Aperture's Blog, page 194

Lisa Oppenheim: Elemental Process

By Brian Sholis

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #1 (Version 2), 2010. All works © Lisa Oppenheim and courtesy Harris Lieberman, New York, and The Approach, London.

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #3 (Version 2), 2010.

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #9 (Version 2), 2010.

Lisa Oppenheim, A monstrous column of roaring flame. Star Oil Co. Loucke No. 3 on fire since Aug. 7, 1913. Most disastrous fire in Caddo oil field and largest single well fire in history of U.S. of A. Daily loss of oil estimated at 30,000 barrels. 1913/2012 (Version V), 2012. From the series Smoke, 2011–12.

Lisa Oppenheim, Billowing. As we were driving up to Norfolk yesterday I saw the Enfield fire; where a Sony distribution centre sat ablaze by rioters was just pouring out smoke over the motorway. The sheer amount of smoke was quite surprising, and today smoke was still covering the motorway. I feel such despair at people who have taken to looting; so angry at the destruction people can cause. 2011/2012. (Version V), 2012. From the series Smoke, 2011–12.

For nearly a decade, Lisa Oppenheim has teased apart the individual steps of picture-making, wringing from the medium’s technical apparatus a surprisingly broad range of meanings. She is informed by the legacy of Conceptual art, but her most recent series, sampled in the following pages, reach back further in time for their inspiration. Time is itself a central focus of this work, which meditates on the various ways photography registers duration—the length of the exposure, the gap between a picture’s making and its viewing—and how our sense of it dilates in a photograph’s presence. This effort is in the service, the New York– and Berlin-based artist has said, of recovering the surprises offered by photography’s materials, and of dwelling in “the magic of the photographic process.” Through cool calculation, Oppenheim has devised an art of surprising affectiveness, equal parts romantic and rigorous.

The emotional resonance of Oppenheim’s works has often rested in her use of (quite literally) universal subjects. The sun and the moon—giver of light and the ultimate light reflector—feature regularly, from a 2006 slide projection in which the artist holds postcards of sunsets in front of the real thing to a two-channel 16mm film installation, made in 2008, that is based upon images of the Earth and the moon made the night of the Apollo mission’s first lunar landing. The moon recurred as the subject of a 2010 series of unique silver-toned photograms she dubbed Lunagrams. To make these works, Oppenheim borrowed from the archives of New York University mid-nineteenthcentury glass-plate negatives by John and Henry Draper depicting the moon. She made large-format copy negatives, placed them on photographic paper, then exposed them to the moon at the time of the lunar phase depicted in the original. Decades collapse as one image, made by an enthusiast whose work was as much science as art, begets another. A related series of Heliograms was made in 2011: she exposed a photograph of the sun originally taken on July 8, 1876, to sunlight at different times of day during each month that year. Irregular amounts of sunlight means not every work is equally exposed, and there are gaps in the series where Oppenheim’s obligations prevented her from capturing a scheduled image. The individual results once again warp our understanding of two distinct instants, but when seen in aggregate, the Heliograms also chart the passage of the artist’s days. These silvery and golden works possess an elemental allure—the metals themselves, the primitive processes used by the medium’s first exponents—but also acknowledge that copies are always already imperfect, and that life and time conspire to make them so.

Lisa Oppenheim, Passage of the moon over two hours, Arcachon, France, ca. 1870s/2012, April 11, 2012.

Oppenheim literalizes her attempt to translate the essence of earlier images in her 2011–12 series Smoke. There, she isolated details of smoke from a wide range of images of fire, then turned these semiabstract compositions into digital internegatives. Rather than use the light of an enlarger to expose these negatives, Oppenheim used the flames from a match, from a culinary torch, and from other sources to expose—and solarize—these images. From a 1913 oil-field explosion to World War II–era aerial surveillance to journalists’ images of the 2011 North London riots, the absent fires implied by the smoke have been made visible by altogether different flames. The resultant works, which look like polished-silver outtakes from Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, add a canny rumination on presence and absence to Oppenheim’s usual investigation of temporality. As with all her recent works, the Smoke series resides in interstitial spaces: between two images separated by time and place; between materialist and conceptual approaches to the medium; between intellect and emotion. In these seams Oppenheim finds a locus of mystery.

Top row: Lisa Oppenheim, Heliograms, July 8th, 1876/December 8th, 2011, 2011. Middle row: Lisa Oppenheim, Heliograms, July 8th, 1876/December 14th, 2011, 2011. Bottom row: Heliograms, July 8th, 1876, December 21st, 2011, 2011.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot (Photos)

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

On Saturday, May 18, Aperture presented an all-day portrait shoot and beach party with the one and only Martin Parr, in conjunction with the release of the beach-bag-size edition of his monograph Life’s a Beach and the related exhibition at Aperture Gallery. Aperture patrons and the public joined us to have beach-themed portraits snapped by Parr, accompanied by friends, family, and even cherished pets. Click through the slideshow above to see a selection of highlights from the event.

This event was made possible with support from Canon U.S.A., Inc., Gosling’s Rum, and Mondrian Soho. Music by Milo McBride. Event photography by Sophie Finkelstein.

—

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Interview with Anne Hardy

For more than a decade, London-based artist Anne Hardy has exhibited photographs of interior spaces she has constructed in her studio. In her new exhibition at Maureen Paley in London, on view through May 26, she has included freestanding sculptural installations alongside her photographs. Brian Sholis spoke with Hardy by e-mail about this development in her art.

Anne Hardy, Notations (2012). All images © Anne Hardy and courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Anne Hardy, Script (2012).

Anne Hardy, Two Joined Fields—Field (/\) and Field (decagon) (2013).

Anne Hardy, Fieldwork (materials) (2013). Interior view.

Installation view of Anne Hardy, Maureen Paley, London, 2013. From left: Fieldwork (materials) (2013); Shelf (2013); and Script (2012).

Brian Sholis: For years you’ve created objects and built environments to photograph, yet this is one of the first times you’ve allowed exhibition viewers to have access to these materials and spaces. Can you speak about the privacy of the studio and the decision to exhibit things that had otherwise gone unseen by the public?

Anne Hardy: In 2011 I was an artist-in-residence at the Camden Arts Centre. Though private, the studio itself felt like a gallery, and sits alongside the venue’s gallery spaces. My ambition for the residency was to build one of the “sets” I construct for my photos, but also to have the chance to evaluate one of these structures outside the context of my own studio, and to invite others to see it as well. In a way, the time at Camden was transitional for me, and allowed me to connect two environments that had previously been separate in my practice—the private space of the studio and the public space of the exhibition. I had become increasingly interested in the structures I was building in order to realize my images, and wanted to think about what further role—if any—they might play in my work, or if they (or something like them) might in fact be the work. They have physical and material qualities, and allow for the viewer’s movement through them, that I cannot replicate with photographs.

Working in the gallery for a month before this exhibition felt a bit like a second residency, but with the added clarity of the space being given over to an exhibition at the end. In this exhibition there are three sculptural spaces—rooms you can enter that have not been used to make the photographs that they are exhibited alongside. They are independent sculptures, built specifically to fit the space in a particular way. For example, it’s important to me that you do not see the doors of two of them as you walk into the gallery, but must walk around them in order to access their interiors.

BJS: So these constructions are no longer “process materials.”

AH: Well, last year, as I was preparing for my show at the Secession in Vienna and its accompanying book, I began to think about how I could open up other ways into my work without presenting work-in-progress studio shots. The small photograph Shelf (2013) is a product of this. It’s one of several smaller images meant to act as a detail without actually being a detail of any particular work—it’s like a newly made potential detail. The two larger photographs in the show at Maureen Paley also use materials from my working process in new ways.

Anne Hardy, Field (decagon) (2013). Interior view.

It’s exciting to finally exhibit physical spaces that people can enter. I have thought about it for a long time, and wanted to do it only at a point when I felt they would not be seen as subsidiary to the images. I’m happy to see the photographs and the structures face one another equally and hold their own ground. I now feel like I can explore the relationships between environments, images, and objects.

BJS: Was your years-long desire to find a way to achieve this balance intrinsic to your studio practice? Or was it fostered by the relationship between images and objects in the culture at large? Or both?

AH: I am interested in the indeterminate state I perceive in cast-off materials and objects—in rubbish. Something that appears unimportant can become significant and meaningful for an individual who chooses to invest time with it. I think these things can create a space for the imagination that is quite free. I want this quality to be intrinsic to the materials I use in my work, and in the relationship between physical spaces and the images. What previously was captured by single images can now, I hope, open out across an entire exhibition of works.

BJS: How does the fact that your photographs nearly always depict a shallow space, bounded at the back by a wall, play into this? Are you attempting to create an “inhabitable” space for this free play of thought?

AH: Yes, in recent images such as Rift, Script, and Notation I really concentrated on making image-spaces that are less interpretable, that are flatter or more confusing in their spatial layout, in order to open up how the image could be read. I want viewing these works to be in part about the process of reading them, coming to understand them.

 

Anne Hardy, Shelf, 2013.

 

BJS: And is making an image as much about the “process of reading” as about the actual space depicted a way of creating a metaphorical link between the construction of space and the “construction” of a self? Put more simply, to what extent are the spaces you photograph meant to be psychologically charged?

AH: I hope that the process of comprehending the new photographs is less about resolving a depiction of a particular kind of place, in which you say “Oh, this reminds me of that” and in so doing distance yourself from it. Instead I hope the ambiguity will cause viewers to be more aware of what they are projecting onto the image. The sculptural works take this one step further by involving you physically with the work—you can literally step into them.

I want the psychological charge of the work to come from this combination of myself, the viewer, and the imagined potential of these spaces and objects.

#MyApertureMag Instagram Contest Winner Announced

Photo by @heathersten on Instagram

We recently asked Aperture readers to post portraits of themselves with the Spring 2013 relaunch issue, “Hello, Photography,” on Instagram with the tag #myaperturemag. We sorted through dozens of great entries (see a slideshow, including the four runners-up, below) and chose the photo above, submitted by @heathersten, as the winner. For submitting the winning photo, @heathersten will receive a free one-year subscription to Aperture magazine and $125.00 to spend at the Aperture Gallery and Bookstore in New York or online.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @aperturefnd, and remember to check our Instagram feed regularly for future contests.

Also, stay tuned for Aperture magazine‘s Summer 2013 Issue, “Curiosity,” available this month on newsstands and online.

Photograph by @scriptorsum on Instagram

"(After Jeff Wall)" Photography by @clutterandvine on Instagram

Photo by @acmillerphoto on Instagram

Photograph by @ walkyourcamera on Instagram

Photograph by @heathersten on Instagram

Another workshop example

Description:

For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of magazine photography, through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the medium, from photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, focusing primarily on the past fifteen years, long-time New York Times Magazine Photo Editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative, creative processes that have made this magazine the leading venue for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media.

The exhibition is comprised of ten individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that has been presented in the pages of the Magazine. The featured projects mirror the Magazine‘s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage and portraiture as well as fine art photography.

Kuwait Oil Fields, Sebastião Salgado; Dream House, Gregory Crewdson; Assignment: Times Square, featuring Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, and Larry Towell; Olympic Portraiture, Ryan McGinley; Korengal Valley Afghanistan, Lynsey Addario; A Response to 9/11, featuring Andres Serrano and Steve McCurry; Great Performers, featuring Hellen van Meene and Rineke Dijkstra; Fashion Crossovers, featuring Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, and Jeff Koons; Where the Protons Will Play, Simon Norfolk; Conflict Photography, Paolo Pellegrin.

The exhibition also includes contextualizing reading material for all the projects on exhibit, and an extensive series of selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty years of the Magazine.

Curated by Kathy Ryan and Lesley A. Martin.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Video from Palau Robert, Barcelona, On view: September 20, 2012–December 2, 2012

 

Contents:

The exhibition consists of 126 works by thirty-five artists spread over ten modules. Contextual material includes contact sheets, snapshots, six video works, personal correspondence, tear sheets and original magazines that offer further insight into the creative process. Artists are: Lynsey Addario, David Armstrong, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roger Ballen, Lillian Bassman, Chuck Close, Fred Conrad, Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Angel Franco, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Edward Keating, Jeff Koons, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Steve McCurry, Ryan McGinley, Jeff Mermelstein, Abelardo Morell, Simon Norfolk, Michael O’Neil, Paolo Pellegrin, Jack Pierson, Sebastião Salgado, Alfred Seiland, Nancy Seisel, Andres Serrano, Malick Sidibé, Larry Towell, Lars Tunbjörk, Hellen van Meene.

Book:

The New York Times Magazine Photographs

Edited by Kathy Ryan

Hardcover with jacket

11 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.

448 pages

500 4-color images

Participation Fee:

Please call Annette Booth at (212) 946-7128.

$25,000 for an 8-week showing. The host venue is responsible for pro-rated shipping and insurance.

Availability:

The exhibition is available through 2015.

Current Venue List:

Les Rencontres d’Arles

Église de Sainte-Anne, Arles, France

Monday, July 4 – Sunday, September 4, 2011
Foam

Keizersgracht 609 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Thursday, March 22 – Thursday, May 31, 2012
Palau Robert

Passeig de Gràcia, 107, Barcelona, Spain

Thursday, September 20 – Sunday, December 2, 2012
Centro de Extensión, Universidad Católica de Chile

Alameda 340, Santiago, Chile

Monday, April 15 – Friday, May 31, 2013
Fotofestiwal Lodz

Lodz, Poland

The New York Times Magazine Tearsheets

Thursday, June 6 – Tuesday, June 25, 2013
MOCA Jacksonville

333 North Laura Street

Jacksonville, FL 32202

Saturday, April 26 – Sunday, August 24, 2014
Hunter Museum of American Art

10 Bluff View Avenue, Chattanooga, TN

Monday, November 24, 2014 – Sunday, March 29, 2015

Featured workshop example

Description:

For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of magazine photography, through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the medium, from photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, focusing primarily on the past fifteen years, long-time New York Times Magazine Photo Editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative, creative processes that have made this magazine the leading venue for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media.

The exhibition is comprised of ten individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that has been presented in the pages of the Magazine. The featured projects mirror the Magazine‘s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage and portraiture as well as fine art photography.

Kuwait Oil Fields, Sebastião Salgado; Dream House, Gregory Crewdson; Assignment: Times Square, featuring Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, and Larry Towell; Olympic Portraiture, Ryan McGinley; Korengal Valley Afghanistan, Lynsey Addario; A Response to 9/11, featuring Andres Serrano and Steve McCurry; Great Performers, featuring Hellen van Meene and Rineke Dijkstra; Fashion Crossovers, featuring Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, and Jeff Koons; Where the Protons Will Play, Simon Norfolk; Conflict Photography, Paolo Pellegrin.

The exhibition also includes contextualizing reading material for all the projects on exhibit, and an extensive series of selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty years of the Magazine.

Curated by Kathy Ryan and Lesley A. Martin.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Video from Palau Robert, Barcelona, On view: September 20, 2012–December 2, 2012

 

Contents:

The exhibition consists of 126 works by thirty-five artists spread over ten modules. Contextual material includes contact sheets, snapshots, six video works, personal correspondence, tear sheets and original magazines that offer further insight into the creative process. Artists are: Lynsey Addario, David Armstrong, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roger Ballen, Lillian Bassman, Chuck Close, Fred Conrad, Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Angel Franco, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Edward Keating, Jeff Koons, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Steve McCurry, Ryan McGinley, Jeff Mermelstein, Abelardo Morell, Simon Norfolk, Michael O’Neil, Paolo Pellegrin, Jack Pierson, Sebastião Salgado, Alfred Seiland, Nancy Seisel, Andres Serrano, Malick Sidibé, Larry Towell, Lars Tunbjörk, Hellen van Meene.

Book:

The New York Times Magazine Photographs

Edited by Kathy Ryan

Hardcover with jacket

11 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.

448 pages

500 4-color images

Participation Fee:

Please call Annette Booth at (212) 946-7128.

$25,000 for an 8-week showing. The host venue is responsible for pro-rated shipping and insurance.

Availability:

The exhibition is available through 2015.

Current Venue List:

Les Rencontres d’Arles

Église de Sainte-Anne, Arles, France

Monday, July 4 – Sunday, September 4, 2011
Foam

Keizersgracht 609 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Thursday, March 22 – Thursday, May 31, 2012
Palau Robert

Passeig de Gràcia, 107, Barcelona, Spain

Thursday, September 20 – Sunday, December 2, 2012
Centro de Extensión, Universidad Católica de Chile

Alameda 340, Santiago, Chile

Monday, April 15 – Friday, May 31, 2013
Fotofestiwal Lodz

Lodz, Poland

The New York Times Magazine Tearsheets

Thursday, June 6 – Tuesday, June 25, 2013
MOCA Jacksonville

333 North Laura Street

Jacksonville, FL 32202

Saturday, April 26 – Sunday, August 24, 2014
Hunter Museum of American Art

10 Bluff View Avenue, Chattanooga, TN

Monday, November 24, 2014 – Sunday, March 29, 2015

Colin Greenwood on Cuny Janssen, Yoshino

Cuny Janssen

Yoshino

Snoeck Verlagesgesellschaft mbH

Cologne, Germany, 2013

Designed by -SYB-

18 ¼ x 13 ¾ in. (46.3 x 34.8 cm)

54 pages

19 color photographs

Hardcover

snoeck.de

Cuny Janssen’s photographs of the sacred and beautiful Japanese mountain of Yoshino make you feel like you’re there. Her camera directs your eye to the blossoms and branches, streams and forest floors. In one image you float, ghost-like, above the other tourists. She invites us
to imagine we are sharing these views with the ancient writers whose texts are interspersed between Janssen’s images. In combination with the texts, Janssen’s photographs become an enraptured revisiting of pre-photographic scenes of Yoshino.

Yoshino’s cover is a Sharpie-pen sketch of woodland; its swaying trunks and entwined limbs are like animist spirits. The book begins with traditional Japanese texts (translated
by Jos Vos, who also contributes an essay), which fan out over five widening pages. Janssen’s images don’t appear to be in any seasonal order; rather, they are a series of vivid stills that fix you in their moment of beauty, and are interleaved with writing praising the same occasion.

The book form and design brilliantly serves to narrate the experience of Yoshino. Its size is like a large sketch book, such as you’d take to draw outdoor scenes. Holding this book and turning through its pages is an intimate experience, and the smaller pages of poetry and prose about Yoshino—tipped in on a different paper stock cut to varying sizes—propel the reader along into each sequence of Janssen’s images. I experience the texts between the photographs like a drama’s chorus, exhortatory voices that punctuate longer, more contemplative passages and spur on this storybook. Janssen matches the different tones of the writings with the forms in the photographs—the bare rectitude of the deciduous trees’ trunks is contrasted with the playful, exotic, splayed sprays of kerria, with cherry-tree blossoms, and with the red-gold-green badges of maples. Her photographs convey a sense of personality in nature—particularly in the later images, where Yoshino’s natural glories butt up against human structures. You start to feel that some of the trees—the cherry trees at the back of the house and in the Shinto cemetery, the bright persimmon in the vegetable patch—are indeed spirits. By photographing them, Janssen makes them active, watchful participants in her scenes of Yoshino.

Vos’s essay describes a pilgrimage to Yoshino in steamy August and an arduous climb through the hills in the poets’ footsteps. Through it runs a nice thread about the fallibility 
of memory as it relates to place. This is underscored by two small, lonely black-and-white photos, which remind me of the depopulated photographs in W. G. Sebald’s books and follow glumly after Janssen’s glorious portraits of nature. Yet Vos and Janssen have created a harmonious book, one that expresses the enduring desire to share some collected memories of Yoshino, a place of pilgrimage, retreat, and return. As Vos writes: “It is as Tanikazaki once said: you can go and party under the cherry blossoms in a Tokyo park, but enjoying the same kind of blossoms at Yoshino, surrounded by spirits of the past, is a totally different thing.”

Or you can just get the book.

Colin Greenwood plays bass guitar with the English group Radiohead. He enjoys photographing the other band members on tour, and is interested in the history of photography. He has recently come back from working with the South Africa–based Children’s Radio Foundation and enjoyed documenting his trip on crf.waste.uk.com.

Publisher’s Note

Dear PhotoBook Review Readers,

We’re delighted to bring you the fourth issue of The PhotoBook Review. Many thanks for your continued interest if you are joining us again—and if this is your first time to pick up an issue of PBR, cheers and welcome. The PhotoBook Review 004 launches at the Los Angeles edition of Paris Photo, and is available once again to Aperture magazine subscribers, at the Aperture gallery, and at the Milan Image Art Fair, extending our audience to the west coast and across the Atlantic.

In addition to launching this issue together at the Paramount Studios, Paris Photo is also our intrepid partner in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Prize, the second edition of which we are pleased to announce will be open for entries May 6. Open to self-published, boutique- and indie-published, and mega publisher–published books, we look forward to taking another dip in the river of creativity that is photobook publishing now. Check out the PhotoBook Prize website (aperture.org/photobookawards) for more details on how and when to enter.

Finally, a big thanks to Charlotte Cotton for taking the helm of this issue. For each volume of PBR
 we invite a colleague who has given the photobook serious consideration to help shape the issue and to tap contributors for inclusion. Miss Cotton brings to us the combined perspective of an author and curator—one who has written her own best-selling book, contributed to a slew of other people’s books, and, perhaps most radically, in Words Without Pictures, reformulated the idea of and process by which books come into being. A collection of talks, conversations, essays, and responses to those essays, Words Without Pictures was originally published online; subsequently appeared in a print-on-demand edition from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and is now available as an Aperture/LACMA copublication. It functioned, in essence, as a community-sourced snapshot of the state of photography during a critical moment of transition. In our first issue of this journal, we outlined the importance of community to The PhotoBook Review’s philosophy, acknowledging that “those of us who care about the photobook come to the table with a vested interest.” In this issue, Cotton injects an ontologically broad and digitally grounded set of definitions to the idea of the photobook and its community, expand
ing the set of concerns to include photography that lives not just on the printed page of a book, but also on record covers, in ebooks, and in magazines. Other additive ingredients are the contributions of aficionados who are knowledgable but not specialists—musicians Kieran Hebden and Colin Greenwood, magazine editor Penny Martin, and design critic Emily King—in addition to an international coterie 
of deeply immersed advisors and photobook veterans such as Jeffrey Fraenkel, Richard Misrach, and others. Our thanks, as always, for the generous responses of all involved. In this issue, we’re treated to a perspective on community as an evolving delivery system for networked knowledge that is both personal and observant. Most critically, it is built on a set of recommendations that don’t just reaffirm what we already know, but open the doors to ideas we’ve yet to encounter.

—Lesley A. Martin

Publisher, The PhotoBook Review

Iñaki Domingo on Paul Kooiker, Heaven

 

Paul Kooiker

Heaven

Van Zoetendaal

Amsterdam, 2012

Designed by Willem van Zoetendaal

13 ⅜ x 9 ½ in. (34 x 24 cm)

176 pages

494 photographs

Hardcover

vanzoetendaal.com

Paul Kooiker is best known for his startling and singular photographs of voluptuous female forms, yet his individual images are incomprehensible except as a part that cumulatively make up his psychologically charged oeuvre. Kooiker’s photographs do not allow for comfortable looking, instead demonstrating his fascination with the game of perception. He uses a visual language that is both dry and delicate, and that pushes at the limits of the unnerving, forcing us to keep our guard up and making us acknowledge our act of looking at these women’s bodies.

Kooiker’s work continues themes explored frequently throughout the history of representation: the relationship of the artist and the model, between the subject and the object of representation. Voyeurism is an ineluctable constant in his work, but it seems as if an explicit sexuality has been (somewhat surprisingly) kept away from his images. Furthermore, he manages to endow the female bodies of his models with a rotund material quality that goes beyond the merely corporeal, and is in line with artists such as Carlo Mollino or Boris Mikhailov.

In Heaven, his most recent publication, the author invites us to consider personal imagery gathered during the last twelve years through a selection of almost five hundred Polaroids that span multiple genres. From his most intimate photographs to the preparatory works created during studio sessions, from landscapes to street photography, these images always convey the fresh and direct style that results from the mastery of a tool that is at the service of his needs. In a sense, he shares with us his creative process when it is still unfinished. It seems that each step of the decision-making process is shared with his audience—as if we are voyeurs peering in upon the process of a voyeur.

The complex and, apparently, random narrative structure is the most prominent feature of this photobook, which is conceived as a journal that records Kooiker’s anxieties and obsessions in the course of everyday life. Notwithstanding the personal nature of this work, it is important to point out the impeccable editorial production of this title. Wise choices as to the format, materials, design, and printing strengthen Kooiker’s project and denote the close and prolific relationship he maintains with his editor, Willem van Zoetendaal, with whom he has published the majority of his books. The rhythm, the typology, and the number of images per page change through the book in a manner that seems to follow the author’s impulses. Throughout, Kooiker adheres to the grid, a very demanding element in terms of layout, in an exercise of Cartesian rationalism that counterbalances the personal nature of the imagery. Added to this is the disquieting presence of blank space, used as a narrative element that allows us to perceive, over and over again, the idea of the ellipsis—that is to say, what is missing, what is left out.

Iñaki Domingo is photographer and photo editor. He is a founding member of the NOPHOTO collective and his photographic works are represented by Ines Barrenechea Gallery. He is co-editor of the blog 30y3.com, which specializes in Spanish contemporary photography, and he is editorial coordinator at Ivorypress publishing house, where he is the photo editor of C Photo.

 

ONLINE ONLY: Jason Fulford in Conversation with David Reinfurt—Part 2

Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle, and Florian Waldvogel, eds., Notes for an Art School, 2006. Amsterdam, International Foundation Manifesta. Designed by Dexter Sinister. 6 1/4 x 10 in. (15.9 x 25.4 cm), 96 pages, paperback.

David Reinfurt: William James described “attention” as what you choose to attend to, what you select as your present moment. “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” There is a lot in that idea that it is a conscious act to decide, “This is my present moment.” There was a series of fascinating experiments done by German psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century that attempted to measure how long a person understands the present moment to be.

Jason Fulford: It sounds like the font you’ve made for the Kadist Art Foundation, which is updated once a week. In this instance, the present is one week.

DR: Yes, the project for Kadist was about framing the organization’s present. The late-nineteenth-century experiments to define the length of an individual’s sense of the present suggested a human average of approximately seven seconds. The experiments were made using a series of sounds or musical chimes. The participants were asked to say when a previous chime had gone out of their present moment, when it was no longer there. There was a related experiment in which they added a metronome to the chime, so you could see a pendulum go back and forth—tick, tick, tick, tick. The subjects were supposed to indicate when they heard the chime, which sounded when the metronome pendulum reached the furthest point. The experiments consistently showed that the longer a subject participated in the experiment the farther ahead of the actual chime they would hear the chime.

JF: They were anticipating it.

DR: Yes, anticipating it, which makes sense. James puts this phenomena in the realm of attention, saying that the perceptual act is something you are initiating and that it’s your decision to say, “I see,” or “I feel,” or “I hear.”

Alex Klein, ed., Words Without Pictures, 2010. Los Angeles/New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Aperture. Designed by Dexter Sinister. 5 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. (14.6 x 21 cm), 510 pages, paperback.

JF: You just reminded me of my friend Meghann. She told me that at some point in her childhood, her mother got the idea that Meghann’s sister liked clocks. So, for every holiday or special occasion, her mother would give her another clock—to the point that her room was full of ticking clocks. Her sister admitted later to Meghann that she wasn’t actually interested in clocks at all, and that this was just a strange notion that her mom had; in face she found them really disturbing. [laughs] On our way down to the Computer History Museum I was asking you about The Serving Library, and why its contents are initially published as a downloadable PDF and then are printed as a book. Why both of those forms?

DR: Well, it’s clearly a choice, a design choice that is supposed to stand for a point of view. It manifests a larger idea about how something works. In the case of The Serving Library publication, our choosing to both release it as PDFs online and in print has practical ramifications, but it’s more a statement about how those two things are different from each other and how they can live and work together. We print thematic “bulletins” of The Serving Library. Every six months we organize about seven to ten texts of about two thousand words each on a given a theme. So we imagine these as kind of semester-length publications, in a way, half-a-year-length publications. They’re supposed to work without the context of any of the other texts that are released at the same time …

JF: An archipelago of ideas.

DR: It is, actually. So, they are supposed to work completely on their own. They shouldn’t rely on prior knowledge of previous bulletins, because as with any editorial umbrella, which The Serving Library is, you are editing for an audience that you don’t fully know and doesn’t fully know you.

JF: But as a publisher you have a point of view that people become familiar with.

DR: Yes, exactly, but we work with the assumption that each bulletin has to stand on its own. It can’t rely on some assumption from a previous text.

JF: It’s like the Golden Record sent into space in 1977 with the Voyager.

David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey, and Angie Keefer, eds., Bulletins of the Serving Library #3, 2012. New York/Berlin, The Serving Library/Sternberg Press. Designed by Dexter Sinister. 6 1/2 x 9 1/4 in. (16.5 x 23.5 cm), 212 pages, paperback.

DR: Each bulletin is a golden record in and of itself. It should be able to travel in the world, land somewhere, be legible, and not need any other context or support. This effects how we decide to produce the bulletin. If we want to include an image—and the bulletins always have images on the cover—it has to have a certain format that makes them seem like an object as much as possible. We realized that we wanted to release the bulletin electronically but with a design form that had some sense of objecthood about it, some sort of discreteness, and also a certain fixity. A bulletin is published and released on the website on a certain date. The next text is often edited and written after the one that has been posted, so there is an embedded sense of chronology of the bulletin that gets posted over the six-month period.

JF: Let’s stick to form for a minute. You’re saying the form of the bulletin tells you how to use it.

DR: Yes.

JF: So, when you print the bulletins as a book, do they function differently than the digitally available PDFs?

DR: At the end of the six months, we collect the set of texts, and we print them in a journal—a magazine—which is called Bulletins of the Serving Library. This is distributed through conventional printed book-distribution channels and ends up in bookstores and on people’s bookshelves. And, unlike the PDFs, you have to pay for the book: it’s $15. We find that the printed journal accords the whole project a degree of legitimacy, which is partially problematic. But the fact that it is an object, is fixed and done, exists in the world, and you can differentiate it from another object manifests a certain kind of identity for the whole project.

JF: When I download your PDFs I always print them out to read.

DR: I think a lot of people do that, and that’s fine. It actually has nothing to do with the experience of reading on screen or not on screen, it’s the distribution mechanism. It’s the fact that you can download it right now, print it, and go read it, which is the way that you want to relate to it and which the distribution method allows. The texts are explicitly “bite-size.” We expect the reader to read one text, and to be able to do so right now.

JF: You know, after I’m finished reading the printed PDF bulletins, I cut the pages in half and I make a scrapbook. I recycle the PDFs and they become a notepad.

DR: Oh, nice, lovely—

JF: —and then I use it for my daily lists, to-do lists go on the back. Eventually they’re shredded, and they are then composted and they go to the vineyards of Sonoma County. [laughs]

DR: [laughs] They go … really?

JF: Yes!

DR: [laughs] Wow, that’s a publishing ecology right there!

JF: I have a friend who works in the printing business. He found out that when a book published in the U.S. is remaindered, the leftover copies are shipped to China and most likely destroyed in one of two ways. They’re either shredded and turned into pig bedding or they’re shredded and put into fireworks as stuffing.

DR: [laughs] Beautiful.

JF: It makes this friend of mine think of how much work goes into the book, however many years the author is stewing about this stuff, getting it out of her system, finally getting a publisher, finding an editor to work it over, the designer to typeset it, the printer, the ink, the PR, all the radio interviews … and then eventually the books are exploding in the sky.

Interview has been condensed and edited.