic posts, but I wanted to mention the recent book and exhibition at ICP - Bill Wood's Business. Organized and curated by Marvin Heiferman and Diane Keaton, the book is a collection of the work of Bill Wood, a commercial photographer from Ft. Worth, Texas. From the late '30s to the early 70's, the Bill Wood Photo Company created a photographic record of the daily life (both commercial and private) of a rapidly growing Texas city. From store openings to evidentiary documents to mortuary photographs, Wood's encyclopedic output not only illuminates the distant, yet temporally close past, but also becomes a perplexing exploration of photography's mutable role in our culture.

© Bill Wood, All Rights Reserved

While many curatorial efforts have used photographic archives (individual or collective) to explore and make arguments about the past (Michael Lesy being the most prominant and influential example) or as part of a larger conceptual gesture (Sultan and Mandel's Evidence or Peter Piller and others), Heiferman and Keaton make a conscious effort to avoid decontextualizing or reframing Wood's work as something it is not. It is easy to see how a simple edit of the work could create something as perplexingly obtuse and wonderful as Sultan and Mandel's work, but by refusing to do so, the work emerges as somehow odder and just as rewarding. The dispassionate commercial eye of Wood reveals the distant world of the past, but his images in their encyclopedia scope point down the knotted forked paths of contemporary photography.

© Bill Wood, All Rights Reserved

© Bill Wood, All Rights Reserved

© ICP/Marvin Heiferman, All Rights Reserved

While the exhibition is down, the book is still available and worth checking out here.

Iron Fists and Trademarked Smiles

2008-10-08T13:31:00.007-04:00

About a year ago, I got the opportunity to work with Steve Heller on another book, Iron Fists: Branding The Totalitarian State (Phaidon, 2008). Photographing Steve's extensive collection of Chinese figurines and totalitarian paraphernalia was a great pleasure. Housed in a veritable museum of graphic design, pop culture and design ephemera, Steve's collection is as impressive as it is comprehensive. The latest in a long list of Heller's publications, Iron Fists, is a brilliant examination of the ways in which totalitarian regimes (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Communist China) used graphic design to branded themselves and solidified their control.

From Mao's "Mona Lisa smile" and Lenin's proletarian cap to Mussolini's Futurist posters and the Hitler's infamous swastika, the visual cues, typeface, logos and jingles of the various regimes were all as carefully crafted and considered as the marketing efforts of Madison Avenue ad executives. As Heller writes,

A popular brand of frozen food or laundry detergent is not forced down the consumer’s throat with an iron fist...[nevertheless] the design and marketing methods used to inculcate doctrine and guarantee consumption are fundamentally similar.

Heller's exploration does not attempt to diminish the atrocities of the various regimes, but rather illuminates the efficacy, influence and powerful sway these efforts had over their populace. Considering the continued confluence of design, state power and propaganda, the lessons from this era have continued relevance.

It's also telling that three of the profiled dictators considered themselves artists - Hitler, a architect and watercolorist; Mao a calligrapher and poet; and Mussolini, a pulp novelist and hypermasculine sex symbol. As "artists," the state become their platform to terrible ends. Clearly influenced by (and working in collaboration with) the Futurists, the Russian Constructivists and other artists, the regimes drew upon the artistic heritage and wealth of their nations to design and wield terrible instrument of power.

pretend that you're actually alive

2008-04-27T11:38:00.012-04:00

Leigh Ledare, a freshly minted Columbia MFA, has just produced a complicated and disturbingly voyeuristic book, Pretend You're Actually Alive. Published by PPP Editions, the book coincides with his solo show at Andrew Roth, who runs the press. The work is a dark collaborative exploration of Leigh's mother, their relationship, and the damage of fame and victimization. As the press release states,

[PYAC] can be viewed as an archive of a mother and son’s shared, private moments amidst the desperate attempts to renew her identity as a dancer – this time working as a stripper in a club beside her parents’ apartment. Pretend You’re Actually Alive is also a mapping of Ledare’s mother’s efforts to commodify herself –initially through her precocious childhood talent, later through her overt sexuality, and eventually through the portrayal of herself as an archetypal victim – in efforts to find companionship, attention, financial security, and a benefactor before her youthful, marketable currencies expire.

Combining archival momentos and notes with frank and graphic photographs, the work continues in the intensely personal documentary tradition of Larry Clark (Ledare was the still-photo from Clark's film Ken Park), Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham and even Jim Goldberg. Coming home one holiday, Leigh visit his mom, who lived next door to his grandparents, and she answered the door naked -- dramatically announcing she was now a stripper. His mom, once a famous ballerina, was stripping at a local club and working through a series of abusive relationships in a desperate attempt to maintain and affirm her beauty and talent, and garner the attention and affection of wealthy patrons and boyfriends, who offered her the possibility of financial security.

© Leigh Ledare, All Rights Reserved.

I'm typically wary of personal photojournalistic work - because more often than not the peculiarities of the person's life (or their approach) rarely merit sustained attention. More recently, the trend for self-involved hipsters to document themselves getting drunk or cavorting about naked seems to offers little beyond the initial voyeuristic excitement. At the same time, the kind of self-destructive lifestyle and drama that fuels much similar work can also be a trap and misleading foundation that props up otherwise thin work. Ledare's work seems to avoid this danger and explores deeper issues of intimacy, the collapse and evolution of a mother and son relationship, co-dependency, performance and authorship. In many ways, the work is a performative investigation and collaboration btw Ledare and his mother about her and their relationship.

© Leigh Ledare, All Rights Reserved.

The book is quite beautiful and comes softbound in a slip-case. The book is divided into chapters with photographs mixed in with various typed and hand-written notes, archival photos, and diary entries that recount what are fictional and truthful events in Leigh and his mother's life. The show is up at Andrew Roth until mid-June and the book can be purchased there or here.

bye bye photography

2008-03-28T13:17:00.019-04:00

© Daido Moriyamo, All Rights Reserved

Sometimes I think the Japanese got it right all along - f*#k the print, long live the book. Having to contend with limited gallery opportunities, the photo book industry flourished in Japan and they developed innovative ways to push the boundaries of the printed image. This thought crossed my mind again when I went to Christie's in anticipation of their photobook auction next week. The previews don't open until next week - but I wanted to take a peek at the catalog - and see a few of the treasures like Yutaka Takanashi's Toshi-e, Towards a City, issues of Provoke and William Eggleston's Morals of Vision.

After looking at the catalog, I walked through the Contemporary Art Auction previews - which reminded me why I don't like auctions. Art work in all states of disrepair hung with a loose effort to create a vaguely meaningful dialog - after all it is a sale, not a show. There are a few photographs for sale - and with a few exceptions they looked like sad rejects cast off by their owners before they faded into oblivion. A relatively early Gursky (1993) had not only faded and developed a sickly jaundiced pallor but also looked like it was barely clinging to its diasec mount. It reminded me of the shock I felt at the Thomas Struth retrospective at the Met, where most of the prints had a noticeable magenta or yellow cast - suggesting their owners had placed them next to their windows and long hours of sunlight.

© Daido Moriyamo, All Rights Reserved

Perhaps it is the willful disregard of the "fine print" that seems refreshing in the face of over-sized megaprints. Artist's such as Daido Moriyama, Kikuji Kawada, Yutaka Takanashi and others (including American artists such as Lee Friedlander and the incredible John Gossage), have all used the book to magnificent ends. Give me a copy of Moriyama's bye bye photography (Shashin yo Sayonara) (1972) or Kawada's The Map (1965) over a sickly Gursky anyday.

© Daido Moriyamo, All Rights Reserved

Mark Steinmetz - South East

2008-03-27T11:14:00.003-04:00

Following up on his beautiful book South Central, Mark Steinmetz and Nazraeli will be releasing South East in June 2008. Although I've written about Steinmetz before, he seems like one of those photographers who is consistently present (i.e., Blindspot, exhibitions etc...), but somehow eludes wider acclaim. Perhaps the fact that he works in B/W and in a more traditional social documentarian mode, has led some to dismiss the elegant and poetic beauty of his photographs and see his work as somehow less contemporary. Photographing mainly in the South - Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana - Steinmetz captures a life lived on the periphery of the American Dream, yet a life that is still touched by grace and beauty.

© Mark Steinmetz, All Rights Reserved

© Mark Steinmetz, All Rights Reserved

© Mark Steinmetz, All Rights Reserved

these birds walk

2008-03-24T20:51:00.005-04:00

© Mike Brodie, All Rights Reserved

these birds walk, the excellent series of books published by Paul Schiek, has announced the next round of books in the kin series. The next round promises an exciting mix of familiar and new names - Alec Soth, Todd Hido, Marianne Muller and Abner Nolan. They aren't taking subscriptions yet, but it should be up soon.

I still love looking at Mike Brodie's book from the first round, which featured Polaroid snapshots and portraits from his trainhoppin' adventures around the US. Jim Goldberg's book is coming out shortly and I can't wait. The series received a lot of attention when it first came out, but it is worth revisiting since the next round is coming up. While much DIY efforts can be self-aggrandizing and largely forgettable, it is nice to see a project producing exciting new work that skirts the edges of the ever expanding photo publishing world.

the idea of order

2008-03-24T20:37:00.007-04:00

© Robert Adams, All Rights Reserved

The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly. -Robert Adams