Aperture's Blog, page 182

Vicki Goldberg on Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels with Natalie Zelt, War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath

Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels with Natalie Zelt, War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / Yale University Press, 2012, Designed by Julie Savasky and DJ Stout, Pentagram

Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels with Natalie Zelt, War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / Yale University Press, 2012, Designed by Julie Savasky and DJ Stout, Pentagram

Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels with Natalie Zelt, War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / Yale University Press, 2012, Designed by Julie Savasky and DJ Stout, Pentagram

“It makes no difference what men think of war. . . .

War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The

ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

I challenge anyone to look through this book without both wincing and admiring, sometimes when confronting the same image. War photographs can plunge us into a kind of purgatory, a state of pain that comes with the promise that we, far from the hell out there, need not suffer eternally. War/Photography, the catalog for the enormous show (almost five hundred photographs and objects) that originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curated by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels with Natalie Zelt, inflicts a good deal of pain: photographs like Greg Marinovich’s of a South African hacking at a man who’s consumed in flames, or Patrick Chauvel’s of soldiers in Bangladesh publicly executing prisoners by repeatedly bayoneting them. And there are admirable, remarkable, sometimes beautiful photographs as well: Christophe Agou’s view through the ragged cross-shaped bars of a shattered window to the bare bones of the towers destroyed on 9/11, and Edward Steichen’s elegant picture of soldiers relaxing and sleeping on a flight deck during World War I.

The book is handsomely designed and produced and, at six hundred pages, is as stuffed with useful and surprising information as a detective’s file cabinet—and heavy enough to flatten your lap. Uncommon facts proliferate. There were many photographs before and during the supposedly almost unphotographed Falklands War. Official German photographers in World War I took color photographs. More than half the population of Great Britain saw a film that included actual footage of the Battle of the Somme while that battle was still going on. And more.

Uncommon photographs multiply as well: the grave of a Mexican prisoner in 1913, still alive enough to reach an arm up from the earth after he’d been buried. The track of a Japanese torpedo racing toward American ships at Pearl Harbor in 1941. A parachutist in 1962 falling into another man’s parachute on the way down. A Khmer guerilla in Cambodia awaiting surgery from medical personnel standing knee-deep in swamp water. And more. And more.

If you cannot see an exhibition during its tour, the catalog offers a vague feeling that you have done so. With war photographs (and movies), one of photography’s most persistent specters is especially prevalent (and dangerous): the insidious sense that we have absorbed the experience, that we know what such conflict is like. Technology is working hard to intensify this notion, as soldiers’ photographs from the field catapult to prominence on the web, and automated photography—aerial photographs from unmanned planes and earth-based images from cameras attached to soldiers’ helmets—zeroes in on dangerous and gruesome encounters.

Every catalog adds to Malraux’s museum without walls, but the catalog’s greatest power is its ability to fill in contextual blanks. If photographs tell but do not explain, catalogs do both. War/Photography does this hugely and often grandly. If occasionally uneven, it fulfills the curators’ stated hopes by providing a platform for discussion of conflict and conflict photography.

The exhibition and book’s premise is complex: that it is important to comprehend not only the intention and purpose of war images, but also their distribution and their effects. Effects are particularly hard to pin down, but the ubiquity of such images since the advent of the illustrated press, plus the ongoing popularity of war movies, testify to their persistence and their strength. Part of War/Photography’s premise inheres in its structure: it looks at the genre comprehensively, not the (mere) history of individual wars or individual photographers, but “the arc of war—from instigation, to recruitment, embarkation, and training, to ‘the fight’ and ‘the fog’ of war, to its aftermath, with prisoners and executions, the wounded and refugees, to war’s end, memorials, and remembrance.” All such photographs are universally recognized as having to do with war, but this is a much more inclusive definition than the common term “war photography,” and the slice across time and place in each category produces some intriguing hints that all wars are both the same and entirely different.

Anne Wilkes Tucker’s introductory essays to each section thoughtfully and authoritatively address the images and issues in that section. John Stauffer’s and Bodo Von Dewitz’s contributions are particularly brilliant and revelatory.

Stauffer, who writes about the effects of images in the Crimean War and the American Civil War, has a logical explanation for which of Roger Fenton’s two pictures of The Valley of the Shadow of Death in the Crimea came first. He also writes that though the British had a virtual lust for images of that conflict, far more, millions in fact, were published in the illustrated press in America, despite the fact that the U.S. was not engaged in that war. What’s more, “England was comparatively free of censorship, which helps explain why the correspondents and public opinion played a crucial role in the war’s outcome.” The other combatants, who had a clearer idea of the power of the press, rigorously controlled it. Government restrictions on publication had been around a long time, but the burgeoning media carved a wide new path for influence to flow along. The mid-nineteenth century gave birth to the mass media, the mass audience, and the image era, all of which grew up fast, eventually reaching maturity—and decadence. They are still growing before our eyes.

Bodo Von Dewitz writes about photography’s influence in Germany during and after World War I. Traditionally, that war is considered rather photograph-poor due to early censorship, restrictions on professional access, and the frequent reliance on staged images when action pictures were hard to get. But in fact, Von Dewitz writes, “countless millions” of photographs were produced by soldier amateurs, sent home as postcards and greeting cards, kept in albums, sold in bookshops in the field, and exhibited on the home front. In postwar Germany, many books were published with war photographs, giving rise to “an unprecedented, intensive journalistic examination of wartime experiences.”

The amateur images were variously interpreted, or slanted and used as propaganda (in an early indication of the questionable authority of photographs as documents). The media’s reinterpretation of these wartime memories generated “the building blocks for the rise of the National Socialist movement, which ultimately resulted in the Nazi dictatorship and its politics of re-armament and war”—a breathtaking claim for the power of photographs. No exhibition has the space to include such history, a persuasive argument for this catalog and catalogs in general.

All photography books change the object in one way or another. Paper and color are different, even if minimally, and scale cannot be reproduced. Reducing the scale of a work of art alters its effect, a fact rendered especially meaningful now that photographs have laid claim to grandeur.

The Houston exhibition juxtaposed two pictures of the identical subject but of quite different sizes: Seamus Murphy’s black-and-white image of a dead Taliban soldier in Afghanistan (20 x 24 in.) and Luc Delahaye’s color photograph of the very same corpse (43 1⁄8 x 93 1⁄4 in.). The book necessarily reduces them, replicating the ratio of one to the other as closely as possible, yet the experience of Delahaye’s oversize image simply cannot be reproduced on the page.

Its scale introduces another factor. Murphy’s picture, though it too is large enough to suggest the photographer expected it to be displayed in an art context, retains elements of a captured or photojournalistic image. The dead man’s feet are nearly at the bottom edge of the picture and the body stretches back toward a wide, deserted landscape. In Delahaye’s photograph, the body lies parallel to and precisely in the center of an elongated frame, and only a brief expanse of ground, not enough to call a landscape, frames the figure and serves to emphasize its centrality. This formal, classicizing composition calls upon the histories of painting and sculptured relief; composition, muted color, and ambitious scale adamantly insist that a war photograph can be conceived from its inception as a work of art. Time, the market, and museums may have lightly tossed many war photographs into the amorphous category of art, and many a photographer, Murphy included, has given a rough picture an artistic twist, but few who were on the battlefield have claimed the mantel so decisively as Delahaye.

Both book and show carefully point out faked and staged photographs, as well as their origins and uses. Staged: the Kaiser was photographed visiting the front during World War I, but he never got there. No German soldier crouched in the muddy swamp of the front lines would have recognized the clean and tidy trench their ruler inspected; it was constructed for the occasion. Faked: Wesley David Archer’s Just as he left the burning plane (ca. 1933), a harrowing picture of a pilot falling through the air while his plane does its own death dive, was long accepted as a war document but later discovered to have been ginned up with a model airplane and doubtless a toy human, too.

Manipulated war photographs, often distrusted by the military, served governments, their agencies, and activists as morale builders and propaganda. The public apparently accepted some degree of manipulation, such as added scenery, but still believed in photography’s essential truthfulness. Would that we could discover whether news editors knew (or cared) which photographs they published were staged.

It seems a characteristic of our species that we will wage war forever. What’s more, as representations of war have mushroomed, they have stoked the appetite for them, which seems to be in no more danger of being slaked than war is of being stopped. It would pay us to understand our hunger for war’s images and to understand how those images have affected history and culture. These are big questions. This catalog hints at and poses them indirectly and asks us to discuss them, perhaps even to come up with answers—which could turn out to be as scorching as the photographs themselves.

—

Vicki Goldberg’s latest book is The White House: The President’s Home in Photographs and History (Little, Brown and Co., 2011), which features two hundred and fifty photographs, from the 1840s–2010, of the house; the presidents; their families, guests, and pets; and their relations with the media and involvement with technology. The exhibition War/Photography opened at the Brooklyn Museum on November 8, 2013.

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Darius Himes in Conversation with Dana Faconti (Blind Spot)

Kim Zorn Caputo, editor-in-chief, Blind Spot, Issue Eight, New York, Fall/Winter 1996

Kim Zorn Caputo, editor-in-chief, Blind Spot, Issue Eight, New York, Fall/Winter 1996

Kim Zorn Caputo, editor-in-chief, Blind Spot, Issue Nineteen, New York, Summer 2001

Kim Zorn Caputo, editor-in-chief, Blind Spot, Issue Nineteen, New York, Summer 2001

Kim Zorn Caputo, editor-in-chief, Blind Spot, Issue Thirty-Seven, New York, Spring/Summer 2008

Kim Zorn Caputo, editor-in-chief, Blind Spot, Issue Thirty-Seven, New York, Spring/Summer 2008

I was living abroad when I first saw an issue of Blind Spot. I had recently completed my BFA in photography and was isolated from any art community. In reading the magazine, I felt like I had discovered a secret treasure trove. I still feel that way when I get a new issue.

Darius Himes: The mission of Blind Spot has always been to showcase unseen work by both well-know and unknown photographers. How has that mission grown and developed over the years?

Dana Faconti: We still aim to present new work, or work that has been overlooked for one reason or another, and it remains a priority to maintain a balance of established and emerging artists. When Blind Spot appeared in 1993, there were far fewer venues for artists working with photography to present their work, which made the impact of this mission profound. Twenty years later, the Internet and new printing technologies have proliferated on-demand books, websites, and small imprints; the number of outlets for photographers has increased greatly. The terrain for a small imprint like Blind Spot to engage new generations of image consumers is much more challenging now. We’ve responded to this by expanding our programming to include events, books, and online content, and by turning the magazine over to artist guest editors who provide distinct views on the role of photography within contemporary art. Artists remain at the center of what we do, and it’s particularly gratifying when they respond positively to our work. Ed Ruscha once said, “I was being forgetful while searching for a copy of Blind Spot. I looked for a good while then discovered it was on a shelf labeled Absolutely Most Unique in Any Storm at Sea.”

DH: Blind Spot is a very trim operation, accomplishing a great deal with modest resources. You perform the roles of publisher, editor, designer, production manager—among various other positions. What has been your approach to design—and has it changed over the last ten years?

DF: I was hired at Blind Spot fourteen years ago to be the assistant to the founding editor and publisher, Kim Zorn Caputo, and to be responsible for overseeing the nuts and bolts of our tiny operation—customer service, distribution, and the like. Having recently graduated from Parsons School of Design with a degree in photography and a focus in graphic design, Kim immediately made use of my layout skills and had me work on the issues with her. (She had previously worked with various designers, including Tony Arefin, J. Abbott Miller, and Tony Morgan.) The issues we produced together featured pieces of contemporary short fiction by writers like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lynne Tillman, and were very much under Kim’s art direction, which favored the use of multiple display typefaces and a lot of full-spread and full-bleed images.

When I took over the magazine I simplified the design and let go of the written components. For me, Blind Spot’s strength was in presenting beautifully produced images, and I wanted to refine the layout to better serve this purpose. At the same time, I was given the task of setting up a non-profit to take over the publishing of Blind Spot. That work led me, in 2007, to bring on Susan Barber as our art director; Su is responsible for creating the present design of the magazine. She’s an incredible designer with a deep appreciation of art and photography, and she works closely with the guest editors to adapt the format to their curatorial needs. I continue to oversee production, which is work I’ve always enjoyed.

DH: Very high production value is a distinguishing aspect of the magazine. The choice of paper stock and the standard of reproductions are superb. Why is that so integral to the experience of the magazine?

DF: The production value of Blind Spot is something I inherited from Kim. The magazine was begun as a side project while Kim was co-running a custom photography lab, Lexington Labs. Kim set out with the intention, strongly influenced by the magazine’s first associate editor, Vik Muniz, not just to create a magazine, but also to collaborate with the editors, designers, and contributing artists on making a piece of art. For Kim, that meant the publication warranted the same level of quality as the exhibition prints she was making for the artists that patronized the lab. Despite how financially difficult it has been to maintain this quality, especially since we produce the magazine and all of our publications in the United States, I remain committed to it.

DH: You’ve begun working with guest editors, inviting noted figures to work with the set parameters of the magazine. Have you enjoyed the process? Has that opened doors to seeing the magazine in a new light?

DF: Blind Spot has always been artist-driven. Vik was instrumental in shaping the publication at its inception, and the decision to turn the magazine over to artist guest editors was an organic development that now seems inevitable. The first issue with the coeditor role formalized was issue thirty-five, published in 2007. I had long been a fan of Jason Fulford’s work, so I asked Jason who he was excited about and he sent me a long and interesting list. From there I began looking for artists that I felt were pushing the medium or particular ideas about it that could be explored through the curation of an issue. I’ve largely given the guest editors complete freedom—with the exception that the trim size and page count remain the same. Taryn Simon was the first guest editor who wanted to change the layout of the pages. This was difficult for me at first but I was ultimately pleased with the resulting issue, and it opened things up for subsequent editors to work more freely within the format.

I’m careful to invite artists whose work I deeply admire, like Walead Beshty, Marco Breuer, Moyra Davey, Zoe Leonard, Tim Davis, Liz Deschenes, and James Welling, while also maintaining Blind Spot’s commitment to giving opportunities to exciting younger artists like Jodie Vicenta Jacobson, Arthur Ou, and Matthew Porter and Hannah Whitaker, who worked together on an issue. The guest editors have all been incredibly generous with their time and vision, and it’s been an extremely enjoyable process. To celebrate the magazine’s twentieth anniversary, I’ve invited Vik back to edit the fall issue, and Barney Kulok will coedit it. Their issue will draw from the magazine’s twenty-year archive, as well as introduce new and unpublished work.

—

Darius Himes is a director of Fraenkel Gallery. He was a cofounder of Radius Books and the first editor of the photo-eye Booklist, a journal dedicated to photography books. His first title, Publish Your Photography Book (Princeton Architectural Press), coauthored with Mary Virginia Swanson, will be reissued in a second edition in the spring of 2014. He lives and works in San Francisco but considers himself a global citizen.

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Alan Rapp in Conversation with Hans Gremmen

Hans Gremmen, ed., Objects in Mirror: The Imagination of the American Landscape, Fw: *Amsterdam, 2012, Designed by Hans Gremmen

Hans Gremmen, ed., Objects in Mirror: The Imagination of the American Landscape, Fw: *Amsterdam, 2012, Designed by Hans Gremmen

Cara Phillips, Singular Beauty, Fw: *Amsterdam, 2012, Designed by Hans Gremmen

Cara Phillips, Singular Beauty, Fw: *Amsterdam, 2012, Designed by Hans Gremmen

Hans Gremmen and Dieuwertje Komen, Commonness, Fw: *Amsterdam, 2010, Designed by Hans Gremmen

Hans Gremmen and Dieuwertje Komen, Commonness, Fw: *Amsterdam, 2010, Designed by Hans Gremmen

Contemporary photobooks that treat ephemeral, elusive, and subtly unsettling subjects require designers who can work beyond familiar conventions. This extends from obvious design issues such as the sequence of images and the composition of pages into production factors, where the craft tradition of books resides. Amsterdam-based designer Hans Gremmen combines proficiency in these fields with critical inquiry. Books he has designed do not exude the air of authority normally associated with the printed document, but instead convey contingency, ambiguity, and disjuncture. Whether in the compilation of test, prep, and misprinted posters by renowned artists and designers (Serendipity), a book bound in office grip clips (Singular Beauty), or a silkscreened bookwrap that is damaged by its removal (Libero), many of Gremmen’s projects question the status of the printed book itself. In our interview, Gremmen used the word unheimlich to describe the alluring and repellent qualities of Cara Phillips’s images of cosmetic surgery spaces; one way that this freighted German word is translated is uncanny, which is the twilight zone where these works reside.

Alan Rapp: When approaching a book project, do you try to get at the core of the work alone, or with exposure to or input from the photographer?

Hans Gremmen: I never instantly have an idea or direction for a book. To get to the core of the work asks for a different approach with every project. But there is a valuable moment that I am always very careful with: the moment I first see the work. I prefer to go into this stage unprepared, not knowing what the project is about (except maybe for a title). I do this because it mimics the experience of many of the book’s future readers and viewers. As soon as you have background info, you look at the work differently. [The first look] is a unique moment. I try to get rough prep material, contact sheets and things like that, and I need time to digest all the information. In the next meeting with the photographer (usually after a few weeks), we begin to talk about how I see things, and whether that is in line with the ideas of the photographer.

AR: What are the main design and production techniques you employ? Do you think of yourself as a designer with a consistent approach, belonging to a certain school or tradition of design?

HG: I have a printing background. Before I went to an arts academy, I trained for four years to do graphic production work: printing, typesetting, prepress, etc. I understand the printing process inside out, and—as a designer—look for ways to use and influence that process to get what I want. My designs stay close to this practical and physical part of the production: paper, ink, print sheets, and binding are my main tools. For me this connection between design and printing is logical, but it also fits in a design tradition in the Netherlands, I think. In the 1950s and ’60s designers such as Otto Treumann and Willem Sandberg made very print-based work, as do my own teachers, like Jaap van Triest, Karel Martens, and Roger Willems.

AR: You have said that in making the photobook you create a “new autonomy.” What are the conditions today that permit this independence of the medium? Given the complex streams and flows of visual culture, what does this autonomy mean to you?

HG: What I meant by that is that a book follows its own rules. The basics of the book (cover/front/back/spine/pages) are given, but you can choose to change and manipulate these, which will affect the work and how people will experience the work. Within visual culture this is not a strange phenomenon. Just think of the movies: if you go to a movie you accept that you are entering a world for a few hours, one that will follow its own logic. Maybe plants will begin to speak, maybe a dwarf will sing a song in a red room; it is all possible.

AR: What did you respond to first when formulating the design concept for Cara Phillips’s Singular Beauty? Clinical spaces where female beauty is manipulated are the subject of the book, and Phillips’s images of them are coldly dramatic. Why employ an all-type cover and bind the block with grip clips?

HG: When I saw Cara’s work I was instantly drawn into these strange rooms and machines. The way she uses the light makes the work unheimlich; it gets under your skin. But what is actually in the photographs is very hardcore medical equipment. So I instantly knew what kind of book it shouldn’t be. This book shouldn’t be a coffee-table book, with perfect paper and perfect binding. That would focus too much on the surface layer of the work. I wanted the book to also have a slightly uncomfortable feeling. Therefore I chose this rough binding, something you could also see as very clinical: staples. Stainless steel at its best. On the front I placed the title very large simply because I needed a counterpoint for all the fragile decisions I made (thin paper, see-through captions, regular typography). The back cover has a large image. For me a cover is a three-dimensional object, with a front, a back, and a spine. A cover should be part of the total concept of the book.

AR: Another example is Petra Stavast’s Libero, in which the design concept extends to the production and packaging. At what point do you as the designer really start calling the shots in fabrication? And how often do you have the budget latitude to do this?

HG: I am always very much involved in the fabrication of a book. By doing so, I can often produce the book more inexpensively than initially budgeted. In the case of Libero I used the maximum number of pages that fit on a sheet of a mid-size book. I found a way in printing that I could push the normal page–per–sheet ratio up by half a centimeter on each side. This may sound like a marginal difference, but it makes the book more in the mid-size range, without losing the intimacy of a small(er) book. And it does not cost any extra money because no extra plates and paper are needed. It is the same process, only used more economically. I work with printers that I know very well, which allows me to get into these kinds of discussions. The puzzle of making it all fit is something that both I and they enjoy. And in the end, it makes for a far more engaging photobook.

—

Alan Rapp is senior editor of architecture and design at the Monacelli Press.

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Editor’s Note: Darius Himes

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf #634 Darius Himes, idealbookshelf.com

Whenever there is a cultural statement involving the “death” of something, you can be assured that a proliferation and rebirth of that very thing is already happening in the nooks and crannies of popular culture. The renaissance is usually spearheaded by artists, and while it doesn’t have the same mass-market reach, it is usually far more culturally satisfying. Vinyl is still around, television didn’t kill radio, college kids now want to become organic farmers, many stores within a few blocks of my flat sell working typewriters, the production process for books has never been more accessible, and you’re reading this on newsprint.

Interestingly enough, newsprint, despite the shuttering of long-standing newspapers around the world, seems to be having its heyday right now. I realized earlier this summer that I had been unwittingly collecting examples of newsprint for the past year: the ANT!FOTO Manifesto (Böhm/Kobayashi, 2013), the state-by-state LBM Dispatch of Alec Soth and Brad Zellar (Little Brown Mushroom, 2012–13), the newspaper supplement to IMA magazine (“Japanese Art Photographers 107,” 2012), Louie Palu’s Mira Mexico, numerous publisher catalogs (JRP-Ringier, Radius Books, MACK), and, obviously, The PhotoBook Review are all printed on a material declared “dead” by popular media.

Change, as the saying goes, is the one constant of this world. I like that sentiment quite a lot. While changes to global society, our national culture, and neighborhood communities continue unabated—think “river of life”— those changes provide rich opportunities for artists to express themselves through ever-evolving mediums. Change represents potential—positive potential, I would argue.

The printed medium is so perfectly universal, I get ridiculously excited thinking about it, and about its future. This has been said over and over, but the conveyance of ideas, both written and visual, through the printed form is here to stay. As Joan Fontcuberta wrote in PBR 003’s Editor’s Note, “As if the irresistible rise of online journals and e-books was to lay waste in two days to print, a technology that has endured for centuries.” Have we forgotten that the right to education, and therefore literacy—the ability to read and gain collected, collective knowledge—arose from the same foment that led to the invention of photography itself? There is no causal relationship, but they are both part of the new level of consciousness that humanity finds itself struggling to adjust to. I’m already sentimental about the future developments in store for humanity in an age where universal education, literacy—including visual literacy—and access to knowledge are not merely considered rights, but have been fully implemented. Did anyone think the application on a global scale of those lofty ideals would take less than a few generations, perhaps a couple hundred years, to implement and adjust?

My ideal bookshelf (illustrated above) is a mix of photography, art, and books about ideas. These are books that have sustained me from the moment they entered my life. They have nourished my intellect and my emotions. Open Secrets, published jointly by Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, was a book I discovered just after college. Perfectly balancing works on paper, this book interleaved photographs, drawings, and prints in a way that resounded with a sensibility that had yet to be fully developed in me. I felt the same expansiveness when I discovered the exhibition catalog In Quest of the Absolute, published in 1996 by Peter Blum Edition. Here was a book and an exhibition that was published in direct response to—in conversation with the ideas of—an earlier show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art titled The Spiritual in Art. This notion of a conversation over the decades and centuries between artists and writers is something that excites me deeply—something that the current interest in photobooks past and present so clearly taps into. The essays Mortimer Adler wrote for his masterful two-volume A Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas are a perfect illustration of this point. By surveying the great books of the Western tradition, Adler delineates precisely how particular ideas—Art, Duty, Love, Matter, Time, Will—have been defined over millenia, and how writers and thinkers have responded to each other through their texts. The writer Ananda K. Coomaraswamy—the first curator of what was then called Oriental Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and one of the true great polymaths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—complemented Adler’s work decades earlier through his prolific writings on art, philosophy, and traditional, sacred society seen through the lens of the world’s great cultures, including not only early Christian civilization, but the great societies of the East, which gave rise to Indian and Islamic culture.

Books are the perfect vehicle for that conversation. The book is a physical site of learning that, in turn, sparks the imagination, the world of ideas. This applies to both text and imagery. The photograph, and by extension the photobook, allows the reader’s intellect and imagination to come into play nearly equally.

The central task of producing a book is to manifest in physical form an abstract vision in one’s mind. The production process is one of coming up against the realities of manufacturing. All of us in the publishing industry—from artists to editors to designers—have dreams of what our books could be and what they should contain; we then have to come to terms with what is and is not possible or affordable.

This issue of The PhotoBook Review includes a focus on the physical production of books. The central piece offers the collected wisdom from more than a dozen book-printing professionals around the world. We broke the production process down into three digestible parts: choosing materials, preparing files for reproduction, and the experience of being on press.

As I’m writing this, I have just returned from the New York Art Book Fair, where evidence of the love of books’ form is plentiful. Examples ranged from MIT Press’s Various Small Books (a survey of photography books responding to Ed Ruscha’s small photo-conceptual artist’s books) to Aaron Canipe’s Eden, a humble, saddle-stitched book of photographs in homage and response to Robert Adams’s book of the same title. What The PhotoBook Review hopes to further and facilitate is that conversation among artists and photographers that was so abundantly evident at MoMA PS1. I hope you enjoy this issue.

—

Darius Himes is a director of Fraenkel Gallery. He was a cofounder of Radius Books and the first editor of the photo-eye Booklist, a journal dedicated to photography books. His first title, Publish Your Photography Book (Princeton Architectural Press), coauthored with Mary Virginia Swanson, will be reissued in a second edition in the spring of 2014. He lives and works in San Francisco but considers himself a global citizen.

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Protected: Artist Talk: Sandy Kim (Video)

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Artist Talk: Sandy Kim (Video)

On Tuesday, February 4, Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons The New School for Design, presented a talk with artist Sandy Kim. A self-identified “spark plug,” Kim authors images as provocative as they are insightful. Her subjects are her friends, and they revel in the casual pleasures of youthful antagonism. For all the impatience and abuses depicted in Kim’s photographs, the radiant glow of humor, creativity, and possibility shines through. During the event, Kim discussed her images and fielded questions from the audience.



Sandy Kim holds a BFA in graphic design from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco. Immersed in San Francisco’s vibrant music scene, Kim gained international exposure for her intimate portraits of the band Girls. Her work has since been featured in publications such as Purple Fashion, FADER, New Yorker, New York Times, Vogue Italia, Pitchfork, Nylon, Guardian, Elle, Wired, and Rolling Stone, among many others. She lives in New York.

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The Aperture Summer Open is now accepting entries!

Entries for the 2014 Aperture Summer Open will be accepted from Friday, February 14, 2014 until Wednesday, April 9, 2014 at 12:00 p.m. EST. Membership with Aperture Foundation is the sole requirement for entry into the Summer Open.



To purchase your membership, please visit aperture.org/join. Upon purchase, you will receive a unique entry code that will allow you to enter the 2014 Aperture Summer Open.

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Entries for the 2014 Aperture Summer Open will be accepte...

Entries for the 2014 Aperture Summer Open will be accepted from Monday, February 10, 2014 until Wednesday, April 9, 2014 at 12:00 p.m. EST.



Membership with Aperture Foundation is the sole requirement for entry into the Summer Open.



To purchase your membership, please visit aperture.org/join. Upon purchase, you will receive a unique entry code that will allow you to enter the Summer Open.



Enter here!

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Week in Review: 01.31.2014

Marco Breuer, Untitled (C-1189), 2012. © Marco Breuer, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

Aperture aggregates the photography blogosphere’s most trending stories from the past week.

››This week, the world responded in shock to a cache of 55,000 photographs detailing Syria’s “torture” regime. The photographs, allegedly smuggled out of the country by a defector, document the deaths of some 11,000 detainees. Even more horrific is the fact that they were taken not by the opposition, but by the perpetrators themselves: members of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Aperture contributor Susie Linfield notes that in this case, “Rather than expose atrocities, photographs now advertise them,” and compares the photos to similarly revolting “perpetrator images” from Nazi Germany. She notes that today, with the use of social media, “these images of cruelty ricochet around the globe.”

››It seems that photography’s identity is being examined on multiple platforms, and we’re floored that New York City is buzzing with talk of the ICP’s latest exhibition, What is A Photograph? The show, which includes work by Marco Breuer, examines our challenge in defining serious photography in a world saturated with images. The show has already generated conversation, and comes at a time when other major institutions, including MoMA, Pier 24, and Aperture magazine, are addressing photography’s “identity crisis” in the midst of technological advances and an “overflow of images.” But is it a crisis? “It’s a benefit,” Pier 24 director Christopher McCall said to the New York Times, encouraging curators “to analyze and think about images because they’re everywhere.”

››State of the Union aside, President Obama caught the art world’s attention with a speech in Wisconsin, where he stressed the importance of education, specifically of the trade-school variety. A valid point, except that he knocked art-history majors in the process, and some have taken offense. “Oh my God, no,” the CEO and executive director of the College Art Association told Politico, “That’s just awful.” In his defense, Obama “loves art history.” And his wife, First Lady Michelle? She totally gets it. “The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.”

››It would be difficult to sum up this week without mentioning the fast-approaching 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, the details of which seem to grow more outlandish by the minute. Fascinating, disturbing, and downright absurd, drama surrounding the games seems more fit for a circus tent than a stadium. Aperture’s The �Sochi Project, by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen, has gained attention as a look beyond the facade of the games, though photographer Hornstra and van Bruggen won’t make it back to Russia any time soon. This week, as the international community pleads with Russia to repeal its anti-gay laws, we learned that winning athletes will be awarded pieces of meteor, and that Putin’s promise of a “green” Olympics was a guise.

››Escaping frigid weather on the East Coast, art publishers and fans alike headed west to the LA Art Book Fair. The fair, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary on January 30 and runs until February 2, is in its second year. It features 250 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers (Aperture included). Its success last year was reassuring proof that print is most certainly not dead—although we knew that already. Earning attention and praise was a Queer Zines Exhibition, which highlighted the zine’s role in facilitating connection and communication between members of the gay community over the past 30 years.

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Follow Aperture on Twitter (@aperturefnd) for a daily feed of photography-related news and commentary, and follow #InsideSochi to stay updated on the latest from the Games.

Katie Booth is an Aperture Work Scholar and a photographer. Originally from the Adirondacks, she holds a BFA in photography from SUNY Plattsburgh.

The post Week in Review: 01.31.2014 appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Best of Aperture: PhotoBooks in 2013

With the New Year came the quintessential batch of “Best Books of 2013″ lists, and we were delighted to find our name on a few. From the nuanced, lushly colored pages of Rinko Kawauchi’s Ametsuchi , to the previously unseen visions of the red planet offered in This Is Mars , here’s where sixteen of our best titles were celebrated at year’s end.

From Ametsuchi © Rinko Kawauchi

 

Ametsuchi: Photographs by Rinko Kawauchi

“The Best Books of 2013”, The Washington Post; “Alec Soth: My Top 10 Photo Books of 2013”, The Telegraph; “The Best Photobooks of 2013 According to Everyone”, Feature Shoot

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Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman 

“2013 Photo Books of the Year: Reflection”, American Photo

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James Welling: Monograph

Surface Magazine holiday gift guide (Dec/Jan Issue – in print)

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Life’s a Beach: Photographs by Martin Parr

“Gifts for Gobetrotters”, Condé Nast Traveller; “Mother Jones’ Photographers Pick the Best Photobooks of 2013”, Mother Jones; “These Coffee Table Books Make Beautiful–and Unusual–Christmas Gifts: Forget the Night Before Christmas”, New York Observer

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Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen by Fred Ritchin

“The 30 Best Art Books of 2013”, Huffington Post; “2013 Photo Books of the Year: Reflection”, American Photo

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City Stages: Photographs by Matthew Pillsbury

“Photography Books”, The Wall Street Journal

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The Enclave: Photographs by Richard Mosse

“2013 Photo Books of the Year: Documentary”, American Photo

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Emmet Gowin: Photographs by Emmet Gowin

“Photography books of the year”, The Guardian; “Alec Soth: My Top 10 Photo Books of 2013”, The Telegraph; “TIME Picks the Best Photobooks of 2013”, TIME LightBox; “Eight Amazing Photo Books from 2013 You May Have Missed”, Slate; “gwarlingo’s 26 favorite art, photography, film & design books of 2013”, Gwarlingo; “2013 Photo Books of the Year: Fine Art”, American Photo

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Sergio Larrain: Photographs by Sergio Larrain

“Sunday Book Review Holiday Books”, The New York Times and In Print

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This is Mars: Photographs by NASA/MRO, Edited and designed by Xavier Barral

“Eight Amazing Photo Books from 2013 You May Have Missed”, Slate; “Black and White Photography Books of the Year”, The Telegraph; “2013 Gift Guide: Science Books”, The Wall Street Journal; “The Gift Finder 2013; Judge the Book by Its Cover” New York Magazine (December 2, 2013 – In Print); “The Best Photography Books of 2013”, Brain Pickings; “Holiday Gift Guide 2013”, Afar Magazine (November 2013 – In Print); “2013 Photo Books of the Year: Environment”, American Photo

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Non-Conformists: Photographs by Martin Parr

“Sunday Book Review Holiday Books”, The New York Times, and In Print; “The Top 10 Photo Books of 2013”, The New York Times Magazine; “Notable Photo Books of 2013”, Photo District News, In Print

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Sketch of Paris: Photographs by JH Engström

“The Top 10 Photo Books of 2013”, The New York Times Magazine

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Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus , Photographs by Rob Hornstra

“Mother Jones’ Photographers Pick the Best Photobooks of 2013”, Mother Jones; British Journal of Photography (“20 Best Things to Happen in Photography This Year” December Issue 2013 – in print)

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Storms: Photographs by Mitch Dobrowner

“Books of the Year: Mitch Dobrowner, Eye of the Storms”, American Photo; “The Best Art Books to Give as Gifts”, Reader’s Digest

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Understanding a Photograph , by John Berger, Edited by Geoff Dyer

“2013 Photo Books of the Year: Reflection”, American Photo; “Good Reads Under the Tree; Fall Titles Begging to be Unwrapped”, Art + Auction (December 2013, In Print); “5 New Books that Will Inspire You in 2014″, Shutterstock

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Wall: Photographs by Josef Koudelka

“Sunday Book Review Holiday Books”, The New York Times, online and in print; “TIME Picks the Best Photobooks of 2013”, TIME LightBox; “Notable Photo Books of 2013”, Photo District News, In Print

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Follow Aperture on Twitter (@aperturefnd) for a daily feed of photography-related news and commentary.

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