Aperture's Blog, page 195
May 18, 2013
Top 5 Photo Bookstores—San Francisco and Los Angeles
By Darius Himes
Opened by Lee Kaplan in 1987 and newly located in the historic Helms Bakery district, Arcana: Books on the Arts is a fixture of the Los Angeles scene. Photography is a specialty at the store, but the shelves contain far more, including rare and collectible titles on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, cinema, music, and fashion. Long a favorite of Hollywood insiders (John Waters can regularly be seen flitting through the stacks), Arcana’s selection is unparalleled and the staff is knowledgeable and friendly.
Arcana. Illustration by Damien Correll.
Run by the gracious, ever-informed Dagny Corcoran, the first Art Catalogues opened in 1977 above the Nicholas Wilder Gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard. In the intervening years, Art Catalogues had several homes. It is now happily settled on the grounds of LACMA, where Corcoran has the talent and authority to craft a full roster of talks, readings, and interviews with some of contemporary art and photography’s shining stars. The shelves are always filled with a great selection of known and obscure monographs, catalogs, anthologies, and essays.
With over twenty thousand titles in stock and thirty years of thriving business under its belt, William Stout Books is exactly what you want in a neighborhood bookstore: an open, airy space; an informed staff; and shelves and shelves of art, design, photography, and architecture titles from around the world. What started as essentially a favor—travels abroad yielded unseen titles that friends wanted access to—has become a mainstay of the tightly knit San Francisco art community. The shop near Chinatown is the original store, and there is a great second space in Berkeley.
Artbook | D.A.P. Showroom, Los Angeles
ARTBOOK | D.A.P. is the nervous system of the independent art and photography book community in North America. Under the laser-sharp leadership of Sharon Gallagher, the company has continued to thrive in this attack-of-the-Amazon era by simultaneously publishing new titles, distributing books by more than two hundred small art publishers, fueling art fairs with their book booths, and nurturing independent bookstores from sea to shining sea. Its Los Angeles showroom, ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Showroom, Los Angeles, is open by appointment to bookstore and specialty retail buyers, cultural institutions, journalists, and other bibliophiles (that’s you). Contact Tricia Gabriel at triciagabriel@gmail.com or call (323) 969-8985.
Park Life. Illustration by Damien Correll.
Another combination bookstore and art gallery, Park Life marries the feel of a neighborhood shop with the leanings of a hipster/fringe artist hangout to produce a space some have affectionately referred to as “Giant Robot North.” The photobook selection is smartly curated and placed amid design titles, graphic novels, and other contemporary artist monographs. Don’t forget to pick up a Chris Baird– or Tucker Nichols–designed T-shirt while you’re there.
Top 5 Photo Bookstores—London
Banner Repeater is a reading room and project space in a Victorian waiting room on Platform 1 of the Hackney Downs train station. Open during commuter rush hours, this artist-run space is also home to the Publish and Be Damned library of independently published artists’ books. It is also a prime location for a range of discussions and occasional publications that offer intelligent proposals about the politics and material meanings of contemporary publishing.
KK Outlet. Ilustration by Damien Correll.
KK Outlet is the Hoxton Square gallery and bookstore of KesselsKramer, the Dutch creative agency. It is small but perfectly formed and always offers an enticing array of interesting publishing ideas, both in terms of design and photographic content.
Bökship is an East London haven for independent book-making. Its enticing display of artists’ books and profiles on new art publishers offers an insight into this dynamic field of artistic practice. Workshops and events are often held in the space. They are curated by the charming Eleanor Vonne Brown, who makes everyone who visits (on its mainly Friday and Saturday opening hours) a very welcome part of the bookmaking community.
Donlon Books on Broadway Market is a treasure trove of art and photog- raphy books, whether totally new, hard to find, or out of print. Spend only a few hours in this beautiful space and you will improve your antenna and develop your passion for the photobook form.
Donlon Books. Ilustration by Damien Correll.
Maggs Bros. Ltd.
This exquisite antiquarian book store in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square is home to the most magnificent collection of Japanese photobooks. Curated by Titus Boeder, this desirable and highly collectible library offers a true education, and is deserving of your time and admiration. For a viewing appointment, contact titus@maggs.com.
Between Analog and Digital—Jason Evans In Conversation with Kieran Hebden (Four Tet)
Jason Evans, NYLPT iOS app, 2013. Produced by MAPP, London. Designed by Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine and Jason Evans.
Photographer Jason Evans and musician Keiran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) have been collaborators for the past fifteen years. They share a fascination with utilizing both old and new technologies in their creative lives. Evans’s most recent book, NYLPT (MACK Books, 2012), features images collected in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Evans re-exposed the same frames of film up to five times, overlapping images in a search for “chance, happy accident, luck.” The project appears as an iOS app produced by MAPP, the new digital publishing arm of MACK Books. Evans has created work for major fashion and commercial campaigns; his photographs have also been exhibited internationally and published in dozens of publications, including the Spring 2013 issue of Aperture magazine (#210). He is the founder of the websites TheDailyNice.com and TheNewScent.com.
Since the late 1990s, Hebden has released music under the moniker Four Tet. His albums include Pause (2001), Rounds (2003), Everything Ecstatic (2005), There Is Love In You (2010), and Pink (2012), and he has created mixes for the prestigous series DJ-Kicks and FabricLive. He has collaborated with the musicians Burial, Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and the late Steve Reid, and he has remixed dozens of other artists’ songs. This conversation, held in London on January 25, 2013, outlines a common creative ground between photography and music in the digital realm.
Jason Evans: NYLPT is an expanded body of work that has found two homes. One is a digital format with an audio component that’s immersive and essentially nonlinear in its narrative. It is never evoked in the same sequence [of sound or images] more than once. I think you’d have to watch it every day all the time for about two lifetimes to see the same thing twice. Whereas the printed book is a much more narrative-structured object that you might look at once or twice. There are conscious narrative interruptions in the printed book. The fact that it’s a softcover means that it is designed to be flipped through, that it’s hard to differentiate the front from the back—things like that. There are interrelations between the digital and analog forms, but what I wasn’t trying to do was to make different versions of the same thing. I mean, NYLPT could also be an exhibition, and if it was an exhibition people would be less likely to question the variance between what’s on the wall and what’s in the pages of the book. But as soon as you compare a physical book and an ambient digital version, people are more likely to question the difference.
Jason Evans, spread from NYLPT, 2012. London: MACK Books. Designed by Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine and Jason Evans. 11 5/8 x 9 1/2 in. (29.5 x 24 cm), 160 pages, 80 duotone plates. Paperback with flaps.
Kieran Hebden: I think it makes sense today almost not to worry about those concerns too much, to be less conventional. You could say, “I’m not really interested in doing an exhibition. That’s not what I’m about right now. I’m going to put a book out through a conventional book publisher and they are going to do their thing. And then I’m going to do an app with the same material, but it’s a completely different thing. It has totally different images and it has a synthesizer soundtrack. I’m going to put that out and a different group of people will relate to it.” I think people can do things that way now and have it be okay.
I decide things like the price of my records and other releases based on how people will feel about it in the shop rather than the budget for the production or anything else. I’ll consider losing money on the production if I believe it’s going to make people think or make people happy. And sometimes you charge more for things because you know that people will then take them more seriously. I know that because I’ve got that same sort of fetish. I say things to myself like, “Oh my God! They are only releasing 150! They’re £25 each, but I’ve got to buy it.” I don’t know how well that translates to the world of photography and photobooks. Maybe you have a situation where you could release everything digitally, totally disregarding the commercial world, knowing that it was going to create such a hoo-ha that you will be invited to photograph Kate Moss for H&M and then you can buy a new house or something . . .
JE: It’s funny because that’s exactly how it works. [laughs]
KH: I can’t shake my deep respect for the tradition of the album: maybe forty-five minutes long, two sides, a kind of experience in itself, with the sleeve and all the artwork. I find that whatever I’m doing with music I keep coming back to that as a very pure and perfect way to put music together. Releasing my music that way allows it to be part of that history, and if I know that people might have my album sitting on the shelf next to . . . well, I can’t resist wanting to be part of that. I am very aware that we now have created an enormous body of artwork together. And the whole collaboration has become a sacred thing to me. How long have we been working together? Fifteen years? This is an unbelievable amount of music and sleeves, and two people have seen the whole thing through. Pure bodies of work like that don’t exist so much these days. I love labels like ECM Records or Impulse, for which people had an artistic vision and were militant about it, saw it through.
Interior gatefold of Four Tet, There Is Love In You LP, 2010. Domino Recording Co. Design by Matthew Cooper and Jason Evans; photographs by Jason Evans.
JE: We are both so passionate about music artwork. You mentioned ECM and I get really excited by Hipgnosis. Why do you think that the history of music-industry artwork has been neglected? So many great pieces of music from great albums have an extraordinary visual-physical presence . . .
KH: I think it has been seen as solely a functional part of music culture. Some of the best sleeves that I own are for library records, and the person doing the sleeve would never have heard the music. They simply would have been commissioned. You know, “We need something! This record is called Industry 4, we need something that goes with that.” And they would make some bonkers painting, then put some crazy text on it and say, “Here you go!” And the record wasn’t even being made for commercial release. We look back at it now and think, “This is the best record sleeve I’ve ever seen. This is amazing music.” But it’s very, well, functional.
JE: The kind of photography I like was never intended as art. The kind of music and artwork you’re describing were never intended as art.
KH: But maybe in four hundred years someone will look at a Cornflakes box and think, “Oh my God, these people were mad!” [laughs] “This crazy, crazy thing. How beautiful is that?”
JE: That should be the case! I collect Japanese chewing-gum packaging because it’s a really bizarre visual manifestation of late capitalism and it has driven people to insane heights of aesthetic discourse in the same way that LSD did in the late 1960s.
KH: Record sleeves must be getting made for so many people in that purely functional way and I’m an enthusiastic record collector, so it appeals to me. I’m a big believer in the concept that time will tell. After ten years or so you can get some sense of whether something was any good or not, be it the music or the sleeve. We find these records from the 1960s and ’70s and think the sleeves are fantastic, but maybe at the time we would have thought absolutely nothing of them. At some point in time someone is going to find these things and they are going to be relevant and exciting and inspiring. One of the best things about having your NYLPT book out is seeing people getting excited by it. But the part that is even more exciting is the idea of some kid finding it on her grandmother’s shelf, you know—
JE: Yes, I do—
KH: —Seventy-five years from now, and it’s sitting next to an A-to-Z and a copy of Reader’s Digest. They’ll think, “Well, I’m going to sit on the toilet and read this one today. . . .” And then realize, “Whoa, this is amazing!”
Interior gatefold of Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic LP, 2005. Domino Recording Co. Design by Matthew Cooper and Kathryn Bint; photographs by Jason Evans and Simon Foxton.
JE: I hope so. It’s funny you should say that because when I designed the book I was thinking about a book by Marianne Wex that I had stumbled across. I love the format of Let’s Take Back Our Space—the printing quality and the design, the naïveté versus or counterbalanced by the intention. It was really important to me. The kind of photobooks I get excited about are like the kind of record covers that we get excited about . . . things that were never too self-conscious—or maybe self-conscious but not very self-aware. And especially when I’m on the West Coast of the U.S., I go to thrift stores and I find a book from the 1970s about how to make a teepee or how to make your own toffee. I want NYLPT to end up battered and found on such a shelf. I’ve got a copy that I carry around in my rucksack to get more knackered, so it can look like it should. The form of the book is obviously really important, but the form is designed to bring you back to the content.
KH: You should plant copies in bizarre places.
JE: I’ll let you know!
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Front cover of Four Tet, Rounds LP, 2003. Domino Recording Co. Design by Matthew Cooper; photographs by Jason Evans.
Interior gatefold of Four Tet, Rounds LP, 2003. Domino Recording Co. Design by Matthew Cooper; photographs by Jason Evans.
Back cover of Four Tet, Rounds LP, 2003. Domino Recording Co. Design by Matthew Cooper; photographs by Jason Evans.
Aaron Schuman on Maurizio Cattelan, Toilet Paper
Maurizio Cattelan
Toilet Paper
Freedman Damiani
Bologna, Italy, 2012
Designed by An Art Service
13 ¾ x 9 ½ in. (34.9 x 24.1 cm)
220 pages
Hardcover
damianieditore.com
During a week marked by a distinct sense of absurdity—St. Peter’s Basilica was struck by lightning just hours after Pope Benedict announced his resignation; a ten- thousand-ton meteor crashed into the Ural Mountains—it seems fitting to have been asked to consider Toilet Paper, Maurizio Cattelan’s recent book. I first encountered Cattelan’s work in 2000, during a visit to the exhibition Apocalypse at London’s Royal Academy, which featured his La Nona Ora—a life-size waxwork sculpture depicting Pope John Paul II on a plush red carpet, crushed by a meteorite and surrounded by sparkling shards of broken glass. I remember finding the work itself strangely captivating, mostly due to the physicality of the installation and the life- like quality of the effigy. But it’s interesting to note (as Frieze did at the time) that a photograph of La Nona Ora also served as the “PR image of choice” for Apocalypse. Of course, given its headline-grabbing content and the accompanying title of the show, this image was sure to attract publicity. Yet when flattened into two-dimensions and stuck onto posters and billboards, the sculpture was reduced to a tongue-in-cheek visual one-liner, seemingly more suited to a T-shirt or skate graphic than a resonant work of art.
In recent years, Cattelan has announced his “retirement from making art” and has instead concentrated his efforts on being co-image-maker and coeditor of Toilet Paper—a text-free biannual that he cofounded with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari in 2010. The magazine contains only full-page photographic spreads that mimic the high-gloss, high-key, highly saturated aesthetic of “commercial” photography while aiming to both subvert and harness it for other means. As Cattelan has explained it, “I hope some of these images can sustain more than thirty seconds of attention—most images can only sustain around ten seconds.”
Toilet Paper presents the first five issues of the magazine in hardback monograph form, interspersed—for the first time—with a selection of quizzical texts that have been cleverly sourced by James Hoff, including a 1919 New York Times article entitled “12 Killed When Tank of Molasses Explodes,” the 1995 United States Patent for the Braille Slot Machine, and
E. T. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” (central to Freud’s essay “The Uncanny”). The texts are frenetically captivating,
and some of the images are successful in sustaining one’s attention for longer than expected, such as one photograph in which a light bulb is caught mid-explosion, having just triggered a mousetrap, or the book’s wince-inducing cover image, which depicts a bright-yellow canary, against a blue-sky studio backdrop, about to have its out-spread wing clipped.
Yet Cattelan’s puerile urge to provoke, particularly by emphasizing without ambiguity the attention-seeker’s favorite themes of sex and violence, often come across as self-conscious rather than subconscious—more “Like, so surreal,” in a pubescent sense, than genuinely Surrealist. (Labored references to oral sex and genitalia abound, predictably including phalluses made of sausages, cucumbers, cigarettes, and dildos.) Furthermore, one gets the distinct feeling that many of these works and the juxtapositions they present would, like La Nona Ora, be much more engaging if conveyed via mediums that invoke the third and fourth dimensions—perhaps as sculptures, installations, or films. In fact, as the magazine’s own website reveals, short videos made during several of the photographic shoots are far more effective.
As a biannual magazine that contains nothing but imagery, each issue of Toilet Paper offers a regular, mischievous, and somewhat cathartic alternative to the high- fashion glossies that populate newsstands—a provocation to consider the visualization of both life and style within this specific context, from Cattelan’s unique perspective. But in book form, even with texts and hardcovers in place to help prop it up, it feels strangely flimsy, feeble and thin; in more than one way, it falls flat.
Aaron Schuman is a photographer, curator, and writer, and is the founding editor of the online photographic journal SeeSaw Magazine.
ONLINE ONLY: Jason Evans in Conversation with Kieran Hebden—Part 2
Front cover of Four Tet, Lion / Peace for Earth 12″, 2012. Text Records. Design and photograph by Jason Evans.
Jason Evans: I think DJing is quite an important part of the glue between us. I was promoting the club night “No Requests” at Electricity Showrooms, and every week I would play a few records and sometimes you’d be the guest DJ. DJing has been important to the promotional portraits and cover art we’ve made together, because it gives me a sense of where your head’s at because you don’t DJ for the crowd but for the love of music. And (one) I never really knows what you are going to play next. Whenever you make a new album or we start a discussion about artwork, it begins with me trying to make photographs that look like the music sounds. And we’ll speak about the artwork well before the record is finished, so there is loads of time to think about it and to prepare. I feel like we have reached a point where we have things very structured because you just can’t help having structure after working together for a long time.
But there has been another shift: I think I’m facilitating much more. For the cover of Pink you had a very specific idea about what you wanted and the references.
Kieran Hebden: I think that was by far the most specific I’ve ever been for any sleeve.
JE: One of the funny things about Pink is how your photographic referencing has changed since we first started. You’d seen an Atget show in New York … I love Atget’s photographs, but we’d never discussed the fact. And I particularly love Atget’s trees, which you picked out along with a bunch of amazing hand-drawn record covers from the Lebanon and Kenya from the late 1970s.
KH: I sent you an e-mail that said, “I’ve actually got a really clear idea for the next album. I’ve been to an exhibition by this old French photographer and I like these pictures of his and I’m really interested in these Lebanese 78 sleeves, so can you do something that brings all those things together, please?” [laughs] I remember you sent me an e-mail back: “I think that’s the weirdest e-mail pitch I’ve ever had.”
Jason Evans, spread from NYLPT, 2012. London: MACK Books. Designed by Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine and Jason Evans. 11 5/8 x 9 1/2 in. (29.5 x 24 cm), 160 pages, 80 duotone plates. Paperback with flaps.
JE: And the most refreshing: what a great hybrid! That’s exactly what digital dissemination should be leading to, those kind of hybrids, those kind of marriages. One of the things that was really interesting was the way that we finally created the imagery for Pink as objects for a physical release that had been staggered over a year as a series of 12 inches and then also as digital releases. So, when you’re making a piece of artwork that has to operate as a twelve-inch square and as an MP3 icon—essentially an inch square—it has to be right in both areas. And one of the things that I really love about Pink is that in order to make the MP3 icon and the printed artwork look as good as each other, we had to do the print as a lithograph with a screenprint on top of it. In order to make it look as good as it looked on screen, we used entirely analog methods. I just loved that hilarious moment of turning to screenprinting to make something look as good as it would on an Apple device. [laughs] It’s the only way to get that density of color. And now there are two thousand original screenprints floating around the world— really lovely objects for people to find. Thinking about how to make stuff shift easily between analog and digital formats has become more and more important to us.
KH: Another thing has happened that I feel is hugely liberating to me: I feel like there is absolutely no need anymore to have any text on a record sleeve. You are never going to be in a situation where somebody is going to buy that record after flicking through record racks at a store or by first seeing it in a window display. Nowadays, the computer tells you what you’re listening to. The name, artist, and track name always comes up, and if you’re buying it anywhere online all that information appears next to the cover. So I can’t see any reason, ever again, to put any text on a record sleeve. Because of websites like Discogs.com, which archive all the information on all records ever released, all you have to do is give your record a catalog number. And if anybody wants to find out who did the artwork, what studio it was recorded in, what date it was recorded, whatever, that information will always be available on the internet. None of us know how rock-solid digital archives will be, but at the moment I feel like it’s so easy to find things out that putting much less information on albums is perfectly fine because people will find it. And people like to find that stuff out. The weirder its name, the more difficult it is to get hold of, all those things, the more popular the record is. Go as weird as you like…
JE: Have you ever been guilty of being deliberately enigmatic?
KH: All of the time! [laughs]
Front cover of Four Tet, There Is Love In You LP, 2010. Domino Recording Co. Design by Matthew Cooper and Jason Evans; photograph by Jason Evans.
JE: I relate to this. It was really important to me to keep the information on and in the NYLPT book as spare as possible. It doesn’t have an essay in it and it doesn’t need one. I’m borrowing a model of innovation from the music world, and I’d love the photography world to do more of this. Digital photo innovation is often fueled by the perceived amateur market and is currently obsessed with ideas of quality, as opposed to qualities . And one of the things that’s really interests me about your work—your collaboration with Burial, for example—is turning away from an industry-standard perceived notion of quality. It seems like one is able to get away with that in music but not in photography. Do you agree?
KH: One of the really, really nice things about working in music, especially electronic music, is that once you’ve paid your electricity bill, you can do everything for free, including distribution. You can do something that is entirely digital, you can quietly make your own thing—in complete isolation, without telling anybody in the world about it—and then distribute it to the world in a very efficient kind of way. But all creative forms, including music, film, photography, have issues with the disseminators and the hardware providers. One of the things that we share as content providers is a real anxiety about paying for the electricity and that, I think, is going to be one of the next big forms of cultural struggle … to rethink the way in which content providers are supported.
JE: There is always going to be another generation willing to buy the back catalogue of Madonna, so you could argue that we won’t need any new music or images to accompany it. I wonder if the question at Apple HQ is “Do we need any more content? No, we’ve got content now. We just keep repackaging Michael Jackson forever.” And that worries me, that’s one of the things we both have to think about. I’m anxious about the ways in which photographic technology governs, maybe even authors, what it produces. There will be fewer options for ways of making images. Perhaps that’s a controversial thing to say, but I stand by it. It’s different with music because there are any number of computer programs or piece of hardware or objects that you can make a noise with. How can we find that diversity for photography?
Front cover of Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic LP, 2005. Design by Matthew Cooper and Kathryn Bint; photographs by Jason Evans and Simon Foxton.
KH: There are problems with digitization, of course. If you take a recording that was made in the 1950s or ’60s, when the quality of recording was amazing, and play it on the best studio stereo equipment, it will floor you. It will sound like the musicians are there with you in the room. Recordings made now, on the other hand, are optimized an iPod speaker or the radio. The music sounds great on those devices. You can also listen to an old jazz record or whatever on those devices, and it will sound good, too. But the difference is in the potential in them. The modern recording has gone as far as it can go, whereas when you play the old one on sophisticated equipment and it sounds better and better. Contemporary recordings just don’t have the same depth of information inside them. It’s really important to me that things that I make have got this hidden potential in them, that they can be better and better than most people ever even realize.
So if someone looks at the sleeve for There Is Love In You and loves it; if this person sees it on all the different formats and notices that they’re all different in their scale; if this person looks closely and maybe reads an interview where you discuss the process for making the sleeve; then perhaps that’s a way to see the potential in photography, to see it go much further. I think that understanding makes it truly lasting and stands the test of time in an amazing way.
Remembering Gigi Giannuzzi
Gigi Giannuzzi. Photo: Carla Borel.
Gigi Giannuzzi died last Christmas eve, having published over eighty-five titles, mostly through his imprint Trolley Books. Publish is too polite a word to describe the process. Making a book with Gigi was more like surrendering your heart to a strange ritual. Magic, dread, and the perception of death were at the root of it. This was back when we were all busy inventing ourselves as an unlikely group, congregating around this wild man who wanted to help us make our books, help us form ourselves. Not because they were books. Or because they were even good. But because they provided him with ammunition, some resistance to the status quo. Even though Gigi could be very charming, he refused to be polite—to individuals, to institutions, to power. He rejected the systems of abuse, etiquette, and normality that he found abominable. Even toward his end Gigi was gathering evidence, publicly outing the corporations who control the world of cancer and the production of the chemotherapy that ironically gave him a few more weeks to battle.
This was also our chance to say good-bye. We gathered around him as he lay on his famous green couch, drinking chocolate milk through a straw. Nine years earlier, on the night of his fortieth birthday, Gigi saved us from drowning. We were marooned in a narrow cigar boat, his old Luna Rosa, without even an inch of gas. It was midnight and we were drunk. On board were photojournalists Thomas Dworzak, Alex Majoli, and actor Sarita Choudhury, who was six months pregnant. Within minutes we were out at sea, and it was only when Gigi saw the anxious flashlight from Thomas’s camera that he pumelled out into the choppy water and pulled us back.
Gigi saved our skins many times over. But mostly he saved us from mediocrity. He was still angry at the state of the world, in love with what was possible, and thinking about new books as he lay on his couch with the look of a clown’s deep gloom. “Bad luck, isn’t it,” he growled softly, still fighting, still laughing. And even though he was weak, the atmosphere in the room was uniquely his. Messy and intense, full of joy and pain, full of contradictory personalities. It was a reminder of the multitude of book launches that merge into one epic blur, first in his sprawling apartment in Venice, where we met; then in the narrow shop front on Redchurch Street in London’s East End; and finally in his elegant gallery on Riding Street, further west, where his remarkable collaborator, Hannah Watson, continues unbroken.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are artists living and working in London. Together they have had numerous international exhibitions and have published nine monographs, including Ghetto (2003) and Mr. Mkhize’s Portrait (2004), both with Trolley Books.
Trolleyology, a survey of the first ten years of Trolley Books, will be published in June 2013. For more information, visit trolleybooks.com.
May 17, 2013
Observing by Watching: Joachim Schmid and the Art of Exchange
By Geoffrey Batchen
Joachim Schmid, from Other People’s Photographs: Self
It is surely telling that in the same month—January 2012—Eastman Kodak declared bankruptcy and Facebook, the world’s largest online social-network site, moved toward becoming a publicly traded company valued at $100 billion. The following April, Facebook spent one of those billions acquiring Instagram, a startup offering mobile apps that let people add quirky effects to their smartphone snapshots and share them with friends.
The inference could not be clearer: social media has triumphed over mere media, or at least over the photographic medium as we once knew it. But what is the nature of the social in digital image-sharing sites? And what about the nature of photography itself? Has it too become bankrupt, reduced to no more than a vehicle for conveying sentimental platitudes? Or does it continue more or less as it always has, banal or fascinating according to the prejudices or interests of each viewer, avoiding its own obsolescence through yet another one of its strategic technical transformations?
Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation. Able to be instantly disseminated around the globe, a digital snapshot initially functions as a message in the present (“Hey, I’m here right now, looking at this”) rather than only as a record of some past moment. This kind of photograph is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical. As Michael Kimmelman once put it in the New York Times, photographing has become “the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.” That chatter demands a different kind of body language than in the past, with arm outstretched and photographer looking at, rather than through, the camera. Contemporary photographers gaze at a little video screen and decide when to still (or not) the moving flow of potential images seen there. In operating that camera, they enact a sort of cultural convergence, in which the distinction between production and reception, and between moving and still images, has clouded. Danish scholar Mette Sandbye has proposed we consider this convergence a “signaletic” one, such that the “that-has-been” temporality of photography once described by Roland Barthes has been replaced with a “what-is-going-on,” a sharing of an immediacy of presence.
That said, the sheer number of photographic images being loaded onto social-media sites makes any analysis of the phenomenon difficult. Facebook has reported that more than three hundred million photographs are uploaded onto its site every day, meaning that the site currently hosts more than 140 billion images. That makes Facebook about forty-six times more photographic than Flickr, the next largest depository. Established in February 2004 by a Vancouver-based company, Flickr reportedly gains about 4,500 new photographs every minute (so nearly 6.5 million a day), mostly gathered into the electronic equivalent of personal photo-albums. Nevertheless, even the White House releases its official photographs there. And it’s just one of a number of such sites (the oldest, South Korea’s Cyworld, has boasted that at one stage 37 percent of the South Korean population had an account). How can anyone examine a representative sample of contemporary photographic practice in the face of such overwhelming statistics?
As it happens, a German artist named Joachim Schmid spends six hours a day perusing and grabbing images from Flickr, using them to illustrate his own artist books under the title Other People’s Photographs. When I asked him why, he told me: “I do it so that you don’t have to.” In the process of saving me the trouble, he also provides a kind of anecdotal, surrealist ethnography of global photography today. Again, it has become a truism to remark on the refashioning of privacy in our digital age, with social media stretching the word “friend” to include a vast array of relative strangers. Schmid’s unauthorized publication of Flickr photographs merely extends this array to comprise discriminating denizens of the art and book-collecting world. His website discusses Other People’s Photographs:
Assembled between 2008 and 2011, this series of ninety-six books explores the themes presented by modern everyday, amateur photographers. Images found on photo sharing sites such as Flickr have been gathered and ordered in a way to form a library of contemporary vernacular photography in the age of digital technology and online photo hosting. Each book is comprised of images that focus on a specific photographic event or idea, the grouping of photographs revealing recurring patterns in modern popular photography. The approach is encyclopedic, and the number of volumes is virtually endless but arbitrarily limited. The selection of themes is neither systematic nor does it follow any established criteria—the project’s structure mirrors the multifaceted, contradictory and chaotic practice of modern photography itself, based exclusively on the motto “You can observe a lot by watching.”
Joachim Schmid, from Other People’s Photographs: Self
For one such book, Schmid first gathered some ten thousand images of “currywurst,” the local fast food of his hometown of Berlin, lovingly photographed by those unlucky souls about to consume it (he tells me that, over his many earlier years spent gathering discarded analog photos, he found only a handful of such images). People visiting Berlin apparently want to remember the food they are about to eat, or at least to share the experience of that want with others. Even within the apparent global homogeneity of Flickr we can thus find viral traces of the local asserting themselves—if, that is, we care to look for them.
In fact, it is only Schmid’s looking that turns this otherwise international genre of food photography into a regional, even an autobiographical, focal point. Indeed, it might be said that a collapsing of the global into the personal is at the heart of his practice, making it true to the character of social media itself. Sitting at his computer screen, he downloads certain subjects and motifs that seem to recur in the constant stream of photographs he sees on Flickr’s “Most Recent Uploads” page, which he refreshes constantly. Of course, there are now sites that set out to facilitate this same sort of distillation process, such as Pinterest, a social-media website launched in 2010, on which its twelve million users compile collections of pictures they find on the Internet. But Schmid brings both a distinctively ironic eye and the play of chance to this process (he finds his images rather than searching for them), thus allowing us to take note of exhibitionist desires that might otherwise remain scattered and lost in the infinity of digital space. In short, each of the thirty-two-page samplers in Other People’s Photographs imposes a thematic unity on an otherwise unruly universe of images. A diverse group, these samplers include the titillating flash of Cleavage, the deadpan documentation of Mugshots, the concrete poetry of Fridge Doors, and the more literally concrete jungle of Parking Lots (surely a choice of category inspired by Ed Ruscha), to name only a few of his titles.
Among other things, Schmid has recognized the sudden popularity of previously unknown genres of image, such as the proliferation on Flickr of photographs of camera boxes, apparently now the first thing everyone takes with their new camera: takes, and then shares online. In a similar vein, one of his recent books comprises nothing but photographs of the photographer’s shadow. Some things, it seems, never change. Or maybe they do: what’s interesting about this digital genre is that all these shadow-pictures seem to have been deliberately made, a significant shift in an amateur practice in which clumsy accident once ruled the pictorial roost. Here on Flickr, through the mediating agency of Schmid’s hunting and gathering, we get to see the art world, which once upon a time mimicked this aspect of the so-called snapshot aesthetic, now having that mimicry copied and reabsorbed back into vernacular practice. It seems the analog snapshot is indeed remembered in digital form, but only via a historic artistic mediator.
Another frequent image appearing on Flickr is the selfportrait made with camera in hand, arm outstretched, a type of photograph made possible only with the advent of lightweight digital cameras. Schmid’s book on this genre implies that there are many more young photographers doing this than those over thirty, and more women than men. His selection also leaves the impression that this practice is more popular in Japan than in other countries (although, as he admits, this could be because Japanese teenagers upload their files onto Flickr as he starts work in Germany, whereas American members upload while he is asleep). In Korea, this kind of photograph has its own name: selca (self-camera). Korean scholar Jung Joon Lee reports that many young women who practice selca adopt specific angles and facial expressions that are designed to give them bigger eyes, a higher nose bridge, and a smaller face. But this kind of specificity, and a critical engagement with the Orientalism it internalizes, is subsumed in Schmid’s book to the startling conformity of the genre, to a blithe repetition of form that appears to obey no identifiable cultural imperative beyond narcissism. Here, then, is the challenge his project lays before us—not just to make sense of contemporary photography, but to find ways to creatively intervene within it; not just to wonder at its numbing sameness, but also to exacerbate into visibility the abrasive political economy of difference.
Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of photography at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
May 16, 2013
The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2013
The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards are now open for submissions. This year’s call for entries will run through September 13, 2013, with winners to be announced at Paris Photo, November 14–17, 2013, and in The PhotoBook Review issue 005.
This year we’ve launched a brand new online home for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards. In the coming months expect an expanded range of slideshows, videos, and editorial content highlighting selections from this year’s submission pool, documenting the behind-the-scenes process of jurying the Photobook Awards, and revisiting 2012′s shortlisted titles and winners.
Submit today, and stay tuned!
May 15, 2013
Interview with Michael Kamber
Baghdad, Iraq, February 12, 2003—Six weeks before the start of the war, a man sits drinking tea at the Al Zahawi cafe on Rashid Street. Cafes are a trademark of this ancient city, gathering places where men play dominos, blackjack, and socialize. Photograph by Bruno Stevens.
Qubah, Iraq, March 24, 2007—A US soldier marks the hands of women and the backs of the necks of men with numbers for their specific neighborhoods and homes. Lt Col. Andrew Poppas of the 73rd Cavalry, 82nd Airborne Division, said the numbering system allowed troops to determine if people were moving around the village of Qubah despite a lockdown following a US attack on insurgents. Photograph by Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR.
Tal Afar, Iraq, June 7, 2005—Terror suspects are detained and put inside an Armored Personel Carier to be transported to a local detention facility during an early morning raid in Tal Afar. Soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and Iraqi soldiers are moving into Tal Afar with Bradleys, Tanks and Humvees. Helicopters are flying overhead. The soldiers are searching houses and detaining terrorist suspects. Photograph by Christoph Bangert.
Karmah (Garma), Iraq, October 31, 2006—Sgt. Jesse E. Leach drags Lance Cpl. Juan Valdez of Weapons Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, to safety moments after he was shot by a sniper during a patrol. Valdez was shot through the arm and right torso but survived. Photograph by João Silva/the New York Times.
Photojournalist Michael Kamber, a recipient of the World Press Photo Award, has worked in the field for more than twenty-five years. He covered the war in Iraq as a writer and photographer for the New York Times between 2003 and 2012, and he was the paper’s principle photographer in Baghdad in 2007, the war’s bloodiest year. His new book, Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq, includes illustrated interviews with three dozen of the world’s leading photojournalists about their experiences in Iraq. Brian Sholis spoke with Kamber by phone.
Brian Sholis: In your introduction you write that “censorship became the starting point for this book.” Can you speak about the tightening of restrictions on photojournalists and the political ramifications of these changes?
Michael Kamber: We began to see changes in what photojournalists were allowed to document as early as 2004. During 2003 the journalistic landscape in Iraq was very open, and we could basically link up with a unit on the street, or find a commanding officer with whom to do quick embeds with very little paperwork. Yet as early as 2004 there were more forms to fill out, additional restrictions. When I went back in 2007, the scene had changed a lot. So much was off-limits, and that only increased.
Photographers were going to Iraq to show the reality of war. When you arrive and discovered you couldn’t show wounded American soldiers, or prisoners, or car-bomb scenes, or memorials for Americans who had been killed—at a certain point it just seemed like we were not able to get out to the American people the information we were trying to get out. I should point out, too, that even when we were able to get these types of images, editors back home frequently didn’t want to publish them. There were several explanations for this. Some editors feared that the images would upset American readers, and that people would cancel their subscriptions. Others were concerned that their Pentagon or military reporters would lose access. There was definitely a worry about backlash, and it was founded. I worked in situations with reporters where we did indeed lose access, and even were threatened . . .
Balad, Iraq, November 13, 2004—United States injured soldiers sit on a cargo plane before taking off to Germany from Balad Air Base. The interior lights of the plane are red because of an “alarm red” attack, which indicates that the base is under attack, usually by incoming mortar rounds. Since the attack on Fallujah began in early November, hundreds of soldiers have been injured and evacuated from the country. Photograph by © Lynsey Addario.
BJS: Which only exacerbated difficult conditions on the ground. Dexter Filkins, in his foreword, calls the Iraq experienced by photojournalists during the war a “wraparound battlefield.” Do you think this is now the default “setting,” so to speak, for the war environment? If so, how does this change things for photographers?
MK: Well, I think Iraq was pretty unique. You can see similar conditions in Afghanistan, but nonetheless there are some areas fairly clearly understood as Taliban territory. In Iraq, the battle was all around you. It was largely an urban war, yet there was plenty of fighting in the countryside, too. There was no front line. There were roadside bombs, bombs in the marketplaces, bombs in the trunks of cars. It was all around you, all the itme; you were always susceptible to it.
And photographers were also targets. As westerners, we had a price on our heads. So I think Iraq did mark a turning point. It was Chris Hondros who explained it best to me. In the past, there were different armed combatants, and they needed the press, relied on it to some degree. That gave us some immunity and safety. Now people have their own channels of communication. The insurgents in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East, have their own media, basically. In Iraq, they had their own photo and video operations; they were filming their own attacks. They no longer needed the mainstream press. As Chris said, we were actually a hindrance; we were in their way. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and in Iraq I could tell that the equation had changed.
BJS: In your interview with him, Patrick Chauvel comments on the relationship between photojournalists’ work and amateur photographs from Iraq. Did the environment for photojournalists and their work change after the Abu Ghraib revelations?
MK: The photos from Abu Ghraib did change a lot. Every single person I interviewed in the book, when I asked what are the most important images from Iraq, responded by mentioning the pictures taken by prison guards at Abu Ghraib. That’s remarkable, and there are complex reasons for it. Those photos changed everything in Iraq, especially Iraqis’ perception of us.
Yet there are a few different issues here, involving as well how the media is changing. Joao Silva said that the problem wasn’t that we hadn’t taken a good image in Iraq, but that we had taken too many. Every image is on a homepage for ten minutes and then is refreshed. When I grew up, we sat with magazines for a week. Additionally, a French photographer who has been working for nearly forty years and who is not in the book has noted how, in the past, when you needed a good photo you needed someone who could expose Kodachrome, travel the world, get the image, send the film back. There were not that many people with all the skills necessary. Today, anybody with a cell phone can get a photo that would be deemed useable, that could end up on the front page of newspapers. I wouldn’t say there is no longer a need for photojournalists, but the standards for what is deemed photojournalism have come down very far. Sometimes newspaper editors will print photographs without knowing their source, or without knowing the agenda of the person who took the picture. What’s missing, and what I hope to address with projects like the Bronx Documentary Center, is the ethical training, the training in standards and journalistic values.
Tikrit, Iraq, April 14, 2003—In Saddam’s hometown, a US Marine slides down a marble handrail in one of the dictator’s extravagant palaces. The residence contained carpets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and at least one golden toilet. Tikrit was the last major city to fall to Allied forces during the invasion and, despite fighting that continued through Iraq, Marines celebrated victory. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson/VII.
BJS: The book has specific boundaries: in its pages readers will find no military leaders, politicians, academics. There are few if any photos of daily life in Iraq. Can you speak about how you came to shape the book’s countours?
MK: I wanted to put forward a view of the war that I hadn’t seen in the media, that I didn’t feel was out there for the American public to encounter. That was at the bottom of it. I was coming back from a war that I knew well, and I simply wasn’t seeing it here in America. Americans didn’t seem to understand what was really happening. They knew the war was taking place, had vague ideas about it, had seen some TV footage and some statistics, but I felt like a broader understanding was mising.
BJS: How many pictures in the book are previously unpublished, or not widely published?
MK: Some had been published in Europe, but not in the US. Some had been published in smaller domestic outlets, or only months after the incident depicted had taken place, perhaps because editors weren’t comfortable publishing the images at the time. We really dug into people’s files; we did a lot of research. I pushed the photographers to send me the “hard stuff,” including stuff their editors wouldn’t publish. I can’t give you a percentage, but people are unlikely to have seen a fair number of the photographs included in the book.
BJS: You also mention in your note on methodology that you worked with the photographers to recaption some images. Did anything surprising come out of that process?
MK: [laughs] Yes! Certainly for me. Some of the pictures nobody has looked at for ten years, from spring 2003, had captions referring to “the end of the war.” “This picture was taken a week after the end of the war.” I realized quickly that us photographers had no idea of what was coming down the pike. None of us did. I remember taking a taxi to Baghdad and dragging my suitcase up the river until I found the New York Times bureau. I was there to photograph the dawn of a new day in Iraq. We just had no idea what was coming. Reworking the captions brought back how unprepared we were as we went into this military adventure.
BJS: You reproduce an Embed Agreement in the back of the book. What provisions within it might be surprising to the majority of people who have not read it?
MK: There are dozens and dozens of embed agreements. It changed every time I went back. Afghanistan has a different one; different regions in Afghanistan have different embed agreements. I must’ve signed twenty different versions of the document over the years. I’m hoping people will see that we were being made to get written signatures from wounded soldiers to take their pictures, which is completely impossible. After a guy’s been shot and he’s bleeding and being loaded into a helicopter, you can’t run over with a pen and ask him to sign a piece of paper. . . .
And you can’t do it beforehand. You can’t show up and ask a bunch of guys who are suspicious of you in the first place and say, “Hey, guys, in case you get wounded. . . .” The embed agreements put us into unworkable situations in which we’re not free to publish pictures of what is actually going on. Something like 25,000 Americans were wounded over there. We couldn’t get their pictures out to the American public. We don’t want to show blood and gore for gratuitous reasons, but this is our war. We invaded this country, rightly or wrongly. We should see what it looks like.
Al Musayyib, Iraq, May 27, 2003—An Iraqi child jumps over the remains of victims found in a mass grave south of Baghdad. The bodies had been brought to this school for identification by family members who searched for identity cards and other clues among the skeletons to identify missing family members. The victims were killed by Saddam Hussein’s government following a Shi’ite uprising here following the 1991 Gulf War. Photograph by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images.
BJS: Several photographers comment on how their ranks eventually dwindled to about six. Approximately how many Western photojournalists are there today? Is there a different group of photographers who are reporting, or is it some of the same people you profile in the book?
MK: Well, conditions have changed. You almost can’t take a photo there anymore. It’s nearly a police state at this point. Literally the day the Americans pulled out, that was it. You walked outside with a camera and you were immediately sent home. You couldn’t go into the Green Zone with a camear, you couldn’t photograph in a fish market, you couldn’t leave Baghdad. Franco Pogetti, who has put in year after year in Iraq, said as much, and while I haven’t been there in over a year, I went to a public square one day to photograph a statue and was immediately told, “No pictures.”
I can’t say who’s there now. I don’t know if anybody is there now. I was there the week the Americans left, at the end of 2011. Every news operation in town was closing their bureau. There might be a handful of freelancers. NPR might have a stringer; the wire services might have people there; the Times still has its bureau. But it’s a done story, so far as I can tell.
We did get some work out. The frustration with Iraq was that you had to put in months. I would go for two months and come out with a handful of good photos. I could go to Libya or Afghanistan and come away with the same number in one day. In Iraq, photographers were so locked down, but they hung in there and got good stuff. It was a difficult exercise, but compared to the conditions after the Americans left … well, the Iraqi government has shut things down 100 percent.
May 14, 2013
Interview with Charlotte Cotton (Video)
In this short video, curator and author Charlotte Cotton discusses the value of photobooks and the principles that guided her as she guest-edited Issue 004 of The PhotoBook Review. As she states in her editor’s note in the issue, “My aims for this issue of The PhotoBook Review: to be pluralistic in its approach to the photobook and not merely to propose a checklist for a collectible canon of this essential form of photography.”
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“Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles,” an essay by Charlotte Cotton, is featured in the Spring 2013 issue of Aperture magazine.
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