PHOTOBOOKS Blog

Taking a look at contemporary photobooks and self published photozines.

[shanelavalette]

It’s here! I’m so grateful for the support, encouragement, and guidance of so many of you… Thank you.

One Sun, One Shadow officially launches in November. For those in NYC, I’d love to see you at the signing at Printed Matter, on Friday, November 4 from 6-8pm. You can RSVP on their Facebook event here.

[photobooksblog]

Hello Eddie,I was happy to discover your blog while I was perusing the work of Ed Rusha.I wonder if I could impose upon you to look at that book and tell me what font was used for the cover?Perhaps with your interest in books you might also have discovered a method of discerning a particular font when the information is out of reach.I am also greatly appreciative of your having turned me on to Project Gutenberg!A wonderful discovery! Thank you so much! Dave Kruger

I’m fairly certain that Ruscha designed his own font for the cover of “Twentysix Gasoline Stations”.Rockwell Std Bold is very similar, but I think the G and O look slightly different.Jeff Brouws’s book “Various Small Books” (about Ed Ruscha) has its cover set in Rockwell, but it does look slightly different to a Ruscha book.Throughout his career, Ruscha has experimented with painting a variety of font styles, both serif, and sans-serif. His most iconic font, inspired by the Hollywood sign, is available as a reproduction named “Tapeworm”.I hope this is helpful?

[photobooksblog]

Memoir of a Photolab Tech - and Why I Stole Someone's Tourist Snapshot of Auschwitz

In 2004 I worked as a photographic minilab operator and camera salesman in a small one hour photo place in the city. Our shop was right in the law-courts precinct and this was when digital imaging was still in its infancy - so we got a lot of film processing work for legal cases. Mostly it was a banal procession of fender-benders and stolen jewellery, but also sometimes investigations of train track suicides interspersed with plastic surgery before-and-afters; a dance of botched tummy tucks and heads wedged beneath train carriages. Criminal prosecutors and crime scene investigators had their own photolab to develop forensic images of course, so these images almost never came across our counter.

When prosecutors prepare forensic photos in an evidence brief, copies are made, small, maybe 3.5"X 5", and wire bound for presentation to the jury. This is called The Murder Book - and only twelve are printed. I was told this by a somewhat cheerful prosecutor after perhaps a guilty verdict and what I presumed was a boozy lunch. This was the same day I purchased Sally Mann's 'What Remains' in a nearby artbookstore. Sally Mann has nothing on The Murder Book.

One morning, several months later, the air conditioning malfunctioned, and with the minilab and film developer running constantly, our tiny shop soon became sauna-like; the air thick with humidity and photo fumes. A woman came in, stricken with grief, her son, my age, had been killed - a car accident. The two photos she so desperately wanted copied were terrible - underexposed, poorly lit. How was it possible that these were the only two photographs of her son?

She had just two photos of an unsophisticated youth in his car - grinning behind the wheel - the sort of car that permanently marks someone as being the wrong kind of working class. "He loved that car!" she wailed. That car? That car he saved up to buy, and spent months fixing up - expensive wheels and a new sky-blue spray-paint job. The casket he bought and made and painted for himself without even realising it. The car that killed him.

I made two copy prints for her as she held me, inconsolable and incomprehensible with grief. It was painful to watch, but she thanked me repeatedly through tears as she gripped my arm tight, to my very bones - her fingers stained with nicotine and old tattoos. And then she simply disappeared in to the mall - back to her grief; and I was left to recover from that brief agony of being involuntarily thrust on to the wrong side of someone else's tragedy. She left red marks on my arm, and her sunglasses behind.

The humid air was causing the print dryer unit on the minilab to malfunction and prints were not drying properly, instead coming out wet and stuck together. A few minutes later, prints stopped coming out all together, and then I knew I was in the middle of a very big problem. The lab was still running, and therefore sending exposed prints through the chemical process but not ejecting them. As a young child I was anxious about enclosed waterslides and would always check the people exiting them against those entering, as though somehow a blockage could occur at any moment and people would continue to hurtle unknowingly to their deaths - crushed by the naked human meat of waterpark strangers.

I opened up the minilab and watched this all unfold in photographic cartoon form, as a parade of handsome faces - modelling agency test shots - jammed together in some sort of chemical orgy. Prints which had made it through the developer, but not the bleach-fix, would silver instantly when exposed to light, model faces would fade into a bronzy-shiny nothingness - vampires. Everything else had to be pulled out until I found the source of the blockage. Minilabs work like somewhat like a waterslide-train-track, taking photos through a series of narrow, but deep chemical baths until they reach a wash and dry. I pulled all the racks, chemicals dripping on to the floor, until I found the problem.

And there it was, wedged at the start of the wash unit. A photo I instantly recognised as someone's tourist snap of Auschwitz. For some reason I made the instant decision to pilfer it as I watched a section instantly bronze up. Undeveloped colour photo paper turns blue when exposed to light. Zyklon-B turns blue when exposed to air.

The minilab I worked on could print up to fourteen hundred 6”x4” photographs an hour. I worked there three days a week for about three years. I’ve probably printed over a million photographs. A lot of cheaper photo places would send their images through in automatic exposure, but we never did this. It was my job to view every image and adjust it for colour and density.  A lot of photo places print images too light in attempt to show as much detail as possible; but I never did this, rather, I’d crank up the density, give them a lot of colour, and plunge head first in to the shadows.

Almost all my customers loved my prints for their richness, but the truth is that I’m actually profoundly red-green colour blind. I’ve kept this secret all through my commercial photo career. My uncle, a veteran, once told me that during the Vietnam War imaging recon teams always included one colour blind as they were better at spotting camouflage netting in aerial photographs. Around 2005 industry people stopped talking about ‘digital’ as being something exciting, and started talking about a destructive force that was coming to take all their jobs. Within a year or so, most of the one hour photo places had succumbed to digital imaging and people just stopped getting their photos printed anymore. Photominilabs which once cost more than a house were leaving auction houses for as little as $5,000. Most were exported to developing regions in Africa where digital was yet to hit.

I continued working in the shop for a couple years before moving on to commercial photographic labs and eventually returning to university to finish my undergraduate degree.

Vernacular photography is different now, most obviously in how we can share images instantly across oceans, but also in how people now get to self-censor their images. Ten years ago I would have seen your photographs before you did. Now, you can take a hundred selfies before choosing which one to put on Instagram. Phones don’t have cameras so much as mirrors with memories.

[photobooksblog]

Andrew Youngson - Aida

Andrew Youngson - Aida

“Meaning is not in things but in between them.” - Norman Brown

Andrew Youngson's images of the spaces between suburban homes are unique for their vague banality. These images could have been taken *almost* anywhere, and with this, as viewers we hunt for any sign of geographic specificity.

Without reading the colophon one can discern these images are of *somewhere* in pacific asia. We are invited to hunt for signs of identity and location; roofing tiles and fences give some secrets away.

By photographing the spaces between Japanese domestic buildings, Youngson records 'emptiness' that exists only physically, the punctures being the occasional air-conditioner unit, a discarded Styrofoam box, and the reflection of the sky in pooled rainwater.

Aida follows the well worn trajectory of suburban photographic topography best known in the photographic community as originating from Ed Ruscha's Every Building on The Sunset Strip. But perhaps the first artists to explore a street-view photobook were Shohaci Kimura and Yoshikazu Suzuki with their 1954 Ginza Kaiwai & Ginza Haccho which explored every building along a strip in the Tokyo neighbourhood. For some reason, Aida reminds me of this earlier work.

All of Youngson's images here focuses on the distance, and the selection of a wider aperture has rendered foreground details deeply out of focus. The cluttered, but geometric details could perhaps have benefited from a greater depth of field.

Aida is a small book covered in rough unfinished card. The cotton saddle stitch thread is reminiscent of Japanese binding. The paper stock is thick, creamy, and slightly textured. However, the lack of finish or glaze renders the printing somewhat dull, with details lost in the shadow tones. The addition of a dark brown semi-translucent faux vellum inside cover adds some earthiness and in a way anchors the light brown card cover, and the soft creamy page stock.

Andrew Youngson's Aida is available for sale here.

[photobooksblog]

Richard Renaldi's 'Touching Strangers' was published by aperture after a very successful Kickstarter funding campaign back in August 2013. I got mine delivered by the very surly FedEx guy a few minutes ago. This case bound edition (presumably) matches the number of kickstarters who purchased the book and 8x10 print. Full review coming later...

[photobooksblog]

Ed Ruscha - Colored People

In 1972 Ed Ruscha published his fifteenth artist book in a single edition of 4,065 copies. The images within, colour photographs of Cacti and various desert flora, were typical of Ruscha's previous photobook development: A tightly organised typology of images, neatly removed from their background and presented as a quaint collection.

It was the title - 'Colored People', which caused general confusion among the art community in California at the time.

Ruscha explained himself in an interview with Howardena Pindell...

"This is the first time that I've used the word 'people' in anything. The objects in the book were affectionately called people - people 'in color'.... The plants may appear to be more Mexican than Negro but they are colored people, yes?"

(Pindell, "Words with Ed Ruscha", Print Collector's Newsletter, 8/6, Jan 1973, p 126)

Ascribing racial characteristics to desert flora aside, the explanation strikes me as an odd one. Ruscha, in deciding the plants are all Mexican simply as they are desert flora is simplistic and reductive and the jump from 'Mexican' to 'colored' is trite. Is he being glib and flippant? Or is this some genuine, but diffident, statement from an artist who never really explored racial politics before Colored People?

Fast forward to 1981 and the catalog for Ruscha's first major museum retrospective: "The Works of Edward Ruscha". Dave Hickey discovers this:

"The artist looked sheepish and said, 'Well, you know how those cactus look?'... He raised his hands, palms forward, up beside his head and shoot them in a perfect imitation of an old-time white-glove minstrel shuffling across the stage with a watermelon grin. The silhouette of the cactus and the minstrel were indeed similar, if you had a perverse state of mind."

(Hickey, "Available Light", The Works of Edward Ruscha, ed Anne Livet, Hudson Hills Press, 1982, p 26)

So there it is. Ed Ruscha, genius, narcissist. Forever preoccupied with quintessentially American iconography whether it be in the skylines of LA or the desert flora of SoCal.

[photobooksblog]

Cigars and opportunities

Famed Hungarian-born New York photojournalist, paparazzo, street snapper and cultural identity Weegee (Arthur Felligg 1899 - 1968) was a man who enjoyed the indulgence of a good cigar.

So it was with interest that I discovered this c.1940 photograph of The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII (1894 - 1972) and Wallis Simpson (1896 - 1986) in the audience at a circus performance at the original MSG.

-Weegee, Naked City, 1945 Essential Books.

Keep in mind that $50 is equivalent to about $820 today, a small windfall for a working photographer always on the hustle.

[photobooksblog]

Trent Parke photographic installation at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The Adelaide Biennial 'DARK HEART' exhibition is open till the 11th of May. A matrix of spectre-like street portraits shot via telephoto lens over a three week period in the city of Adelaide. Parke currently has two photobooks published by Steidl, and both are available from the AGSA bookshop for $125.

[photobooksblog]

Rothman's National Press Photo Awards. 1987.

[shihlun]

[photobooksblog]

Ed Ruscha

[photobooksblog]

Ed Ruscha - Twenty six Gasoline Stations

I found some Ed Ruscha books at my local university library. Many of them are in poor condition and have been re-bound in hardcovers. Nonetheless, it was a great experience to get a hands on look at the Ruscha books we've all read so much about.

[photobooksblog]

Stacy Kranitz - From The Study on Post Pubescent Manhood

Somewhere in Appalachian Ohio you'll find Skatopia, a disheveled encampment of wild youth set about drinking and partying and generally getting into minor mayhem.

Stacy Kranitz has photographed these young men as they booze and brawl their way through whatever it is they are doing. Thematic leit-motifs recur through the pages with deliberate timing: stars and stripes, blood, dirt, piss and booze.

The book is basically a small softcover Magcloud publication. This gives a good printing quality with a cheap zine feel. Kranitz has chosen to print the images full bleed meaning that landscape orientation images are rotated. This simple layout condenses everything and gives the sequence a rather cramped feel.

Kranitz is clearly a photographer with great style, talent and promise. But The Study could benefit from a more ruthless edit. There are some standout killer images in this book, but they are let down by the inclusion of some runts which should have been culled from the litter. The images have been shot in a mixture of ambient light, and some fill flash which has been well controlled for a well developed aesthetic.

Comparisons will be made to Larry Clarke, Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley. But Kranitz has a style which stands confidently alone.

Stacy Kranitz - From The Study on Post Pubescent Manhood is recommended.

http://www.stacykranitz.com/

[photobooksblog]

Arthur Fellig (Weegee) on meeting Alfred Stieglitz in 1945.

[photobooksblog]

Crossing Over - Yanina Shevchenko

As a kid, I remember looking at 35mm film and thinking that the sprocket holes made it look like a train track. It’s a twee metaphor now, but one that still holds its weight. A roll of film, like a train line, has a discrete beginning and end, with a clearly delineated path that offers no ambiguity to its narrative.

Likewise, photobooks are the natural medium for a photographic narrative. Photographers are interesting in structuring their narratives, and the shuffling translation from the exposure numbers to page numbers gives us a framework in which to plot a journey.

The Trans-Siberian railway was constructed from 1891 to 1916 and spans from Moscow, east through Siberia, the Ural Mountains and reaches its termination in Vladivostok. It is the longest railway line in the world and has connecting lines to China, Mongolia and North Korea. It was instrumental in Japan’s west-bound export of wartime supplies to support the Third Reich, but was also used by a small number of German and Russian Jews to escape East with Japanese visas.

Yanina Shevchenko’s ‘Crossing Over’ is a portfolio of 12 photographs, presented in a softcover book published by The Velvet Cell in London. The images present a series of landscapes that vary from bucolic country scenes, to generically derelict sites of former industry. The pastel colour palette remains tightly controlled throughout the images and Shevchenko shoots from a distanced and elevated perspective, never getting too close to her subjects.

All the images appear to be shot directly from the train window itself, or during brief stopovers at various stations along the journey. Shevchenko undertook a complete return journey of the railway, From Moscow with a two day stopover in Vladivostok and then back again over fourteen days.

Many tourists and non-European travellers have an idealised visual notion that all Central and Eastern Eurpoean cities have their own unique visual identity. To a certain extent that is true, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Prague each differ splendidly in their architecture. Shevchenko notes that, aside from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, most Russian cities give the impression that they lack variety and personality.

When viewing Shevchekno’s collection, I can’t help but be reminded of the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. The Russian chemist and photographer produced an impressive and audacious series of photographs during three journeys across the Russian Empire from 1905 – 1915. The Prokudin-Gorskii work is renowned for its goal of capturing the Russian people, but the work is as much a story of the railway on which he travelled in order to make these expeditions.

If Prokudin-Gorskii set out to confidently survey all of Russia with his camera, Shevchenko is satisfied to offer glimpses and vignettes of places which are deliberately vague and inconsequential. She seems attuned to photography’s place in relating to notions of urban and rural spaces.

Shevchenko has also written the essay that forms the porfolio’s afterword. She was born in Volgograd, of Russian / Belorussian backround and has recently completed her MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths University of London.

Crossing Over is recommended :-)

Technical Notes:

Crossing Over

Yanina Shevchenko 2013 London 24 X 16.5cm Softcover 24p 12 photographs ISBN: 978-1-908889-16-4 Digital full colour print. £12

Photographer  http://www.yaninashevchenko.com/crossingover.html

http://www.thevelvetcell.com/crossingover.php

[zinesofthezone]

CAST MEMBERS

Eddie Major

october 2012, Adelaide, Australia, 100ex

electrophotography, 32pages, 13,3x21cm

website / email

[photobooksblog]

Why you should hand-make your next photo book: http://digitalmag.pdnonline.com/pdnonline/201203/m3/Page.action?lm=1372696579000&pg=42

[photobooksblog]

I’ve just ordered a copy of this photo zine from Stacy Kranitz, due in late August and available for pre-order now at:

http://straylightpress.com/collections/books/products/from-the-study-on-post-pubescent-manhood-stacy-kranitz