Aperture's Blog, page 169

Editor’s Note: Ramón Reverté

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #751: Ramón Reverté

I confess: the more I know about the photobook market, the less I understand it. It is widely believed that the photobook community is growing—and in fact, one often hears this moment described as a “golden age”—but if you ask publishers whether they are seeing a corresponding growth in sales, many will tell you no. Sales have plateaued or are declining, and it is increasingly easy to find good books with print runs of just a few hundred copies. My guess is that the market is maturing and growing, but the sheer volume of published books has outstripped the appetite for them.

All this notwithstanding, great books do sell, and sell very well indeed, if the formula is just right. The combination of photography, new book printing technologies, and—that catalyzing ingredient—the Internet has proved to be a potent cocktail for the dissemination of photobooks and information about them. More people appear to be collecting books, albeit from a more informed perspective and in a less voracious, compulsory way. The broader recognition of the photobook as a work of art (finally) has created new rules and increased interest in buying books not just for the pleasure of owning them, but because of their monetary value.

In the midst of this interesting moment, this issue of The Photobook Review focuses on the explosion of events that have grown up around the photobook: the fairs, festivals, workshops, contests, and clubs. As a Mexican publisher based in Barcelona who spends roughly half the year working out of Mexico City, I also wanted to address the recent exciting revolution in photobooks being produced in Latin America and, especially, Spain.

Many consider this extraordinary period of creativity in Spanish photobooks to have begun in 2011, with the release of Ricardo Cases’s remarkable book Paloma al aire. Other great examples had emerged previously, but Paloma al aire appeared at the right moment, when many things were converging in Spain: a hungry, young generation of photographers; new photography schools outside of the traditional academy, notably Madrid’s Blank Paper; independent publishers such as Phree, Ca L’Isidret, Bside Books, Standard Books, and Ediciones Anómalas; specialized booksellers doubling as publishers, such as Dalpine, Kowasa, and Ivorypress; photobook collectives such as NoPhoto; blogs such as 30y3.com and cienojetes.com; talented designers such as Eloi Gimeno, N2, and Astrid Stavro; active photobook meet-ups and clubs; and, perhaps most important, the exhibition space and publisher La Kursala.

We have invited some of the protagonists of the Spanish boom to write for this issue, and Cristina de Middel created the centerfold: the bombastic Photobook Boulevard, an homage to various now-iconic photobooks, using the cover of The Great Unreal by Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs as a template.

I would like to thank all the writers and reviewers for their collaboration. It is my hope that this issue will help broaden our shared understanding of this amazing field.

_____

Ramón Reverté is the editor-in-chief and creative director of Editorial RM, a publishing house based in Mexico and Spain. He is also a voracious book collector, the cofounder of the Concurso Fotolibro Iberoamericano, and the publisher of The Latin American Photobook (Editorial RM/Aperture/Images en Manoeuvres/Cosac Naify, 2011) and Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía/Acción Cultural Española/Editorial RM, 2014). editorialrm.com

Jane Mount (illustration) published The Ideal Bookshelf, a collection of the favorite books of one hundred creative thinkers, with Little, Brown in 2012. More of her work can be seen at idealbookshelf.com

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Publisher’s Note: Lesley A. Martin

Dear Photobook Review reader,

Over the past three years that The PhotoBook Review has been in publication, it has become apparent that the ecosystem of the photobook is no longer exclusively concerned with simply publishing books. A whole network of additional activities has sprung up around that core act, with prizes awarded and festivals held practically every month, from Indonesia to Vienna; the de rigueur publication of “books about books” from any country with a respectable publication record; exhibition treatises about single photobooks or regional surveys; and, finally, the move to create a PhotoBook Museum (or at least, as founder Markus Schaden says, a first draft or “dummy” of what such a museum might look like).

If we were to take a snapshot of these activities and provide a representative sampling of the world of the photobook, above and beyond the actual making of books, who and what would be represented? How and for how long can this spate of activities—what I’d like to affectionately term “the PhotoBook Circus”—be additive to our understanding of the power and meaning of photography itself? In pursuit of insight, I turned to Ramón Reverté, a fellow publisher and enabler in the growth of photobook activities, to select a range of contributors who would assemble a series of “Reports from the Field.” Our goal was to help record the range of activities happening around the photobook today—the better to gain a sense of their repercussions and the motivations behind them.

Not coincidentally, this issue turns a spotlight on Spain’s recently energized photobook scene. This focus highlights not only the output of contemporary Spanish photographers, but also what could be seen as a case study, in which activities centered around the photobook help transform and invigorate photographic communities outside of traditional cultural centers, with directly participatory and highly networked means of both creating new work and communicating it outward via the photobook.

I’m also delighted to include the short-listed titles from the 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Paris Photo, with its strengthened commitment to the photobook under the guidance of director Julien Frydman, serves as another example of the way in which the conversation has expanded to acknowledge the photobook as an essential part of photography. This year, the Awards include a new category: Photography Catalogue of the Year. Thank you to the more than eight hundred entrants overall! Finally, I’d also like to thank Ramón for being this issue’s editor, and, as always, all the participants who have let us harvest a few of their thoughts and ideas—a smorgasbord of photobook delights.

—Lesley A. Martin

Publisher, The PhotoBook Review and Aperture Foundation book program

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The Air for All: An Introduction to The Drone Primer

Tushev Aerials, 'Halemaʻumaʻu crater,' 2013. Courtesy Center for the Study of the Drone.

Tushev Aerials, 'Cape Canaveral,' 2013. Courtesy Center for the Study of the Drone.

Tushev Aerials, 'Brooklyn, Queens by Night,' 2014. Courtesy Center for the Study of the Drone.

Tushev Aerials, 'Cape May,' 2013. Courtesy Center for the Study of the Drone.

Undated aerial photographs of Paris, taken by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon).

The single surviving photograph of Boston from James Black’s balloon flight in 1860.

One of the first aerial photos of Paris, taken in 1868 by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon).

The Center for the Study of the Drone introduces its compendium  The Drone Primer  this weekend, with a launch event on Saturday at Wendy’s Subway, 722 Metropolitan, Brooklyn, starting at 8pm. The launch will feature a multimedia aerial installation by the drone-flying art duo Tushev Aerials, featured in the slideshow above. Below, an excerpt from the chapter “The Air for All,” featured in the book. 

The first aerial photograph was made in 1858 by the artist and critic Nadar, who used a balloon of his own invention to fly eighty meters above the French village of Petit-Becetre. Nadar’s artistic and somewhat bohemian leanings belied a more utilitarian motive: three years earlier, he had patented the idea of photographic mapping, and the following year he was proposing to take photographs for the French Army during its campaign in Italy. Flying with a camera wasn’t easy (Nadar had to install a miniature darkroom in the balloon basket) and it wasn’t always safe (his second flight ended in a landing that dragged him and his wife for a kilometer). But he was on to something. By the First World War, the cultural theorist Paul Virilio wrote, aviation had ceased to be about breaking flight records and had become an essential, a determinant  aspect of modernity and “one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing.”

The price point for that way of seeing has dropped dramatically in the past few years. The continued development of the components that go inside smartphones—sensors, optics, batteries, and embedded processors—has brought the cost of an able quadcopter with a camera and a thirty-minute battery life down to roughly $700, within reach of many gadgeteers and amateurs. The FAA has predicted that by 2018, around 7,500 drones will fly over the U.S., and that’s not counting many smaller, lower-flying consumer systems. Just as the computer giants vied to put a computer in everyone’s pocket, some upstart drone companies dream of putting a drone joystick in everyone’s hand. “We are entering the drone age,” declared Chris Anderson in 2012, as he left his job editing Wired to run 3D Robotics, a drone kit company, and DIY Drones, an associated website where drone hobbyists share mostly open-source designs. The site has over 30,000 members. Now armed with small cameras and GPS navigation systems, homemade and commercially-available remote aircraft are used as affordable tools for filmmaking, farming, environmental sensing, wilderness patrol, and searching for missing people. They have been used by realtors to make dramatic videos of homes, and by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to take epic video selfies. “Our goal is to put flying robots in the hands of as many people as possible,” Tim Reuter, a drone hobbyist and one of the founders of AirDroids, one of many drone startups based in San Diego, told TechCrunch in January. (In a Kickstarter campaign, the company raised over $50,000 overnight.) “We think it’s empowering to democratize the sky,” he added.

The drone raises the stakes in the tension between information and privacy. When Google’s Street View cars were found to be collecting massive amounts of data in Germany without proper authorization, they became a symbol of the massive and otherwise invisible network of sensors that spans from the street corner to our inboxes. And yet these cars—someday, per Google’s driverless dream, bound to be drones themselves—bring us value: they allow anyone to view the streets like a kind of drone pilot. Google’s satellite maps, meanwhile, have done for the Earth what Google’s web crawlers did for the Internet. They allow us to scan the Earth on a map that is, per Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story “On Exactitude in Science,” as large as the world itself. (The U.S. government, with its satellites, can have something like a real-time version of this map.) In 2012, the artist James Bridle underscored the drone-like power of Google with Dronestagram [featured in Aperture's "Documentary Expanded" issue], bird’s-eye-view photos of the locations of drone strikes taken from Google Maps and tinted like a scenic cell phone selfie. It contemplated two sides of the drone, bringing the people closer to a way of seeing typically reserved by the state.

The Drone Primer  is available for free download. 

The post The Air for All:
An Introduction to The Drone Primer appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture at Paris Photo, Nov. 13 to 16

Visit Aperture Foundation at Paris Photo, the leading international fair dedicated to photography. Throughout the weekend, join us for book signings and the announcement of the winners of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, on Friday, November 14, at 1:00 p.m. Limited editions by Erwin Olaf, LaToya Ruby Frazier, An-My Lê, and Pieter Hugo will be available.

For ticketing information, visit parisphoto.com.

 

Book Signings

Thursday, November 13

3:30 p.m.: Larry Towell

Friday, November 14

1:30 p.m.: Alex Majoli and Paolo Pellegrin

2:00 p.m.: Erwin Olaf

3:30 p.m.: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

4:30 p.m.: The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, with David Campany, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, and Bernard Plossu

6:30 p.m.: Pieter Hugo: launch of Kin in a slipcased edition—available exclusively through Aperture, in advance of the trade edition available in spring 2015

Saturday, November 15

2:30 p.m.: Reinier Gerritsen

3:30 p.m.: Richard Misrach

5:30 p.m.: Penelope Umbrico: launch of RANGE

Sunday, November 16

2:30 p.m.: Joel Meyerowitz

3:30 p.m.: Robin Schwartz

The post Aperture at Paris Photo, Nov. 13 to 16 appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Vicki Goldberg: Contemporary Ukrainian Photography

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012. All photographs courtesy Shilo-Group.

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012

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 two, Goldberg considers the work of Ukrainian photography collective Shilo-Group.

Part 2: History in Contemporary Ukranian Photography

Like human beings, contemporary art most often retains hints of its heritage whether it means to or not, sometimes even by maneuvering to disown it, which is one form of acknowledgement. In any case, it cannot help being part of the time it is embedded in.  Past and present have met head on in the work of the Shilo-Group, gounded in 2010 by three young men from Kharkiv in Ukraine: Vladyslav Krasnoshchok, Sergiy Lebedynskyy, and Vadym Trykoz. Having nothing on display in galleries or museums when I was there, they showed me several bodies of work, including a dummy of a book they hoped to publish. (Since then, Krasnoshchok and Lebedynskyy’s Euromaidan has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.) In November of 2013, the group had a show in Moscow. As a group they are unusual: all self taught photographers, they live in three different countries and only photograph together several times a year, and all three have different professions: Krasnoshchok is a maxillofacial surgeon in Kharkiv, Lebednyskyy is finishing a PhD in particle technology in Germany, and Trykoz is an adhesive engineer in Austria. (I was told that this kind of cross-country art collaboration is relatively common in Eastern Europe, most commonly when people who are citizens of different nations work together) The Shilo-Group shares ideas about photography and, evidently, attitudes to the contemporary life around them. Their individual styles all bear a strong family resemblance to each other.

They have previously written that they joined forces when they “felt stuck in a big swamp of played out and constrained local photography environment.” In Kharkiv independent photography began tentatively in the early 1970s, when the first unofficial photo clubs began meeting informally and irregularly. Today the best known of those photographers is Boris Mikhailov, who has continued to photograph a social documentary of life after communism fell, often seeing it at its worst, as in his unblinking pictures of the homeless. In the mid 1980s he made Unfinished Dissertation, a book of his own images glued onto the back of his uncle’s lecture notes, with short handwritten texts on most pages. The Shilo-Group’s book project is called Finished Dissertation: they cut Mikhailov’s pictures out of a published copy of his book, replaced them with their own, and also erased and replaced his texts. This could be seen as appropriation disguised as obliteration, but it is appropriation at a basic structural level: Barbara Kruger’s catalog illustrations have been removed from catalogs and Richard Prince’s Marlborough men from ads, but no matter how transmuted Finished Dissertation is, it remains a book, in fact, still the original book­ which was itself appropriated from another man’s notes.

The defaced and refaced use of an earlier book is a logical expansion of appropriation. London-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin bought 100 copies of the 1998 edition of Berthold Brecht’s War Primer, first published in 1955, and in 2011 issued War Primer 2, their profoundly revised version. Brecht’s book reprinted black-and-white mass-media photographs of World War II; Broomberg and Chanarin superimposed media photographs of the “War on Terror,” in color, over the earlier images. (Their book, which in a new edition won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize this year, was shown in the New Photography show at MoMA in New York last year.) War Primer 2 not only comments on the earlier publication but also on earlier photojournalism and war photography itself as well as the means of its dissemination. War photography is as continuous as war itself but as variable as circumstances, technologies, and the changing media, a family lineage that is inevitably reshaped by new generations.

The Shilo-Group calls its book a diary of “the creative life of the emergent photographic generation” and of friends and colleagues as well as both a prank and a serious work: “‘Finished Dissertation’ is a play in impudence,” they said. It’s a kind of furtive social documentary at a distance, observed through sunglasses at night and tinged with apprehension and a sense of dislocation that lingers from long after 1989, when so much fell apart and so many left Ukraine. A prank it may be, but one couched in a contemporary idiom that is at once faintly plaintive, quietly melancholy even when it laughs, and consistently, raggedly, expressive. As of today, of course, the constant stream of photographs from Ukraine might make one nostalgic for mere dislocation.

The Shilo-Group’s revisions of Mikhailov could hardly be a more direct reference to their local photographic history, and in their own way the members of the group are as intent on telling the story of their period and place as their Ukrainian forebear. But like inheritors mindful of their family’s success yet determined to make their own mark, they have changed both the approach and the ambience. Their images are black and white, gritty, dark with sudden flares of light, sometimes purposefully outrageous, other times simply off kilter. Their street photography is determinedly half legible, the people anonymous, the streets more atmospheric than descriptive, the message hovering on the edge of ambiguity. They develop by lith printing, a process that invites accidents and unpredictability and is, therefore, not reproducible. No two prints are exactly the same, and the group uses Soviet-era paper, which is hard to find and, inevitably, altered by time.

In the Shilo-Group’s kit bag there are also some painted-over and written-over color photographs and a pointed political fantasy called “Timoshenko’s escape or the first step to the exhibition on Mars.” The escape rewrites the fate of Yuliya Tymoschenko, the imprisoned former prime minister of Ukraine, who was released during this year’s revolution. In this narrative, where a mostly naked woman takes the role of Tymoschenko, she escapes and finds Kharkiv, an old industrial city free of excessive charm, so beautiful she decides to stay. That’s current history seen through Alice’s looking glass – or perhaps a grim fairy tale: as of this writing, Tymoschenko is free, has run for election once more, and lost.

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

The post Vicki Goldberg: Contemporary Ukrainian Photography appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Vicki Goldberg: History in Contemporary Ukrainian Photography

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Finished Dissertation", 2011-2013

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012. All photographs courtesy Shilo-Group.

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012

"Untitled" from series "Timoshenko's escape", 2012

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 two, Goldberg considers the work of Ukrainian photography collective Shilo-Group.

Part 2: History in Contemporary Ukranian Photography

Like human beings, contemporary art most often retains hints of its heritage whether it means to or not, sometimes even by maneuvering to disown it, which is one form of acknowledgement. In any case, it cannot help being part of the time it is embedded in.  Past and present have met head on in the work of the Shilo-Group, gounded in 2010 by three young men from Kharkiv in Ukraine: Vladyslav Krasnoshchok, Sergiy Lebedynskyy, and Vadym Trykoz. Having nothing on display in galleries or museums when I was there, they showed me several bodies of work, including a dummy of a book they hoped to publish. (Since then, Krasnoshchok and Lebedynskyy’s Euromaidan has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.) In November of 2013, the group had a show in Moscow. As a group they are unusual: all self taught photographers, they live in three different countries and only photograph together several times a year, and all three have different professions: Krasnoshchok is a maxillofacial surgeon in Kharkiv, Lebednyskyy is finishing a PhD in particle technology in Germany, and Trykoz is an adhesive engineer in Austria. (I was told that this kind of cross-country art collaboration is relatively common in Eastern Europe, most commonly when people who are citizens of different nations work together) The Shilo-Group shares ideas about photography and, evidently, attitudes to the contemporary life around them. Their individual styles all bear a strong family resemblance to each other.

They have previously written that they joined forces when they “felt stuck in a big swamp of played out and constrained local photography environment.” In Kharkiv independent photography began tentatively in the early 1970s, when the first unofficial photo clubs began meeting informally and irregularly. Today the best known of those photographers is Boris Mikhailov, who has continued to photograph a social documentary of life after communism fell, often seeing it at its worst, as in his unblinking pictures of the homeless. In the mid 1980s he made Unfinished Dissertation, a book of his own images glued onto the back of his uncle’s lecture notes, with short handwritten texts on most pages. The Shilo-Group’s book project is called Finished Dissertation: they cut Mikhailov’s pictures out of a published copy of his book, replaced them with their own, and also erased and replaced his texts. This could be seen as appropriation disguised as obliteration, but it is appropriation at a basic structural level: Barbara Kruger’s catalog illustrations have been removed from catalogs and Richard Prince’s Marlborough men from ads, but no matter how transmuted Finished Dissertation is, it remains a book, in fact, still the original book­ which was itself appropriated from another man’s notes.

The defaced and refaced use of an earlier book is a logical expansion of appropriation. London-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin bought 100 copies of the 1998 edition of Berthold Brecht’s War Primer, first published in 1955, and in 2011 issued War Primer 2, their profoundly revised version. Brecht’s book reprinted black-and-white mass-media photographs of World War II; Broomberg and Chanarin superimposed media photographs of the “War on Terror,” in color, over the earlier images. (Their book, which in a new edition won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize this year, was shown in the New Photography show at MoMA in New York last year.) War Primer 2 not only comments on the earlier publication but also on earlier photojournalism and war photography itself as well as the means of its dissemination. War photography is as continuous as war itself but as variable as circumstances, technologies, and the changing media, a family lineage that is inevitably reshaped by new generations.

The Shilo-Group calls its book a diary of “the creative life of the emergent photographic generation” and of friends and colleagues as well as both a prank and a serious work: “‘Finished Dissertation’ is a play in impudence,” they said. It’s a kind of furtive social documentary at a distance, observed through sunglasses at night and tinged with apprehension and a sense of dislocation that lingers from long after 1989, when so much fell apart and so many left Ukraine. A prank it may be, but one couched in a contemporary idiom that is at once faintly plaintive, quietly melancholy even when it laughs, and consistently, raggedly, expressive. As of today, of course, the constant stream of photographs from Ukraine might make one nostalgic for mere dislocation.

The Shilo-Group’s revisions of Mikhailov could hardly be a more direct reference to their local photographic history, and in their own way the members of the group are as intent on telling the story of their period and place as their Ukrainian forebear. But like inheritors mindful of their family’s success yet determined to make their own mark, they have changed both the approach and the ambience. Their images are black and white, gritty, dark with sudden flares of light, sometimes purposefully outrageous, other times simply off kilter. Their street photography is determinedly half legible, the people anonymous, the streets more atmospheric than descriptive, the message hovering on the edge of ambiguity. They develop by lith printing, a process that invites accidents and unpredictability and is, therefore, not reproducible. No two prints are exactly the same, and the group uses Soviet-era paper, which is hard to find and, inevitably, altered by time.

In the Shilo-Group’s kit bag there are also some painted-over and written-over color photographs and a pointed political fantasy called “Timoshenko’s escape or the first step to the exhibition on Mars.” The escape rewrites the fate of Yuliya Tymoschenko, the imprisoned former prime minister of Ukraine, who was released during this year’s revolution. In this narrative, where a mostly naked woman takes the role of Tymoschenko, she escapes and finds Kharkiv, an old industrial city free of excessive charm, so beautiful she decides to stay. That’s current history seen through Alice’s looking glass – or perhaps a grim fairy tale: as of this writing, Tymoschenko is free, has run for election once more, and lost.

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

The post Vicki Goldberg: History in Contemporary Ukrainian Photography appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Fashion Film & the Photographic by Marketa Uhlirova

Still from Inez & Vinoodh fashion film with Daria Werbowy for Vogue Paris, 2012

Still from Jean-François Carly, I Feel for
Raf Simons, 2005

Still from John Maybury film for Alexander McQueen Autumn/Winter 2013 collection, 2013

Still from Experiments in Advertising: The Films of Erwin Blumenfeld (1958–64), edited by filmmaker Adam Mufti and sound designer Olivier Alary, 2006

Still from Pierre Debusschere, Holy Flowers, 2012

From Bob Richardson, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Deborah Turbeville to Steven Meisel, Glen Luchford, and others, fashion photographers in the past few decades have often emulated the aesthetics of cinema. They have pictured carefully constructed and dramatically lit scenes that brim with narrative potential or, more directly, quote mise-en-scène drawn from the vast reservoir of the movies. This type of photography is, not surprisingly, described as “cinematic.” But what if we flip this familiar concept of the “cinematic” fashion photograph to make a reverse claim: that some recent fashion film, a newly prominent type of fashion image, has curiously dwelled on the “photographic”? In fact, could it be that the fashion film has, more than any other form of the moving image, a proclivity to reside in, gravitate toward, or at least somehow hover around photography?

This may sound odd because, surely, the initial stimulus of its makers was the opposite—to escape the confines of the photographic medium. Take Erwin Blumenfeld, who, in the late 1950s, began to experiment with film chiefly to extend the scope of his work in fashion photography. His desire was to set into motion the traditionally static form—very much in an echo of the primary impulse of early cinema to “animate photographs”—and outline a new visual language for fashion by introducing movement and time. While the recent fashion filmmakers were spurred on by such motivations, it is worth stressing that, like Blumenfeld, they have also transposed onto film what were essentially photographic problems and conventions, by holding onto processes, structures, and concerns specific to fashion photography.

Although fashion film assimilates a number of diverse film genres and forms, for the most part it evokes short, intense, non-narrative spectacles dedicated to the display and promotion of fashion. It is perhaps best characterized as a rhythmic fusion of visual and aural effects, somewhat similar to the music video. As a form of moving image, it is certainly not new, for it had appeared in different mutations since the beginnings of cinema (consider fashion commercials, newsreel and cine-magazine pieces, or various hybrids of promotional and documentary films). Yet, it had until recently been a form strangely overlooked, even displaced: an unclaimed ground half-lost somewhere between fashion and cinema—two industries with different demands. So it makes sense that when it reemerged from within the fashion community during the aughts, it “arrived” with unprecedented vigor. This rejuvenation has evidently been enabled by the “digital revolution,” especially in the new millennium, which has seen an intensified encounter between new media and technologies on the one hand, and fashion image makers and clients keen to explore them on the other.

Dynamic Blooms from Tell No One on Vimeo.

Fashion film has shared photography’s clients, settings, budgets, and, progressively, imaging tools. And it has replicated—at least to a degree—its crews and cast. Many of today’s fashion filmmakers have backgrounds in photography but little or no formal knowledge of film or animation techniques and have generally continued with their previous practice of producing editorials and advertising for print magazines. This hybridization between photography and film has increasingly manifested itself through specific projects. Nick Knight and Tell No One’s Dynamic Blooms (AnOther magazine/SHOWstudio, 2011), Pierre Debusschere’s Holy Flowers (Dazed Digital, 2012), or Sølve Sundsbø’s The Ever Changing Face of Beauty (W, 2012), for example, all treat the material generated in a single “shoot” as the basis for a published fashion editorial and an online fashion film, simultaneously and with no obvious hierarchy between them. In the same vein, recent advertising campaigns such as Inez & Vinoodh for Yves Saint Laurent’s Autumn/Winter 2010–11 and Steven Meisel for Lanvin’s Spring/Summer 2013 present a seamless continuity between photography and film. This intermedial coexistence feels very real as it has also found its platforms in museum exhibitions, retail and public spaces, and, above all, online fashion magazines and websites. The most important of these has been Nick Knight and Peter Saville’s SHOWstudio, which has since its conception been very specific about the “studio” as a physical space that can amalgamate various creative practices (photography, filmmaking, and so on), while also being a broadcasting station.

Alongside these material and functional connections, there is another way to consider this close alliance between film and photography. It is through fashion’s vital preoccupation with the pose—something that has in fact been a recurrent source of fascination for the cinema. Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (USA, 1957), and Veˇra Chytilová’s Strop (Ceiling, Czechoslovakia, 1962) are two fiction films about fashion that in their portrayal of photo shoots use the freeze-frame or photographic still to provoke a tension between the models’ pose as a process, a choreography unraveling in time, and a final product—a privileged fashion image. By highlighting the moment of the holding of a pose, both expose its intrinsic paradox whereby one must become an immobilized image prior to the fact. (Both films did so with a different purpose: Funny Face elevates the frozen moment as the ideal image whereas Strop draws attention to its falsity.)

In a similar, if less ideological, manner, a distinct group of early fashion films associated with SHOWstudio explore the deceptive borderline between photographic stillness and filmic illusion of stillness. For example, Shelley Fox 14 (Shelley Fox and SHOWstudio, 2002) and Maison Martin Margiela A/W 2004–05 (Nigel Bennett, 2004) both arrange sets or sequences of still photographs into a temporal experience. Two other early SHOWstudio films, Jean-François Carly’s I Feel (2005) and Knight’s Sleep (2001) approximate photographs in the way their subjects are statically framed and portrayed as ostensibly inactive. Carly’s film shows a string of young male subjects standing in front of a white sheet, facing the camera in a way that is reminiscent of Warhol’s Screen Tests. The screen is split into two, with each pair of portraits showing the same boy, one dressed in his own clothes, the other in Raf Simons. The juxtapositions are accompanied by sparse comments in which the boys state how they feel as their newly fashioned selves, bringing into focus the transformative potential of clothes. In another nod to Warhol, Knight’s Sleep was first staged as a “live photo shoot” portraying nine models while they slept in their hotel rooms. Initially filmed by webcams and streamed via SHOWstudio, the footage of Sleep was subsequently turned into nine short films that speed up the non-action by applying a time-lapse effect. The edited films reintroduce movement, spotlighting the lyrically mutating draperies of the models’ flimsy dresses.

I Feel Pal by Jean-François Carly from Visual Art Services on Vimeo.

The attachment to the photographic seen in SHOWstudio’s early films also permeates a number of other, different strands of the fashion film: Inez & Vinoodh’s campaign for Yves Saint Laurent Autumn/Winter 2010–11 shows a simple event of a model descending a staircase and walking past the camera, very much in the style of early Lumière films. The model’s descent is not, however, captured as fluid motion but rather as a broken and disjointed sequence of slow-motion shots displaying an array of outfits. Yang Fudong’s campaign First Spring for Prada Spring/Summer 2010 inserts deliberately stilled or decelerated shots into otherwise dynamic street and interior scenes. Steven Klein’s Time Capsule series (2011) are pared-down filmic continuations (in black-and-white) of the very (color) images that make up the photographer’s editorial for W.

Why, then, this insistence on stillness and restricted expression in so many fashion films? Perhaps there is a sense (articulated by many, most famously Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) that photographs are ultimately more memorable and impactful than moving images. Or perhaps the prolonged static shots allow for a closer study of shapes, colors, textures, and detail, something that industry clients and consumers may like to see. What is certain, though, is that the growing entanglement of the two media has naturally pushed for a new level of aesthetic and conceptual dialogue between them. In this relation, film is not necessarily an extension of photography, but rather, each medium is an extension of the other.

_____

Marketa Uhlirova is director and curator of the Fashion in Film festival and a research fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She is the editor, most recently, of Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (Koenig Books, 2013). 

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Vicki Goldberg: Russian Photography Looks at the Past

Vsevolod Tarasevich, 'USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics Moscow region, town of Pushchino,' 1974-1976. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, 'Vladimir Safronov, engineer of apparatus for cultivating algae (chlorella) USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics Moscow region, town of Pushchino,' 1974. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, from the series "Moscow University" 'The university at night,' 1964. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, from the series "Moscow University." 'Academician P. S. Alexandrov,' 1964. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, from the series "Moscow University." 'Duel,' 1963. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, "Untitiled," 1970s. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, 'Research session to determine the influence of perceptual conflict on short-term visual memory. Emotional memory laboratory. USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics Moscow region, town of Pushchino,' 1974-1976. MAMM collection

Vsevolod Tarasevich, 'Assembly of the Mirabelle hydrogen bubble chamber Moscow region, town of Protvino,' 1971-1974. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, 'Pulse generator of elementary particles at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino,' 1980s. MAMM collection.

Vsevolod Tarasevich, 'Candidate of Medical Sciences Igor Podolsky checks the progress of an experiment on electrophysiological equipment for researching conditioned reflexes in animals. Emotional memory laboratory, USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics, Moscow region, town of Pushchino,' 1974-1976. MAMM collection.

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 one, Goldberg considers USSR propaganda photography of the 1970s.  

 Part 1: Russian Photography Looks at the Past

The past is irretrievable but may be revisited in bits and pieces through memory, literature, histories, and other means– prominent among them photography. The summer of 2013, when I was in Moscow, several of the photographs and exhibitions I saw were engaged in a lively dialogue with the history, art, and photography of the Russian past. Sometimes this amounted to an homage to the notion that ‘we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants’ and can only move forward if we admit our debt, sometimes it was a program to retrieve visual shards of the nation’s past. In either case, the camera performed one of its cleverest and most common tricks: helping people remember a time they never knew.

Soviet photography had a demanding leader, and his name was officialdom. For a very long time, photography belonged to the state; the aim, often clearly stated and always understood, was propaganda; and the authorities, from generation to generation, demanded that all negatives revert to the state. Olga Sviblova, who founded and directs the Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow (formerly the Moscow House of Photography), told the New York Times in 2010 that in France in 1991 she saw, for the first time, Soviet photographs that had been censored in her own country.

“At the time a new Russia was starting and we were a country without any kind of visual history,” Sviblova said. “I realized without history you cannot look into the future.” (May 28, 2010)  The experience spurred her to collect historical photographs, which resulted in such exhibitions as “Time Formula,” a June 2013 show of Vsevolod Tarasevich’s photographs curated by Olga Annanurova as part of several exhibitions of “The History of Russia in Photographs”.

From the late 1950s to the mid 1970s Tarasevich was a well-known photojournalist whose pictures of Moscow University and of scientists all over the Soviet Union were widely published in a magazine called Soviet Life. The images on view generally looked like blow-ups of 35mm, some of them grainy, some candid, some dramatically lit, even back lit, a few softly romantic, the scientists’ portraits nicely done and nicely varied, everything well enough seen and composed to stand beside most of Life and Look at the time. The few examples of the magazine on view revealed a splendidly executed journal, the contrasts sharper and more telling than in American magazines. The photographs often occupied a whole page or three quarters of a double page, while the text was merely a fillip.

Every issue and picture served a propaganda purpose. Soviet Life, like that most beautiful of all magazines, USSR in Construction (1930s), was published for the eyes of foreigners interested in “everyday life in the USSR” as the Soviets selectively presented it. (Never underestimate the selective capacity of a viewfinder, an editor, or a repressive government.)  The Russian embassy in Washington distributed 30,000 copies of Soviet Life every month. Tarasovich’s photographs of Soviet scientists and science centers were propaganda that this area of Soviet achievement well deserved, since the USSR had one scientific triumph after another during this period: Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin (the first man in orbit), others who went into space, and Nobel prizes for seven Soviet physicists. According to the wall text, scientists, physicists first of all, were the heroes of “an epoch in which knowledge and achievement were more important than material rewards.”

Another aspect of these years was richly on display at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, which previously exhibited photographs of Moscow from the first half of the twentieth century and in 2013 concluded their program of “Moscow Stories” with images of the city by the forgotten photojournalists of the 1950s to the 1980s.  (The curators Irina Chmyreva and Evgeny Berezner introduced me to the gallery, its director, and other photographers.)  Photojournalists who had been famous for decades were subsequently erased from memory by the years, and Edward Litvinsky and his wife, Natasha Grigorieva, who together founded Lumiere, spent seven years resurrecting upwards of one hundred photographers. They went to the photographers’ homes, asked to see their work, and found, despite the state’s lock on negatives, large bags of jumbled negatives and prints.  Evgeny Berezner told me flatly that the Soviet Union was a double-faced country, every person in it being necessarily double-faced and every photographer making a double of each photograph – one negative for the authorities, one, secretly, for the photographer. The carelessly bagged photographs the couple found had been unopened for years because no one was interested– until Litvinsky and Grigorieva were.

Their large exhibition displayed Moscow soon after Stalin, when there was a slight easing up, and in the later years when cracks in the system began to open up but had not yet grown quite wide enough to step through.  Moscow was depicted in a good light to be sure – it was not until late in this period that it was possible to take unofficial photography– but a Moscow younger people neither knew nor remembered and that they flocked to the gallery to see. There were pictures of Khrushchev and Gagarin, of missiles muscling through Red Square on Victory Day, and street photography of children playing in older sections of the city with nary an ad on buildings that today are plastered with them. Most of this was in black and white, all of it on film, all of it highly competent in a rather classical, photojournalistic vein. There were no forays into Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand or Gene Smith territory (probably unknown then), but reporting that would have been welcome in most American and European magazines. Authoritarian governments, of course, do not lack for talented citizens.

It is odd today to see how few cars there were in the city in the 1950s. Later there were more cars, all of them the Russian manufactured Volgas; today the cars fill the streets like a plague of locusts named Mercedes Benz. Change is inevitable, seeing it is not.

 

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Publisher’s Note: Lesley A. Martin

Dear PhotoBook Review Reader

You’ll find many of the following pages are guided by one particular idea as a loose organizational frame: the photobook and desire. For those of you who know guest editor Bruno Ceschel as the founder of Self Publish, Be Happy, a curatorial project com- mitted to the celebration and study of the self-published photobook, you may also be aware of SPBH’s id-driven alter ego, Self Publish, Be Naughty, a series of monographs about love, lust, sex, and taboos. It is eclectically promiscuous in its approach to desire and, as is pointed out in The Photobook: A History, Vol. III (Phaidon, 2014), to photog- raphy itself. A giddy, mischievous ethos infuses most of Bruno’s projects, and this one

is no different. His vision is ultimately utopian at its core, in which confession of our desires sets us free and connects us to communities of shared and overlapping interests.

This utopian bent is particularly appropriate as this is also the second time we will be launching the spring issue on the dreamy West Coast, during Paris Photo Los Angeles. Last spring, in issue 004, guest editor Charlotte Cotton gave us a blueprint for intertwining personal experience with intellectual analysis, a challenge which has been consciously picked up by Bruno and many of the contributors selected by him and his team. In “PhotoBook Lust” and other writings in these pages, you will find an unruly garden of thrills and delights, filled with books that can seduce us into taking them home for private enjoyment.

I was especially gratified to have the opportunity to engage Miyako Ishiuchi and Yurie Nagashima in a conversation about the ways the female body has been depicted in Japanese photography—both in their own work and in that of other photographers, some of whom have gained international recognition for their frank, possibly exploitative depictions of the eroticized nude (pages 12–13). Also in this issue, instead of a standard Publisher’s Profile, Bruno has interviewed David Senior, bibliographer of the MoMA Library, about the increasingly blurred lines between publisher, designer, artist, and other once-discrete roles (page 4). In this interview, Senior proposes that one new application of the book form itself is as a self-run artist’s space, particularly as it applies to self-published works.

Finally, I’d like to bring attention to the launch of a new category of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. While it has become a bit of a tru- ism that a “true photobook” is almost exclusively the authorship of an individual artist or editor, it became evident during last year’s jurying process that many excellent contributions to the field decidedly do not fall into the aforementioned framework, as they are focused more on the presentation of scholarship and curatorial thinking. We realized we ought to find a way to recognize these efforts to bring innovation and new knowledge to the world of photobooks. With this in mind, this spring we launch a new, third category of prize: Photography Catalogue of the Year. More details on this can be found at aperture.org/photobookawards.

As always, we thank our guest editor and contributors (of whom there are so many in this issue!), whose ideas and words are the backbone of The PhotoBook Review. The collected wisdom and opinions of so many participants reshaping the landscape of the photobook today are continually inspiring to me, as they hopefully are to you, the PhotoBook Reader, as well.

—LESLEY A. MARTIN

Publisher, The PhotoBook Review and Aperture Foundation book program

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Studio Visit: Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s New York (Video)

With painstaking care and the use of multiple exposures, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao stitches images together to create detail-driven panoramas of the New York City landscape. We visited Liao at his home studio in Queens, NY, where he showed us what’s behind his unique perspective of the city, and took us through his recently published monograph, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: New York.

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: New York includes photographs taken over the last ten years. From rehabilitated Coney Island to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, from the demise of Shea Stadium in Queens to the newly built One World Trade Center, Liao has created a lasting document of a significant period of transformation of New York’s skyline and social fabric.

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