Aperture's Blog, page 178

PhotoBook Awards 2014: Open for Entries

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the 2014 edition of The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. We are excited to reveal the introduction of a third award category, Photography Catalogue of the Year, which joins the PhotoBook of the Year and First PhotoBook categories.



Call for entries is May 5 – September 12, 2014. Enter here.

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PhotoBook Lust: Olivier Richon on Paul Nougé, Subversion des Images

This is a web exclusive from the feature “PhotoBook Lust,” a collection of writing on photobooks and desire by artists, curators, and writers, first published in The PhotoBook Review 006. Read the Lust introduction by guest editor Bruno Ceschel.

PBR 006 will be shipped with issue 215 of Aperture magazine. Subscribe here.

Paul Nougé

Subversion des Images

Les Lèvres Nues

Brussels, 1968

Paul Nougé was a writer, a poet, and an intellectual. The nineteen square photographs in this small book were all made over the course of three months, from December 1929 to February 1930, with a simple amateur camera.

I first discovered Subversion des Images, this Surrealist manifesto for a different use of photography, in an exhibition of twentieth-century Belgian art at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1991. I did not know at the time that the work had been produced as a book by the Belgian publishing house Les Lèvres Nues—“the naked lips.” No wonder then that these lips would encourage slips of the tongue, the pen, and the camera. Ten years later I finally managed to get a copy of the book, not without difficulty. It has now acquired the value of a fetish object.

My copy of the book still has its rice-paper wrap, so the cover looks like an image seen through frosted glass. The quality of the printing is basic; only the thickness of the paper indicates that it is a picture book as much as an essay. Although the work appeared in Surrealist journals, it was published as a book much later, in 1968. Only 230 copies were made.

For me, this book is exemplary for many reasons. It fits into a jacket pocket and its content is, as the title indicates, subversive. Photography is not here in the service of realism, documentary, or the morbid rituals of family life, but instead is in the service of dreamwork where image and language are intertwined, arguing for the rhetoric of objects.

Here, the camera is akin to a typewriter, used to produce a visual manifesto about the appearance and disappearance of objects. Nougé was a close friend of René Magritte, who figures in some of the photographs. He was also responsible for many of the titles of Magritte’s paintings. (For Nougé, as for Magritte, the title always came after the image, and therefore could always be revoked.) It is clear that there is a visual conversation going on between the two artists in Subversion des Images, more marked in some images than in others. All the pictures are scenes from inside a home. Most of the subjects look like they’re sleepwalking or hypnotized, and objects have an uncanny presence. This is the world of the inside, of interiority. Photography, in the words of Dalí, is conceived as a creation of the mind.

In these photographs, we have a condensed version of Nougé’s conception of the object: it must be separated from the thick universe of things. When objects are isolated and lose their functions they become signs, images; even something as banal as a piece of string can be turned into an incomprehensible thing. The same could go for words, which can be equally isolated from the mass of language that obscures their objectness. Alternatively, as with ellipses in a sentence, the object can be removed entirely, like the “glasses” in the photograph of two drinkers at a table: holding the air in the shape of two missing vessels, their hands appear to be living things, attempting to touch each other.

The back cover of the book shows an arm coming from behind an almost-closed door. The index finger points toward the edge of the frame, which cuts and isolates the visual field to turn it into an image. But this pointing also brings us back into the book, inviting us to read it again from the end—as if walking backward to get ahead.

—

Olivier Richon lives in London, where he is a professor of photography at the Royal College of Art. He is currently writing a book about a photograph by Walker Evans for Afterall Books’ One Work series.

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PhotoBook Lust: Brad Feuerhelm on Richard Peter, Dresden: eine Kamera klagt an

This is a web exclusive from the feature “PhotoBook Lust,” a collection of writing on photobooks and desire by artists, curators, and writers, first published in The PhotoBook Review 006. Read the Lust introduction by guest editor Bruno Ceschel.

PBR 006 will be shipped with issue 215 of Aperture magazine. Subscribe here.

Richard Peter

Dresden: eine Kamera klagt an

Dresdener Verlagsgesellschaft

Dresden, Germany, 1949

I can imagine what it is to wake up in a city like Dresden the morning after being carpet bombed by Allied forces in 1945, and to understand much of what Richard Peter’s Dresden: eine Kamera klagt an may have felt like to create. This book, when I discovered it in Germany in 2004, sent me reeling with inexplicable loss, but also a longing, a desire, to speak and see through that same leveling dust. I couldn’t help it—couldn’t stop the thought that, if I am honest with myself . . .

I desire the end of all things; I desire to become an unholy spectator striding amongst incalculable ruins with my only companions gleaming at me through hollowed eye sockets, strained grins pulled taut from their last gasping breaths. It is this aesthetic dysphoria that I desire. I desire to walk as a seer through a sprawling forest of gloom.

I seek to enumerate and catalogue all that will never be again through my own eyes, seeing and recreating a taxonomy of that which can never be sought by the world at large, and, in doing so, to feel truly alive in a world rent asunder by flame and fury. To be the only entity capable of speaking in tongues, to ears that cannot possibly listen. My desire is not orgiastic; my desire is eschatological, illogical in a quest to understand the end of all things. Somehow I have been here before . . . and I know that I will be here again. In this ecstasy I am able to navigate a rebirth negated by truant hope.

—

Brad Feuerhelm collects, deals, and writes about photography. His first book, a volume of the SPBH Book Club, was published in 2012 with Self Publish, Be Happy.

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PhotoBook Lust: Guido Guidi on Paul Strand, Un Paese

This is a web exclusive from the feature “PhotoBook Lust,” a collection of writing on photobooks and desire by artists, curators, and writers, first published in The PhotoBook Review 006. Read the Lust introduction by guest editor Bruno Ceschel.

PBR 006 will be shipped with issue 215 of Aperture magazine. Subscribe here.

Paul Strand

Text by Cesare Zavattini

Un Paese

Giulio Einaudi

Milan, 1955*

Un Paese by Paul Strand was one of the first photobooks I ever looked at persistently. I remember that at school Italo Zannier had long spoken about it. It was published by Einaudi in 1955, and I was lucky enough to find a copy on sale for not that much at the end of the ’60s. What a pleasure to finally have a copy in my hands! The jacket has a photograph glued on a gray-green background, as was the fashion at the time. Underneath, there was the spartan cloth binding; inside, the coated paper was not too white, and the ink was greenish brown.

Strand looked after every single phase of the making of this book, from the creation of the dummy to the rotogravure printing. For him the book had to be a sort of “movie on paper,” and so the photographs follow one another as in a film, supported at times by short interviews by Cesare Zavattini that give voice to the people in the photographs.

I mostly didn’t read the text. I was all too interested in the “silence” of the photographs, in which the people were emanations of the places, and the face of things offered to me, as a gift of the page.

—

Guido Guidi (born in Cesena, Italy) is a photographer who has shown his work internationally, included at Centre Georges Pompidou and the Venice Biennale.

*Book pictured above is the English-language edition of Un Paese (Aperture, 1997).

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Guido Guidi on Paul Strand, Un Paese appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Mark Steinmetz: Photographing Civilization

 

On April 5 and 6, Mark Steinmetz led an insightful workshop at Aperture Foundation, grounded in the tradition of American photography. The workshop began with a seminar on the history of the medium, critically examining the works of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Adams, and Stephen Shore. Steinmetz highlighted composition, lighting, and thematic narratives, and shared many personal anecdotes from his experiences working with some of these photographers. He also presented his own photographs, discussing his experiences, inspirations, and publications. Each student was able to present his or her portfolio to the group and receive feedback related to the techniques and themes discussed in the lectures. It was a fun and enlightening weekend!

 

From the students:

 

“Mark is my favorite photographer, and having the opportunity to talk to and learn from him was an amazing experience.”

 

“Mark’s presentation of his own work and the presentation of other great photographers’ work enabled me to look at images that I was familiar with in a new way.”

 



 



 



 



 

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Artist Talk: James Bridle (Video)

On Tuesday, April 15, 2014, artist James Bridle joined us at Aperture Gallery to discuss his latest project, Dronestagram, featured in the Spring 2014 issue of Aperture magazine. Sourcing cartographic images and metadata from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent news organization in the UK, Bridle posts on Instagram aerial views of the approximate locations of airstrikes carried out by the United States government in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.



Embracing the accessibility of social media, Bridle creates a visual record of the invisible war being waged overseas. Each caption details the casualties and location of the attack. This clever and chilling project has garnered a lot of attention; the Dronestagram account now has over 10,000 followers and has sparked debate over the moral and political implications of anonymous warfare.



View “James Bridle: Artist Talk” Part 2 and  Part 3 on Vimeo.

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PhotoBook Lust

In putting together this issue, I reached out to a wide range of bibliophiles and artists and asked them to discuss their personal relationship with a specific photobook. I asked them not to approach this as a book review, but rather as a personal account of a photobook that had provoked (or still provokes) the feelings of lust, desire, or arousal. I was interested less in an intellectual engagement, and more in something that each person has been unaccountably drawn to: a book that has obsessed them, whose pages have been pored over, consumed, loved; a book that has been very significant to each person’s life, which brought them into a world they would like to be part of. The results range from covetous reactions to books that triggered new ways of thinking about photography, to those that inspired outright salacious responses. You’ll find these contributions contaminating the whole issue, wrapping themselves around and between pages—an uncontainable account of PhotoBook Lust.

—Bruno Ceschel, guest editor of The PhotoBook Review 006

Web exclusives

Ed Templeton on 61 Pimlico: The Secret Journal of Henry Hayler

Guido Guidi on Paul Strand, Un Paese (coming soon)

Brad Feuerhelm on Richard Peter, Dresden: eine Kamera klagt an (coming soon)

Olivier Richon on Paul Nougé, Subversion des Images (coming soon)

From the print edition

Vince Aletti on Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar

Justine Kurland on Nicholas Muellner, The Amnesia Pavilions

Anouk Kruithof on Justin James Reed, 2013

Adam Broomberg on Our Bodies, Ourselves

Lise Sarfati on Mike Kelley, Photographs/Sculptures

Lucas Blalock on Elmer Batters, Elmer Batters

Paul Kooiker on Boris Mikhailov, Case History

Colby Keller on Iron Eyes Cody, Indian Talk

Roxana Marcoci on Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, Ringlpitis

Paul Graham on William Eggleston, Election Eve

Sean O’Hagan on Ed van der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank

Michael Mack on Collier Schorr, Jens F.

Laurel Nakadate on Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

Ron Jude on Joachim Brohm, Industriezeit

George Pitts on Russ Meyer, A Clean Breast: The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer

JH Engström on Daido Moriyama, Bye Bye Photography

Mariah Robertson on photography instructional manuals

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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 committed 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 photography 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. 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. 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 truism 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 here.

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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Editor’s Note: Bruno Ceschel

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #706 Bruno Ceschel / idealbookshelf.com

I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room with my mom like I did every Wednesday when I was ten years old—I had developed an allergy to house dust and was getting weekly injections as treatment. From among the publications piled up in the waiting room that afternoon, I picked up one about maritime activities. I remember it like it was yesterday: suddenly, flipping through the book’s pages, I noticed a feature about a yacht sailing in a tropical sea with a crew of teenage boys. In some of the photographs the boys were naked, and in one photo in particular, you could see part of one of the boys’ pubescent genitals. It was probably the first time I had seen the cock of an older guy. That photo caused a hormonal earthquake inside of me that forced me to secretly rip those pages from their place and take them with me. I kept them for a very long time, hidden in my room.

That day, now nearly thirty years ago, I consciously encountered the power of desire and photography for the first time. Those carefully hidden pages offered me a portal to an otherworldly place of ecstasy, a place I didn’t know existed until then: a paradise that those photos made “real.” Those pages have long since disappeared, but for years they were my loyal companions, my promise to happiness. Those photographs were my only escape from a small conservative village in the Italian countryside.

Paradise often lies between the covers of (photo)books. The binary desire to have or to be is the key to revealing such a paradise to our own eyes. Desire is like those glasses needed to see a 3-D movie: without them, the film just looks dark and out of focus.

This issue of The PhotoBook Review endeavors to explore the nuanced relationship between pleasure, photography, and the photobook—a very powerful triangulation which has always been the foundation of my own interest in photography. (It is no accident that the organization I founded, Self Publish, Be Happy, uses happy and naughty as programmatic names.) As Lesley A. Martin mentions in her publisher’s note, I am indebted to Charlotte Cotton, a previous guest editor, and to her assessment that a meaningful creative culture has to take into account each actor’s personal experience.

The issue is organized as one would a big party. The contributors are a mix of friends and my ideal party guests, most of whom were invited to bring along a photobook that has been a tool of lust and arousal, or otherwise a giver of pleasure—from the platonic to the lascivious. The result, in the form of the feature “PhotoBook Lust” (including special web exclusives), is a cacophony of beautifully confusing, heartfelt personal testimonies mapping the idea of desire, in its many forms and inclinations. Such a knot of desires untangles to reveal a touching testament to our times.

Of course, it would be difficult not to look at the desire around the book as an object itself, and who better than photographer Todd Hido to talk about his own extensive collection of photobooks and what prompts him to possess them. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we find editor Simon Bainbridge rallying for artists and publishers to create new digital forms for photobooks. He points toward a promised land that is, to many such as myself, hard to imagine. Such a promise is darkened by the question of whether the misfortune of digital editions so far can be attributed to their lack of tactile pleasure (and uncollectibility).

To further explore the relationship between the tangible and intangible, I asked artist Lorenzo Vitturi to produce a three-dimensional manifestation of his own idea of pleasure and photobooks for the publication centerfold. His photograph, titled Candyfloss Ballad (2014), is a naughty take on hide-and-seek, pleasure, and eroticism.

This issue of The PhotoBook Review is sublimely unresolved, confusing, and queering. The chaos of this photobook orgy is exciting and pleasurable. I feel it’s a slightly frantic but successful gathering, and I’m really grateful to all who decided so generously and carefreely to take part. (A special thank you to Joanna Cresswell, who assisted me in the development of the project.) If this issue cannot be conclusive in mapping the complex relationship between pleasure and the photobook, I hope that it prompts you, the reader, to reconsider your own relationship with books, freed from the idiosyncratic diktats of the collector market, art-world hype, and prevailing academic discourses.

Jacques Lacan wrote, “That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given, ready to be coopted. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.” In my conversation with David Senior, he praises the bravery and tenaciousness of the artist/publisher. I heartily urge such artists to think about the photobook as a catalyst for a new presence in the world—as a new way of thinking and living. After all, this could be paradise.

—

BRUNO CESCHEL is a writer, curator, and lecturer at the University of the Arts London. He is the founder of Self Publish, Be Happy (SPBH), an organization that supports and promotes the work of emerging photographers. SPBH has organized events at a number of institutions around the world, including at the Photographers’ Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Serpentine Galleries, London; C/O Berlin; Aperture Foundation, New York; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, among others. Ceschel is also the director of SPBH Editions, which has most recently published books by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Cristina De Middel, Mariah Robertson, and Lorenzo Vitturi. Ceschel writes regularly for a number of publications, including Foam, British Journal of Photography, and Aperture, and has also guest-edited issues of Photography & Culture and OjodePez.

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PhotoBook Lust: Ed Templeton on 61 Pimlico

This is a web exclusive from the feature “PhotoBook Lust,” a collection of writing on photobooks and desire by artists, curators, and writers, first published in The PhotoBook Review 006. Read the Lust introduction by guest editor Bruno Ceschel.

PBR 006 will be shipped with issue 215 of Aperture magazine. Subscribe here.

Bill Jay

Photographs by Henry Hayler

61 Pimlico: The Secret Journal of Henry Hayler

Nazraeli Press

Portland, Oregon, 1998

I was in Sydney, Australia in the year 2000, and while in the Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay, I stumbled upon the beautiful volume 61 Pimlico: The Secret Journal of Henry Hayler. It’s the story of a Victorian-era photographer who shot nudes that were a scandal in his day; the photographs were mostly destroyed until Bill Jay found a precious few images hidden in an old journal at a car-boot sale in Maidenhead, England. I couldn’t stop looking at the images, devouring the story of how they were made and the sex Hayler was having with his subjects. They are reminiscent of E. J. Bellocq’s Storyville portraits, but the faces are all hidden or obscured with framing or a turn of the head, as if the sitter suddenly looked away as the shutter was released. Many of Hayler’s sitters, it turns out, were society ladies who wished to be photographed anonymously in the nude, to what purpose I do not know. There are only nine images handsomely tipped into the book, and each one is oozing with a sort of clandestine naughtiness, seen through eyes that are new with discovery of the female form and the pleasures of the flesh.

I would return to this book often back home in California; the images haunted me. They still do. There is so much sex and nudity available at the click of a button now—any act or type one could conceive of is there, if you only search—making these glass-plate negatives and the time and effort that went into each one a thousand times more erotic, in my opinion. The social mores surrounding the time in which they were created make these nude photos a special kind of contraband. They continue to cause an ache in my loins that cannot be found on the Internet.

—

Ed Templeton is a California-based artist, professional skateboarder, and the owner of Toy Machine skateboard company.

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Ed Templeton on 61 Pimlico appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.