Aperture's Blog, page 168

Review: Bronwyn Law-Viljoen on Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

 

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, Ponte City

This book was short-listed for a 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award.

Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

Ponte City

Steidl

Göttingen, Germany, 2014

Designed by Ramon Pez

9 1/2 x 14 5/ 8 in. (24.1 x 37 cm)

192 pages

365 four-color and black-and-white images

Clothbound hardcover in a box, including 17 accompanying booklets with written and visual essays

steidl.de

 

It is a testament to the purchase of the building known as Ponte City on the collective imagination of Johannesburgers that, within minutes of my opening Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s book of that name in a coffee shop hardly four miles from the place, several people stop to tell me something about the Ponte they know: a city councillor whose German father lived there in the early ’80s when he came to South Africa on a work assignment; a lyric soprano who sang a lullaby in the round building’s famous hollow core; an architect just returned from a Europe trip with a trove of city books, several of which mention Ponte; and an artist who conducted a “suicide project” in the tower—a video camera parachuted down into the core, recording as it went.

I have my own flickering recollection of a visit to a Ponte apartment in Johannesburg’s “bad” late ’80s. On such visits one saw quickly that it was, then, a space where more than one kind of transgression was possible: the apartment was shared by one black and one white tenant, defying multiple apartheid-era proscriptions, and, at some point in the visit, drugs of various description were consumed. Today, cleaned up, secure, and home to thousands of tenants, many from outside South Africa, its glamour and infamy are ameliorated by the everydayness of life in a residential skyscraper.

What this substantial book demonstrates, both in its visual scope and its bookish, boxy materiality, are the variegated ambitions, associations, and meanings of an apartheid-era residential building that rises fifty-four storeys above Johannesburg’s skyline—a city within a city, like the high-rise in José Saramago’s novel The Cave. Housed in a plain, stapled cardboard box, Ponte City is really eighteen books: a large photobook with a minimalist blue-and-black cloth cover, and, nesting beneath it in a rectangular cavity, seventeen saddle-stitched booklets. These form a kind of visual-textual puzzle: the cover of each is a section of one of the photographs in the bigger book, and each reflects on or interprets Ponte differently.

If you follow the editorial signposts, you’ll flip through the photobook, and as you get to the pages with the “missing pieces,” reach for the right booklet and read downward into the subterranean layers beneath Ponte, or upward through its hollow core. You’ll gaze voyeuristically into the apartments, or rifle through press clippings, tracing Ponte’s history from its construction in 1975, to its middle-class hipsterism, to its status as urban eyesore, to the post-apartheid ambitions developers had for it. Reading in this way is like tunneling into Ponte’s past and discovering that the first vision for the building, as a home for upwardly mobile young urbanites, lies buried under the various layers of its complex history. But you’ll also read “smaller” histories—gleaned from the ephemera gathered by the photographers from vacated apartments into a bitty, pop archive—about migration, bureaucracy, Johannesburg’s transformations, hope and failure and the banal texture of daily life. These are presented textually and visually as quasi-fictions, fictions, and documentary fragments, lying between the full-bleed images—some by the photographers, some found—in the photobook.

This book looks at a single and singular building from multiple perspectives, at once a filmic, literary, and photographic account of Ponte, fixated both on the individual lives lived here and the heady panoramas of the hectic city from which it ascends. Ephemera serve as counterpoint to the “big gaze” of Subotzky and Waterhouse’s meticulously composed images. But so do their collages of doors, windows, televisions. In these they zoom in and away—from kitchen counter to cityscape—in dizzying maneuvers that point to the relationship of metropole to individual life, of history to intimacy. Ponte City plays out partly as a postmodern archeological dig, recalling the work of other documentarians but also contemplating the inevitable fragmentation of lives and the concomitant inventiveness that are the photographer’s challenge and pleasure.

_____

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is a writer, senior lecturer, and head of creative writing at Wits University, Johannesburg; cofounder and editor of Fourthwall Books; and former editor of Art South Africa magazine. fourthwallbooks.com

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Review: Daniele De Luigi on Nicoló Degiorgis

 

Nicoló Degiorgis, Hidden Islam

This book was the winner of the First PhotoBook Award in the 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. 

Nicoló Degiorgis

Hidden Islam

Rorhof

Bolzano Bozen, Italy, 2014

Designed by Nicoló Degiorgis and Walter Hutton

6 1/4 x 9 1/2 in. (16 x 24 cm)

90 pages, including 45 gatefolds

42 color photographs and 82 black-and-white photographs

Hardcover

rorhof.com

“Silent invasion” is a phrase that Italian right-wing populist parties and media frequently use to oppose the rise of new Islamic places of worship across the country. The clear aim is to generate panic about Muslims “colonizing” Italy. It is true that places in the country where Muslims can practice their faith are often invisible to others—but this is because requests to build official mosques are so frequently denied by local governments. Beyond special regulations for Catholicism, there are no clear and complete national laws on the construction of places of worship, leaving other religious groups vulnerable to bias. Moreover, every time there is an announcement that a new mosque may be built, groups of local citizens shout that it will be a den of terrorists and barbarians. As a result, you can literally count the number of official Italian mosques on two hands, and an estimated 1.5 million Muslims are forced to gather in hundreds of makeshift places of worship.

Hidden Islam by Nicoló Degiorgis, winner of the 2014 Rencontres d’Arles Prix du Livre d’Auteur, uses a clever layout device to illustrate this situation. The photographer’s research focuses on northeastern Italy, a large area where Islamophobia has spread. Degiorgis carried out an extremely accurate mapping of unofficial places of worship and decided to represent them using a dual approach in style. He shot the exteriors of buildings using the rules of nineteenth-century documentary aesthetics: black and white, diffused daylight, visual clarity, no people, anonymity. The point of view is always diagonal, facing a corner of the building, or frontal, for the apartment buildings featured. The sequence is made up of images of similar buildings, to increase the impression that there’s nothing to see. All the photographs are sorted into eight types—such as warehouses, shops, supermarkets—and pinpointed through postal codes. Half of the buildings have been shot inside too, but in color and typically with people in prayer. The documentary approach in these color photos is narrative: Degiorgis allows himself to vary the point of view and the moment of shooting, with great attention to detail depending on the scene.

The peculiarity of the book is how the photographic material has been organized. Every page in the book is made up of a gatefold: on the outside of the flaps are pictures of the exteriors, while inside the gatefolds are the interiors. The combined use of two photographic codes that are usually seen in opposition—a choice that could be seen as risky—works surprisingly well; the gatefold structure doesn’t read as an obvious play on inside vs. outside.

This book does not only shed light on the condition of Italian Muslims or of Muslims living in Italy. As it’s up to the reader to either keep the pages folded, only looking at the surfaces of the urban landscape, or open them to cast a glance inside, it also works as a metaphor for the attitudes one can adopt in the face of this phenomenon. This is key to understanding religious tensions in contemporary Italy, a land that is both the cradle of Catholicism and a prime destination for many Muslim immigrants, many of whom arrive from countries just across the Mediterranean. Ironically, Hidden Islam could even be a useful tool for the supporters of the “silent invasion” theory. Thus, the book is also a reflection of the instability of photographic meaning and the limits of the medium. As Lewis Baltz suggested, to see is not the same as to know.

_____

Daniele De Luigi was recently appointed curator of the Galleria Civica di Modena Italy, and is a regular contributor to the European Photography Festival in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

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Publisher Profile: Natasha Christia on La Kursala

The exhibition La Decencia, with photographs by Davíd León Rodríguez, at La Kursala in September.

 

La Kursala, an exhibition room dedicated to emerging Spanish photographers and patron for independent publishing under the imprint Los Cuadernos de la Kursala, has been one of the most influential exponents of the recent boom in Spanish photobooks. Initiated in 2007 by the University of Cádiz and assigned since its beginning to photographer, professor, and curator Jesús Micó, the project has remained committed to its core goal of bringing international attention to the periphery of Spanish photographic creation.

The backlist of Los Cuadernos de la Kursala, a collection of photobooks copublished with emerging photographers and small independent editors from around Spain, reads as a heterogeneous cartography of contemporary Spanish photobooks: the forty-three released so far include La caza del lobo congelado by Ricardo Cases (2009), The Afronauts by Cristina de Middel (2012), and Ostalgia by Simona Rota (2013). La Kursala, using a standard low-scale budget, works less as a publisher than as a collaborative, unpaid editor, whose main task is to spread the word about its editorial selection by sending out its whole five-hundred-copy print run to a mailing list of influential photography people in Spain and abroad. In this sense, Los Cuadernos books are messengers: not only have they drawn attention to the curatorial discourse of a small hall in Cádiz, but they have also conferred visibility upon a new generation of photographers and photobook makers residing in Spain who would have otherwise lacked any sort of institutional platform.

Jesús Micó is a Cádiz local permanently based in Barcelona, 900 kilometers away from the small seaside town, which is situated at the extreme southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. He was given carte blanche for La Kursala’s conceptualization and development, and to him, a self-described “expert in projects of the periphery,” it represented a stimulating challenge: was it possible to turn a minor provincial exhibition hall into a reference point in contemporary creation, and, if yes, how? In Micó’s mind, La Kursala should make up for its peripheral position with a fresh and competitive program, omitting consecrated photographers in favor of novel young names. Secondly, it should maintain this program within the margins of an affordable budget, yet not at quality’s expense. Thirdly, and most important, it was necessary to develop a promotional strategy which would allow its work to transcend local frontiers and reach the nucleus of contemporary Spanish photography.

When the University of Cádiz offered a standard budget of 2,900 euros for every La Kursala project, Micó suggested that most of this money be allocated to the publication that accompanied the exhibition rather than to the exhibition itself: book production would be financed with 2,000 euros, while only 900 would be allotted to the exhibition. At the time, photographers, sellers, and institutions in Spain were primarily oriented toward exhibitions, but La Kursala placed photobooks, with their infinite narrative layers, at the core of its project.

In 2008, the year after La Kursala’s founding, the financial crisis blasted away the Spanish market and any illusion of welfare guaranteed until then by the flow of public funds. An emerging generation of photographers found themselves on the crossroad of two eras: before and after the crisis. In 2007, their works were largely absent from gallery walls, museum collections, fairs, or auctions; they were too young, the establishment too conservative. After 2008, they were at least, in comparison to older generations, better prepared to start all over again and deal with irreversible changes to the rules. “Websites, blogs, screenings, and, of course, electronic or printed photobooks became their media of expression,” Micó explains. La Kursala arrived at the right moment. By acknowledging the autonomy of the artist as self-curator and producer, Micó says it provided, for the first time, an institutionalized frame of support for this “self-sustained generation, whose way of understanding photography was closely related to the concept of the photobook—a generation conceiving their works mainly to be made in this format.”

As a result, the books published independently under Los Cuadernos de la Kursala work more like singular artistic statements than like the traditional exhibition catalogues produced by other Spanish publishers. Variety in format, content, and aesthetic denotes Micó’s fundamental curatorial premise: absolute creative freedom for participants and full respect for their work. Attuned to this spirit, La Kursala provides everyone with the same modest budget regardless of their name, trajectory, or status, and, apart from Micó’s discrete coordination and curatorial advice, the University of Cádiz does not interfere in any way with editorial or production. This is a far cry from more traditional Spanish publishers who are less keen on risks and rarities.

As a flexible publishing platform that has provided essential support to many people and projects, La Kursala acknowledges the ideas of self-publishing and the synergy of various agents when putting a project through. Crowdfunding, private sponsors, and small independent publishers are all welcome. Although 2,000 euros is the minimal, elementary budget for each book-publishing project, this has nonetheless kickstarted books such as The Afronauts (a book that was obviously not made with 2,000 euros) and initiatives such as Fiesta Ediciones, Ricardo Cases’s own publishing venture. Furtivos by Vicente Paredes (2012) and Ukraina Pasport by Federico Clavarino (2011) were Fiesta’s first projects exhibited at and copublished with La Kursala, while, for Juan Diego Valera and Aleix Plademunt, the release of their respective Kursala books Coma (2011) and Espectadores (2007) prepared them to launch Ca l’Isidret, their own publishing house.

 

Micó repeatedly stresses the paramount role of regular mail as a promotional channel for La Kursala. Each Los Cuadernos volume is dispatched to journalists, curators, booksellers, professors, collectors, and others in the Spanish photo world. This affordable DIY distribution strategy—airmail requires a minimal budget—has transcended regional barriers and solidified a visceral circulation network that has spread the word, fueled debate on online social networks about photobook culture, and reinforced the awareness of both collective work in photography and of the photobook community.

 

Narrating the story of La Kursala is equivalent to sequencing the history of the Spanish photobook of recent years: nearly all significant independent publishers in Spain have collaborated with or originated from it, and some of the best Spanish designers, including N2, Jaime Narváez, and Ramon Pezzarini, to mention but a few, have been involved in its projects. Over the last years its volumes have been finalists for PHotoEspaña awards, won prestigious distinctions, and been featured in exhibitions, such as the contemporary photobook exhibition Books that are photos, photos that are books at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Photobooks: Here and Now at the Fundaciò Foto Colectania, Barcelona.

 

Meanwhile, life in Cádiz is quiet for La Kursala. The university keeps its budgets frozen. All Cuadernos books can be downloaded from the university’s website in PDF format, with images, critical texts, and biographies. “La Kursala does not have a proper webpage yet due to the lack of funds for its production and permanent actualization,” Micó explains. But perhaps keeping structures minimal and affordable, and depending on its books to provide sites for visceral experience, has been precisely what has contributed to La Kursala’s success.

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Natasha Christia is a freelance writer and curator based in Barcelona. She is currently coordinator of international editions at Editorial RM and a member of the research group Arqueologia del Punt de Vista. natashachristia.com

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Aperture #217 – Editors’ Note

The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

Natalie Czech, A Poem by Repetition by Emmett Williams II , 2013

Are images trumping the written word? Even in the age of instant visual communication via Instagram and Snapchat, this isn’t a new question. Photography critic and curator Nancy Newhall wrote in 1952, in the first issue of this magazine, of which she was a founder: “Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records [will] be kept in images and sounds.” Penned more than sixty years ago, Newhall’s words sound remarkably prescient now that photographs have come to be described as “chatter” and the culture of books and reading is shifting. A New Yorker blog post earlier this year detailed how smartphone pictures had superseded note taking in one writer’s process; a recent New York Times article proclaimed that “The Emoji have Won the Battle of Words,” referring to the popular pictograph lexicon used in text messages.

We hope (and are fairly certain) that the latter isn’t true, but this issue is set against a backdrop where images are, arguably, placing significant pressure on the written word, whether or not this is a new or old problem. The prolific French writer Hervé Guibert, an accomplished photographer in his own right, prophetically feared that photography could “quickly turn to madness, because everything is photographable.” He is joined in this issue by William S. Burroughs and Kobo Abe, novelists who moonlighted as photographers. Writers Geoff Dyer and Janet Malcolm never developed a practice as photographers, but both have thought deeply and written extensively about images, navigating the tricky business of translating the visual into the verbal. A group of contemporary fiction writers offer varying takes on the pressure images place on what they do—Lynne Tillman smartly reminds us that “fiction is another form of image making,” and Teju Cole makes a case for poetry and lyricism in the age of automated images. Gus Powell, Moyra Davey, Sarah Dobai, and Eamonn Doyle have all looked to works of literature to inform their work as image makers, whether by adopting a formal constraint, borrowing snippets of language, or riffing on a theme. Taking a cue from Burroughs, creator of the “cut-up,” Natalie Czech and Erica Baum reanimate found language— from tactile, printed book pages to unlikely commercial objects (like the effects pedal above)—prompting viewers to reflect on how language can be both read and seen.

Words as inspiration for image making, words as images, images as open-ended fictions, documentary under the influence of fiction—as in the case of Walker Evans and his interest in writing and French literature, explored here by David Campany—are just some of the ways in which image and language brush up against each other in these pages. Perhaps novelist Tom McCarthy gets it right when he says, “in the end the difference between image and word isn’t relevant because ultimately it’s all scriptural…photography is a branch of writing.”

—The Editors

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Announcing the Winners of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014

Paris, November 14, 2014—Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. Hidden Islam by Nicoló Degiorgis is the winner of $10,000 in the First PhotoBook category. The selection for this year’s new category, Photography Catalogue of the Year, is the separately published, matched set of catalogues Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness and Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany by Christopher Williams, while Imaginary Club by Oliver Sieber is the winner of PhotoBook of the Year. A special mention in that category goes to Vytautas V. Stanionis’s Photographs for Documents.

A jury in Paris selected this year’s winners: Rahaab Allana, curator at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts; Quentin Bajac, Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator at the Museum of Modern Art; Cléo Charuet, designer and director; Sebastian Hau, curator; and Pierre Hourquet, gallerist, publisher, and designer, who replaced Urs Stahel due to a delay in Mr. Stahel’s schedule.

The initial short-list selection was made by Julien Frydman, director of Paris Photo; Todd Hido, photographer and photobook maker; Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture Foundation book program and of The PhotoBook Review; Mutsuko Ota, editorial director of IMA magazine; and Anne Wilkes Tucker, photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

“Overall, it was more complicated than I thought,” says Cléo Charuet. “It was a hard task to judge, as it is a hard task to make a book: understanding the work of a photographer, understanding how to make a book attractive but well-suited to the subject.”

Winner of First PhotoBook 2014:

Nicoló Degiorgis, Hidden Islam

“This volume condenses years of research and interaction with members of Muslim communities in northern Italy. It is a sincere book that attempts to bridge local conditions in Italy to a larger European context—and a very strong example of attention to detail and overall concept in today’s independent bookmaking.”—Sebastian Hau

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year 2014:

Christopher Williams, Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness and Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany

“This is a super pure, extremely well-done set of books: the use of bright colors, the perfect selection of papers, the perfect economy and rhythm. It’s very appropriate to what’s happening right now in terms of both design and photography. The book is a perfect response to the material.”—Cléo Charuet

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year 2014:

Oliver Sieber, Imaginary Club 

From a range of titles that included both emerging artists and contemporary masters competing for the PhotoBook of the Year prize, the jury selected Oliver Sieber’s Imaginary Club as an extremely well-crafted final manifestation of a photographer’s personal, in-depth project.

Special Mention:

Vytautas V. Stanionis, Photographs for Documents

“Photographs for Documents tells me that these are not just documents; they are lives that are shared on the page. The page becomes a stage. . . . The fragility and simplicity, the humility of the materials themselves, are also pivotal to the overall result.”—Rahaab Allana

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The short list is on view in the Publishers section of Paris Photo at the Grand Palais in Paris until November 16, 2014. The exhibition will then travel to the IMA Concept Store in Tokyo from December 9, 2014 to January 18, 2015, and New York’s Aperture Gallery from December 13 to January 29, 2015, followed by exhibitions in 2015 at Photobook Melbourne, Australia, and the Month of Photography Los Angeles.

The short-listed books are also profiled in issue 007 of The Photobook Review, Aperture’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook. The PhotoBook Review is available for free at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore in New York and mailed to all Aperture magazine subscribers.

See the entire PhotoBook Awards 2014 short list.

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Review: Noemi Smolik on Thomas Ruff

 

THOMAS RUFF, ‘r.phg.05_II,’ 2014. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Ruff’s “Photograms,” a series begun in 2012, represents most of his new exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf: after becoming fascinated with the photograms of artists such as Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, Ruff began to experiment with the process himself, but Ruff transfers the analog technique into digital. The darkroom is instead set up inside a computer, with objects three-dimensionally projected, exposed to light, and moved. Through this controlled procedure, virtually exposed waves, crystals, spirals, lenses, and patterns leave their imprints on virtually generated paper. The C-print process then transfers these traces to real pieces of paper measuring approximately six-by-five feet. The resulting framed photograms create an impression that is spherical and remarkably pictorial. Some of these images are highly geometric in composition, with an illusionary depth created by the interplay of light and shadow. Others are chaotic or arbitrary; some are crystal clear while others are indistinct; some are bluish or greenish in tint; and others display astonishingly vivid shades of luminous yellow, red and blue, such as the image phg.05 III (2013). They are created without any use of the camera lens, and, consequently, these images expand the range of Ruff’s photographic experiments, the complexity and diversity of which are without equal in the contemporary art scene.

 

THOMAS RUFF, ‘phg.09_II, 2014,’ © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

The “Interiors” (1979–1983) and “Stars” (1987–1992) series’ are also on view. The small “Interiors” images show the meticulously photographed home décor of Ruff’s parents and friends from the Black Forest region; they testify to a subtle but frightening smugness and narrow-mindedness.

 

THOMAS RUFF, ‘Interieur 1A, 1979,’ © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Giant black photographs of stars, which Ruff acquired from the European Southern Observatory, could potentially serve as an effective contrast to the “Interiors,” but within the constellation of this exhibition, however, they do not, which highlights issues with exhibition with the installation and presentation of the various individual series.

 

THOMAS RUFF, ’17h 38m/-30°,’ 1990, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

The images from the “Night” series (1992–1996), positioned side by side can also produce a slightly bland effect. Inspired by the nighttime photographs that suddenly began appearing on television during the First Gulf War (1990 – 1991), Ruff also began to make use of night vision devices. But he employed them to photograph utterly peaceful courtyards, streets and house entrances in his city of Düsseldorf. These images have a greenish tinge, due to the device’s amplification of low light, and they succeed in wresting light impressions even from the darkness. While making inroads into dark with light, they still leave a mysterious, enigmatic, or even dangerous impression.

 

THOMAS RUFF, ‘Nacht,’ 1992. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

The 2014 series “Negative,” which appears in the same gallery, features blue-tinged images of black-and-white photographs from the nineteenth century that have been transformed back into negatives. The images depict studios of the era when the competition between paintings and photographs began as well as portraits, oriental landscapes, and nudes. With their bluish tinge, a result of the reversion to the negative, these images create the impression a world of ice that has become almost transparent, from a time when the photograph still served as a document. With this new series, Ruff returns to the beginning of his artistic development, when he was dealing with documentary photography. Here, he has turned this kind of photography upside down.

Noemi Smolik is a critic living in Bonn, Germany, and Prague.

Translated from German by Alan G. Paddle.

“Thomas Ruff: Lichten” runs through January 11, 2015, at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. 

THOMAS RUFF, ‘neg◊artists_01,’ 2014. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

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Paris Views: Gail Albert Halaban (Video)

On October 29, 2014, we joined artist Gail Albert Halaban for a conversation with Amy Adler, Emily Kempin Professor of Law at the NYU School of Law, about Halaban’s new book, Paris Views. The two discussed the conventions and tensions of urban lifestyles, the blurring between reality and fantasy, feelings of isolation in the city, and intimacies of home and daily life in Halaban’s work. A continuation of Halaban’s 2012 series Out My Window, her new series Paris Views shifts her focus from New York to Paris and features cinematic atmospheres and intimate domestic stills taken through the windows of her neighbors and others in the community.

Gail Albert Halaban: Paris Views




$79.95



Add to Cart

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Vicki Goldberg: More History in Russian Photographs

Vadim Gushchin, "Colored Envelopes #3," 2010. Courtesy ClampArt, New York City.

Vadim Gushchin, 'Circle of Reading #1,' 2010. Courtesy ClampArt, New York City.

Vadim Gushchin, 'Library #1,' 2000. Courtesy ClampArt, New York City.

Vadim Gushchin, 'Circle of Reading #14,' 2010. Courtesy ClampArt, New York City.

Nikolai Kulebyaki, 'Windows,' 1991. Courtesy the artist.

Nikolai Kulebyaki, 'Windows,' 1994. Courtesy the artist.

Nikolai Kulebyaki, 'Slow Series,' 1984. Courtesy the artist.

Nikolai Kulebyaki, 'Fast Series,' 1994. Courtesy the artist.

Nikolai Kulebyaki, 'Fast Series,' 1990. Courtesy the artist.

Nikolai Kulebyaki, 'Slow Series,' 1990. Courtesy the artist.

In 2013, writer Vicki Goldberg traveled to Russia and Ukraine, where she examined postwar and contemporary visual imagery that illuminates life under and after communism. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we publish Goldberg’s three-part diary, which looks to photography from the Soviet era and today. In part three, Goldberg assesses the contemporary work of Vadim Guschchin and Nikolai Kulebyakin.

Part 3: More History in Russian Photographs

Russian art photographer Vadim Gushchin, who combines minimalist, conceptualist, and abstract strategies, is also entwined with two crucial aspects of Russian art that are inseparable from the nation’s identity and history. (He is widely exhibited internationally and since summer 2013 has been shown twice in Moscow, once in Vienna, and once in Paris.) He photographs the most mundane objects from his (and our) daily life, each in series: books, envelopes, pills, packages, bread. Photographers from Stephen Shore to Gabriel Orozco have also photographed the least imposing elements in our homes— a plate, a pail, a table mat— but Gushchin manages to transpose the globally recognizable, inconsequential, disposable fragments of life into pristine artifacts of art, more beautiful in their spare perfection than reproductions of his work suggest.

A wrapped package, a red business card holder, an envelope, or a single pill is isolated and centered on a table. (He likes envelopes because they tell signify important events: births, weddings, deaths, even in this age of email.)

Seen from above, an envelope or package on a table are flattened into abstract shapes; the table tilts up and runs into the featureless dark ground like a table in a Cézanne still life: a mere three colors, minutely scrutinized and arranged, a single rectangle, sometimes cut off by the frame and maneuvered into different geometries: we are in Malevich territory here, with objects destined for wastebaskets converted to Constructivism, a heroic movement in Russian and indeed in twentieth century art. Gushchin says that it is impossible to invent new forms of art: “The language has been invented. The question is, what do you want to say?”

For fifteen years he photographed only in black and white. In a series of photographs of the white pyramids and spheres used to teach student artists how to draw three-dimensional objects, Guschin pointed out the marks left by handling, which encode a kind of history of the objects. The last of the black and whites was a series of different water glasses, the light choreographing complex patterns within them, each one topped with a different kind of bread. A Russian would understand it at a level of personal and national history: at a Russian wake, family and friends gather to drink wine and eat bread, leaving one empty glass and piece of bread for the dead. Gushchin combined particular glasses with breads of different shapes in an attempt to create the impression of particular people. “Thus,” he told me, “an imaginary portrait gallery of the dead appeared.”

In color, his subjects are frequently red, a color associated not only with Malevich but even more often with icons as it is associated with blood. What’s more, the artist says, the word ‘red’ in Russian is very close to the word for beauty. In a photograph of several plastic jar tops in a row, Gushchin points out a gold metal jar top as another reference: the gold backgrounds of icons refer to the constant splendor of light in heaven. Several of the wrapped packages he photographs are bound with rubber bands, to make a cross. This is a more humble reference to religion than even the current Pope’s automobile: a cross made of rubber bands that have never been blessed, holding together a package that, who knows? may be contaminated with atheism. Can such pedestrian objects assume the mantel of faith? Gushchin says that being Russian, he has to reflect Russia, a country with a long history of fervent belief that persisted even while the Soviets killed millions for their beliefs.

During the summer of 2013 the Glaz (Eye) Gallery in Moscow had an exhibition of work by Nikolai Kulebyakin, another photographer widely known internationally. There were arresting, sometimes counterintuitive, even inexplicable color photographs of the outdoors, made with exposures as long as an entire night and into the day with unpredictable results. Color shifted and light misbehaved as the world turned and the lens lingered.

A larger selection of black- and- white prints offered a dazzlingly, endlessly complex set of still lifes of overlapping glass sheets and objects, some of them broken, plus mirrors, layer upon layer, with light improbably sifting through or ricocheting off unlikely surfaces. These images were tantalizing puzzles with no reasonable solutions – what was in front of what and what behind? What was seen through glass? What was reflected, and what was not? Both series were about photography, seeing, perception, and the limits of all three.

Kulebyakin too has jousted with history, even personal history, on occasion. A series called “Reproduction of Archive” consists of snapshots of children, family groups, a man with a dog, and so on, in diptychs with negative and positive on adjacent halves. The series comments on photography again and the retrieval of family history, the creation and reinforcement of memory through reprinted negatives, a slippery matter: does anyone remember the dog’s name after all these years? Can anyone identify the child in that damaged photograph?

Forget history for the moment or leave it to the future to construct – Kulebyakin’s black-and-white portraits are as individual as, well, the individuals, and take a fresh and powerful look at an age-old genre. The sitters maintain strong identities while negatives of slightly different portraits of themselves are thrown upon the background in rectangles that are somewhat distorted and askew. Something is usually aslant– a trapezoid of light. a wall, or a pane of glass– and strong lights, shadows, and bits of negative portraits of themselves fall over faces, shirts, lightly patterned backgrounds. The result is a partly modernist, partly cubist shifting pattern of lights, darks, and negative reversals, and yet the sitter’s image triumphs over all. A psychic insight is implied: that another self exists, perhaps an inner self, possibly inverse or darker, or just differently perceived by a spectator – or by a photographer. At the same time, these images emphasize the reproducible nature of photography and make visible the ordinary studio procedure of taking more than one portrait of a sitter. They deploy the extraordinary potentials of light in a medium that owes its existence to it.

Possibly somewhere in the vast repository of current work there is some that will make history and last within it, but history can be fickle and elusive. None of us knows what art (original or not), what records, or even what inventions will be preserved in the notebook that time keeps on file until someone opens the file drawer, realizes that something of value is inside and opens it to the present, restoring it to memory– or perhaps to the history of photography.

Vicki Goldberg is a writer on photography and author of the Aperture book Light Matters.  

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What’s in a Name? By David Campany

This article originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review 007.  

The term “photobook” is very recent. It hardly appears in writings and discussions before the twenty-first century. This is surprising, given that some of the various kinds of objects it purports to designate have been around since the 1840s. It seems that makers and audiences of photographic books did not require the term to exist; indeed, they might have benefitted from its absence. Perhaps photographic bookmaking was so rich and varied precisely because it was not conceptualized as a practice with a unified name. So does the advent of the term “photobook” mark some kind of change?

There was little serious writing on the subject of photographically illustrated books throughout what was arguably the most important period for the form: 1920 to 1970. In that half century, when so many remarkable and important books were published, barely a single intelligent essay was written about them. For example, August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time, 1929) and Atget: Photographe de Paris (1930) received almost no critical attention, beyond a few lines from Walter Benjamin and Walker Evans. Today they are among the most discussed. Even Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958/9) attracted little serious commentary when it first appeared (although there were plenty of ranting column inches, for and against).

For all the sophistication of the photographs, design, editing, and printing techniques, and for all the nuanced grasp of how a book of photographs might contribute to its cultural moment or become a complex document, something seemed to elude critics and commentators. It seems as if it was only once photographically illustrated printed matter had begun to be eclipsed by television, video, and, later, the Internet that it could come under close scrutiny. In 1998 the American scholar Carol Armstrong published Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875. It is a remarkable reflection on the very early interplay of photography, writing, and the printed page. Armstrong’s discussion of books by Anna Atkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, and others is very illuminating, and her way of seeing that distant but vital moment through the prism of more recent critical theory is ambitious. Upon reading it, I felt convinced it was going to be the book to open a new field of study—but it didn’t. Maybe it was still too early. It never got out of its expensive hardcover and has now slipped out of print.

By contrast, the dominant form for books about photographic books follows the template set in 2001 by Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, and consolidated by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s three volumes of The Photobook: A History (2004–14). These densely illustrated anthologies introduce a range of titles, establish some kind of canon, and function as guides for collectors, connoisseurs, and curators. There have been more than a dozen published in this vein, most often taking a national or regional theme: Dutch books, Japanese books, Latin American, German, and so on. These anthologies are invaluable because the area of study is still so new and there’s still much to discover, but they also frustrate because the writing on each entry is usually short. Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present (2011) is a welcome exception, with more sustained essays about the context, production, and reception of each book included.

Generally the more serious scholarship is scattered and a little harder to spot, but it is there. The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (edited by Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson, and Shamoon Zamir, 2012) emerged from the regular meetings of a bunch of UK academics, myself included. The meetings didn’t really cohere and neither does this collection of papers, but maybe that doesn’t matter—if the writing of one of the various thinkers is of interest to you, it’s not difficult to track down more of what they’ve been up to. For example, Caroline Blinder writes extensively on the intersection of photography and literature in the U.S.; Ian Walker’s books on Surrealism are attentive to image/text interplay; and the reliably provocative David Evans writes on everything from photomontage and Situationism to Jean-Luc Godard and Wolfgang Tillmans, always with an interest in photo editing. I look forward to his forthcoming book 1+1, a primer on the history of editing.

This brings me to what I think has been the real stumbling block for sustained discussion of photographic books: a critical framework for thinking about editing has never really taken hold. How do we articulate the endlessly varied ways in which one image affects another, and another? In the 1920s, filmmakers and film theorists worked up sophisticated, even revolutionary, theories of cinematic editing. Think of the Soviet situation, with the intensity of the ideas of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov. Given the expansion of the popular press and the extraordinary experiments with the book form around that time, one might have expected an equally sophisticated discourse around the editing of photographs. But beyond pockets of debate about photomontage and collage, there really wasn’t any. Even the great image editors of the last century, from Stefan Lorant and André Malraux to Franz Roh and Robert Delpire, have spoken little and written less about how they actually operated.

Nevertheless, editing is ubiquitous. For over a century nearly all photographic culture—from mainstream magazine photo-essays to independent books and website presentations—has involved the ordering of bodies of images. “Composition” is not confined to the rectangle of the viewfinder; it is also a matter of the composition of the set, series, suite, typology, archive, album, sequence, slideshow, story, and so forth. So are we to presume editing and its effects upon us are simply ineffable, beyond language, pursued entirely intuitively? Is editing a poetic practice that is not to be thought about too hard? Do we not discuss editing because it’s a painful truth that the majority of photographers are lousy editors of their own work? Many a landmark photographic book has resulted from collaboration between photographer and editor. This complicates the presumption of the singular authorial voice that still dominates discussion of photographic books.

In this light, Blake Stimson’s The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (2006) is a significant study, with its sustained chapters on Frank’s The Americans, The Family of Man book and exhibition (1955), and the serial studies of industrial architecture made by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Stimson’s central contention is, “The photographic essay was born of the promise of another kind of truth from that given by the individual photograph or image on its own, a truth available only in the interstices between pictures, in the movement from one picture to the next.” From this, he develops a nuanced argument in which photographic meaning is as much about gaps and the unrepresentable as it is about what can be revealed or expressed visually. It is refreshing to see this idea articulated and thought through. At its core it’s not a wildly original insight—anyone who has ever sequenced photographs will at least intuit what Stimson is getting at—but this might be precisely why his book is starting to have an influence. Sarah E. James’s Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain (2013), which emerged from her doctoral research, is a good example of this; her debt to Stimson is clear in her close attention to ways in which poetics and politics are inseparable in the making and reading of image sequences.

It might still be early days for the discipline, but is discipline what is needed? I know you can’t unring a bell but I rather miss those days before the dubious term “photobook” became so widespread. It’s not an innocent word. It has been welcomed and taken up in order to impose some kind of unity where there simply was none and perhaps should be none. A few years ago I wrote this in the British magazine Source: “The compound noun ‘photobook’ is a nifty little invention, designed to turn an infinite field (books with photographs in them) into something much more definable. What chancer would dare try to coin the term ‘wordbook’ to make something coherent of all books with words in them? But here we are. A field needs a name and until we find a better one we’re stuck with ‘photobook.’”

The emergence of the term and the institutionalization of a field of study does signal a change, and nobody who has witnessed the boom in interest in the last decade could fail to ask themselves, “Why ‘photobooks’ now?” I don’t think the term signals an end. New media don’t replace old ones but they do redefine them. The take-up of the term “photobook” is a consequence of the Internet, and so is the field it marks. Compared to the wild hall of mirrors that is the photograph online, the photobook—for all its various forms—is at least a fixed and relatively tame object of study.

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David Campany is one of the best-known and most accessible writers on photography. His books include Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2011), Photography and Cinema (2008), and Art and Photography (2003). He is also the author of The Open Road (Aperture, 2014). davidcampany.com

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Video: The PhotoBook Awards 2014 Short List

With this week’s opening of Paris Photo, we’re highlighting the titles included in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014 Short List.

Stay tuned for the final announcement of the winners of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards on Friday, November 14, at 1:00 p.m. at Paris Photo and on the PhotoBook Awards website. In the meantime, take a closer look at the outstanding publications competing for the Photography Catalogue of the Year, First PhotoBook, and PhotoBook of the Year prizes.

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