Monsters & Madonnas

It is refreshing to see  photobooks from India that do not present the usual orientalist tropes – the bright reds, the sadhus in saffron, the ash covered faces, the Kumbh, the Ganges, Rajasthan and a funeral pyre by a river. Most of these tropes are not false, they do exist. But there is another way to see India, through the eyes of contemporary working photographers from there. Their point of view is as much a response to the environment as it is a representation of it. The Red Cat and Other Stories by Ritesh Uttamchandani, End of Time by Ronny Sen and Angst by Soham Gupta are three such bodies of work that are honest in their response to their environments and what they see.

Bombay is a state of mind and Mumbai is a city. Ritesh’s book The Red Cat and Other Stories, I reckon, is made in Bombay and photographed in Mumbai. In form, it is a white colored square-shaped book with an exposed coptic bound spine. The book is not housed in any protective cover and over time its white cover will stain and scruff. This is very much the experience one will have as one moves through and lives in the megapolis that is Mumbai. This is not a coffee table book on Mumbai, which makes it fantastic. This is a storybook, where the elements in the images are the words and the image is the sentence. Laid out beautifully in a meticulous edit, this body of work narrates a short story of urbs prima in Indis. It is not a fast-flip through, but a slow read novel –  a love story perhaps, one that Ritesh shares with his hometown and one he invites you into.

In reading the Sindhi folklore of the Laal Billi, one may take away a message of compassion with one’s environment, of how that what you seek may be right where you are, not elsewhere. You know what they say, if you think the grass is greener on the other side, it is time for you to tend to your own lawn. Did I mention that this is a fun book? It is, those back alley golfers, the street-savvy workout enthusiasts and the two Ronalds who escaped McDonald’s to watch existential TV! In this city, where life is a grind and unbearable for many, Ritesh provides a hint of a smile.

The opening image of Ronny Sen’s End of Time, speaks straight to the title of this book and also to a sentence in the book that reads, “Jharia was once a green forest”. End of Time published by Nazar Foundation follows the success of his project The End, which won him the 2016 Getty Images Instagram Grant. This is an apocalyptic story set in a contemporary coal mine town in India and photographed exclusively on Ronny’s phone. This tight set book, the pages of which are housed between two thick cardboard pieces, comes enclosed in a plastic case. As I turn the pages of this photo-book, I feel a perverse desire to witness the suffering in and of this scarred environment. Apocalyptic is a word that is very center and present in this body of work, and perhaps the existence of this scenario in our current time is what gives rise to this desire. To say that the environment is dramatic is, putting it mildly, the images consequently are fairly dramatic too. One may say Ronny’s images in this book are literal in how they speak about the rape of Jharia. There is decay, destruction, smog dust and dirt on every page, the message is constant and relentless. A ruined temple and broken mosque and residential complexes that are as soot-laden as the lungs of those who reside there. One may ask if the photographer is being too cynical, or one may say that Ronny has a high standard for accepting and then representing the honesty of a situation. Either way, End of Time is a photo-book from India that I recommend taking a look at.

Soham Gupta’s Angst, is a dramatic photo-book that is made up of four chapters/sections/ stories, each one separate from the other, but equally dramatic in their sense of tragedy, with characters that might appear in your strange dreams and nightmares. There is, however, a tenderness and endearment in the souls depicted within its pages. Angst also brings up questions: Who is that human with his face hanging off his face? Where did that naked round fat man come from, where is he going? Why were we not invited to that glitter party, where we possibly would have met her? Was there ever a party or is that glitter the only shine in an otherwise squalor of a life? Angst is a fictionalized body of work and it was written at night – the images here are staged after Soham would engage the subjects in conversations, which give the base to the stories presented in the book. While all of this work was photographed in Kolkata, there is little in the book to anchor us to the city. There is a heavy emotional weight to this book – it is not one that you can go through in a single sitting. My experience of reading this was like reading a fantastic hybrid of a graphic novel – one with live action photographs instead of drawings. You finish one chapter or a few pages of one, set the book aside and then go back to it again. Shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First Photo-book Award and Shortlisted for the Photo-Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France; Angst is published by Akina Books. There are also 100, made by hand, by Alex Bocchetto editions of this book.

It has been close to a month that I have been sitting with these books and I have to say I am not entirely done with them. All three of these books pull me back in, to look, re-look – they bring me home. They also change the visual zip code on India that we have been subject to this far. If you are at some point considering a visit to India, take a look at these books. Most of what you will see here will not be part of your tour itinerary.

We are pleased to introduce a post by Rahul Majumdar

‘A photobook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film.  The photographs lose their own photographic character as things ‘in themselves’ and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book’  -Ralph Prins, in conversation with Cas Oorthuys in 1969, quoted in Mattie Boom and Rik Suermondt, Photography Between Covers: The Dutch Documentary Photobook After 1945, Fragment Uitgeverij, Amsterdam, 1989, p 12; in turn quoted in the Introduction to The Photobook: A History Volume I, Martin Parr and Gary Badger 

Photobooks that stand as unique art objects, commanding their own space, take the coming together of photography, writing, design, and sculptural skills. They bring a definite tactility to the viewing experience that moves far ahead of simply turning pages; making the viewing experience physical activity and true discovery. Here are six photo books that move beyond the sum total of the images they hold and occupy a space as little temples built to house those images in.

As soon as you consider the photobook as an art object, one has to tip their hat to the years-long experimentation that Dayanita Singh has worked at to shape out new book design formats. (The ICP library holds a book dummy of Sent A Letter.)

Museum Bhavan and Sent A Letter, both beautiful and incredibly well-received works of art have been written about extensively. We’d like to draw your attention to a smaller, less complex (in physical form) and beautiful piece of work, Blue Book (one of two color books Dayanita has made). At about 4.5” x 6”, Blue Book, is a collection of industrial landscapes; each photo is presented as a postcard that one could actually tear out of the binding to send out (currently available anywhere between $114 – $400, I’m not sure how many of us will actually send all of the postcards out, there is something deeply spiritual about this exercise though).

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Lucy Helton’s Transmission, a photobook in the form of a scroll, and created by sending the images through a fax machine is another gem. Cased inside a thick cardboard cylinder, Transmission is nine panoramic images that are held together by Japanese clip binding. Lucy describes this body of work: “at once deeply personal and dystopia, my work imagines the future earth as a scarred, damaged, fragile landscape“. Her choice to thermal print on facsimile paper speaks directly to the ‘delicate’ and urgent subject of our environment, as the paper itself is meant to be ephemeral and will begin to disintegrate at an advanced pace.

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The fantastically odd shaped In Other People’s Bathrooms, by Alexine Chanel was published by The Green Box Kunst Editionen to coincide with a 2008 exhibition by the same name. As the name suggests, this is “a photo adventure by Alexine Chanel”. Presented like a huge collection of paint swatches, under 15 “families” (sic) such as Hit, High, Patterns, Contact, Hide, Mess, Clean, Pet, Jet, Charge, Orbit, Flood, Monster, Cream and Naked, Alexine’s photobook asks the viewer to consider the bathroom as a “laboratory”; a space that allows for the playing out of multiple scenes.

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The Pictoral Key to the Tarot is the genesis point of Bea Nettles’ Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards. A line drawing in that book inspired Bea to make a self-portrait as The Queen of Stars, and the next morning she woke up with an idea that occurred to her in her dream: to ask people to pose for her photographic tarot card deck. That is where the ‘dream’ in the title of her photo object comes from. It took Bea five years to photograph this project. The 1975 edition consisted of 78 cards of hand-colored photographic paper enclosed within two sheets of frosted mylar. The more recent 2001 edition (presented here) has been scanned from those original prints.

On the Road, by Bert Teunissen is an excellent piece of work that emerges from the “in-between” spaces. Working on Domestic Landscapes put Bert on the road and behind the wheel often. From this point of view, staying in the car, perhaps one hand on the wheel and the other holding up an Olympus Pen camera, Bert created this travelogue printed on newsprint and presented as a daily-paper with a black ribbon tied around it.

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There is a beautiful and mysterious box, Resonance by Minny Lee. It consists of a box, the inner base of which is a photo grid of the covers of literature focused on essays and metaphysics. The book holds three scrolls and a thin stitch bound booklet. The scrolls themselves have content and pages from other books, printed edge-to-edge giving them a continuous and seamless feel. The contents make for an investment of time to read and understand, but the form of this object belies this fact by how feather-light it is. In an interview (https://icpbardmfa.wordpress.com/author/reasonforthis/) Minny says, “A book consists of a sequence of pages and therefore it is a time-based medium. I can intend to lead the viewer in a certain way by sequencing and designing the book but each viewer will experience and react to the book differently due to their diverse backgrounds and histories.” Resonance, as a photobook, allows for ample room for play, for discovery and experience.  

As promised, here is the second installment of my 2018 acquisition blurbs. Caleb’s Guide To ICP Library New Acquisitions part 2 ~

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EINSTEIN STUDIO – TOKYO/JAPAN JUN 2018

At the New York Art Book Fair we acquired a few issues of Einstein Studio’s ongoing monthly series “Tokyo/Japan”. JUN 2018 is the latest that we have however the series, which began in 2016, is still ongoing. Each issue begins with a few highlighted photographers and continues with work from between 30 and 60 additional contributors. JUN 2018 features Hanayo, Masanao Hirayama, Sayo Nagase, and Kohey Kanno but also includes 52 other photographers. Tokyo/Japan is not constrained by photographic genre in any way, and every image in the book is labeled with the neighborhood in which it was captured (regardless of how abstract the picture or recognizable the landmark). The project of Tokyo/Japan seems monumental but at the same time extremely simple. The mission is not to document the totality of the city but simply to create an ever-expanding index of the multiplicity of visions within a highly populated urban space. Einstein Studio 2018.

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MATEO RUIZ GONZALEZ – HAMBURGERS FOR BREAKFAST

I met Mateo by chance through my old friend Cole when we were all going to play in a band together. The band didn’t work out but Mateo and I stayed in touch and last month he donated some books to the library from his new press An-Tics. Hamburgers For Breakfast was to me the highlight of the batch (although all of his stuff is worth checking out), not least because it documents Superiority Burger, a tiny (and extremely good) vegetarian restaurant in the East Village where Gonzalez used to work. He created the images that make up the book by bringing his camera to work and snapping photographs while on shift. It’s rare that a book portrays labor from the point of view (literally) of the laborer, and this book is particularly illuminating because of in turn how mysterious the inner workings of this specific restaurant are.

Hamburgers For Breakfast magnifies gestures between human and comestible to full frame, detailing the inner workings of the arcane food preparation process of Superiority Burger. A key element to unpacking this book is that this restaurant is SMALL. Gonzales gets a lot of mileage out of every available square inch, and when he’s able to get far enough away from anything to get a picture that’s fully in focus it feels like a miracle, yet the images don’t feel claustrophobic. Instead, we get a feeling of density; much like New York itself the restaurant is a site of unlimited cultural saturation and exchange housed within a finite space. Gonzales has a sensitive eye for portraiture, and his strength shines through when he catches his coworkers in rare moments of repose. I’m looking forward to seeing what Gonzales has in store for us next – make sure you stay tuned to An-Tics to find out! An-Tics 2018.

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IKENO SHIORI – ORB

One of the booths I was most excited to visit at the NYABF this year was Commune – the Tokyo based gallery/press/boutique who published Ikeno Shiori’s new book ORB in 2018. Ikeno works in promotional and artistic idioms while maintaining a strong sense of individual style. My first exposure to her work was concert photography on the PYOUTH MAG instagram page – disorienting angles of extreme moments of performance in vivid, very obviously analog, color. Ikeno’s professional work has included product/fashion work, and promotional/tour photography for musicians such as Haino Keiji and Bo Ningen. ORB on the other hand deemphasizes subject matter and brings Ikeno’s personal style to the forefront.

The photos in ORB have no decisive moment other than the instant the flash bulb fires; these seemingly mundane pictures could perhaps fall into the “snapshot-gone-wrong” or “disposable camera diary” genre, but Ikeno’s unique vision shines through when the sensational subject matter of her promotional photographs is removed.

In these more abstract moments, Ikeno’s masterful use of flash, shallow depth of field, and high contrast create a soft world in which much of her frame becomes dots (orbs). Human figures take on a high drama when the flash renders them alone in a frame of darkness. ORB also showcases Ikeno’s sensitivity to the world around her; much of the daylight and non-flash photography shows careful observations of everyday tableaus. The book maintains a straight face without sacrificing a playful and honest approach, and hidden small details reward the repeat viewer. Ikeno’s prolific output can be found on her Instagram as well as in @jusangatsurecords and Pyouth Magazine. commune Press 2018.

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MINNY LEE – MILLION YEARS

Last year, when I was still a teaching assistant at the library, I wrote about Minny Lee’s short yet poignant Ashes Into The Ocean; a loving elegy for her father-in-law that mixes short pieces of text with photographs of apartment interiors and the ocean. In her newest book, Million Years, Lee shifts her perspective and scale, with photographs taken of American countryside from a plane.

Photograph collections are rearrangements of moments; photographers show us groups of instants taken out of time to create narratives or feelings, alternatives to our linear intake of time and life. Specifically, aerial photography often feels like an attempt to display the totality of the planet, or to create an index of the ways in which humans have shaped it. The affect of aerial photography is typically imperialist, masculine, and strict in its formalism.

Million Years reimagines the genre as something softer, more personal, and capable of a wistful yearning. Her approach to text in Million Years is a photographic approach: a pastiche of material sourced from geology, rearranged to create feelings and narratives. An added complexity is that the original geology text often does the very thing that aerial photography sets out to do: show us a totality of the earth, and index its various properties. Lee plays with our expectations of photography, science writing, and poetry by extracting a profoundly lonely personal narrative from seemingly objective scientific texts. Another pick from the NYABF, it was a pleasure to meet Datz, who consistently release spellbinding photography books that are all worth checking out! Datz Press 2018.

Eugene Atget: The Eternal Inspiration is the record of an exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum that ran from December 2017 till January of the next year. It is part three in a series of exhibits held by TOP about Atget, the previous two showing in 1992 and 1998 respectively. This show specifically highlights Atget’s influence in America and Japan in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and collects work from Atget himself as well as Americans Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Berenice Abbott (as well as her prints of Atget’s work), Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander; Japanese photographers Moriyama Daido, Araki Nobuyoshi, Fukase Masahisa, and Seino Yoshiko; as well as Atget contemporaries Henri Le Secq and Charles Marville. In addition, the book contains supplementary essays by Suzuki Yoshiko and Yokoe Fuminori.

Eugene Atget “Saint-Cloud” 1904

Yokoe’s essay walks the reader through the history of Atget’s life and work, in the process debunking common misconceptions, including a background to his methodologies, context for his work, and details of his complicated relationship with Berenice Abbott as well as Man Ray and the surrealists. Atget did not see himself as an “art photographer” or a surrealist, yet many saw in his work something beyond mere documentary. In the posthumous 1930 book Atget: Photographe de Paris, Pierre MacOrlan writes that photographs can contain “sentimental knowledge” and “a truth that can serve as a point of departure for our own interpretations”. In some ways, truth was not quite as solid as Atget perhaps trusted it to be in his life’s work: the project to photograph the disappearing Old Paris.

Seino Yoshiko “Everywhere – Gather Yourself – Stand” 2009

In her posthumous, second photo book, Everywhere – Gather Yourself – Stand (2009), Seino Yoshiko echoes MacOrlan, “Today…We cannot focus on anything and the present gets diffused for everyone. What, then, do we try to find in the images of photographs? I do not believe that photography is a medium that represents memory, history, story, or sentiment alone. I do not like such photographs anyway. It has become clear to me that photographs that just consume our “hope” eventually fail to reach us. Photography makes sense only when it manages to find a narrow passageway; it becomes valid only when the photographer manages to create a “passage”. The passage opens up before the viewer and what lies ahead is left for [them] to decide.”

Seino Yoshiko “Everywhere – Gather Yourself – Stand” 2009

Atget did not wish to make any sort of imperative statement with his images yet at the same time didn’t see himself as an artist creating open-ended works either; his self-image was that of documentarian whose work would speak for itself in its neutrality. However, this precise lack of added narrative in his work is what attracted impresario gallerist Julien Levy, and Man Ray, to him. Suzuki Yoshiko writes of Julien Levy: “Drawn to the idea that the principal appeal determining whether a photograph is good or bad is concealed within an elusive ambiguity, Levy was preparing the groundwork for passing on the aesthetics of straight photography, which originated with Atget, to the next generation.” Ironically, what is named here as the defining characteristic of something “straight” is that mysterious and slippery quality called imagination. In trying to achieve an impossible objectivity without qualifiers, Atget opened up a new space for a genre of photography in between literal documentary, staged fiction, and figurative abstraction. Straight photography would come to define the 20^thcentury even though its inspiration was largely unintentional. The Eternal Inspiration leaves no doubt in the readers mind that ambiguity is indeed central to photography’s ephemeral and sometimes mysterious power, even beyond the realm of straight photography.

Eugene Atget “Versailles, Parc” 1924-25

It’s this assistant librarian’s opinion that the photography that inundates us: advertisements, ‘non-fiction’ documentary and news, “Instagram friendly photography”, this is to say photography without history, or photography that “just consumes our ‘hope’” is artistic photography without this crucial yet unnamable ambiguity that Levy saw as the foundation of the now-anachronistic idiom of straight photography. The resulting void is replaced with commodity fetishism and spectacle – thus ambiguity in the age of digital advertising is a political and anti-capitalist quality. TOP’s volume on Eugene Atget may at first seem like an unnecessary rehashing of “old masters”, however the value of ambiguity cannot be overstated, and The Eternal Inspiration makes an absolutely convincing case for its title.

Working at the ICP Library is a gift that keeps on giving. Not only am I surrounded by the canon of photography from past and present, but I’m also exposed to new work every day. I have been blessed to come into contact with the following books this year, the first part of my Favorite Books of 2018 list, and have had the pleasure of cataloging all of them. Not all of them were published this year, but all were added to our catalog in 2018. Caleb’s Guide To ICP Library New Acquisitions begins here and continues in part 2~

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LUIS SERGIO – PU MAPUCHE

Pu Mapuche is Luis Sergio’s sleek, nuanced, and comprehensive documentary look at the Mapuche people of the Araucania region of Chile. Sergio approaches non-fiction from a variety of angles, and the book is structed as three mini-ethnographies in multiple styles of breathtaking photography. The first section is an impressionistic look at rituals and traditional social customs, the second tackles land and forestry disputes, and is the only section in color, and the third looks at the intersection of Mapuche culture and urban landscapes/contemporary Chile. Includes a detailed index, endnotes, and expository text in three languages. Gronefot Ediciones 2018.

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XITEK – NEW TALENT AWARD 2015 & 2016

Xitek’s yearly “New Talent Award” showcases young Chinese photographers working in a broad array of styles. 2015 and 2016, the two most recent anthologies of the competition, are published portfolio style with each artist producing their own miniature publication, which are then housed together in cardboard slipcases. Much of the work in “New Talent Award” focuses on specific, nonfiction content, and I’m always struck by how attentive the photographers included are to the visual idiosyncrasies of their subject matter, setting the bar high for new documentary work. Equally as affecting is the work of the more personal, diary style projects, which often veer into the realm of the conceptual while retaining emotional depth. I’ve included images of two works from each year: 2015’s “Human Brain Project” by Yang Mu and “Wonderful Human” by Sickgirl; 2016’s “Lingering Garden” by Guo Guozhu and “Harmony Southern Xinjiang” by Sun Junbin. Xitek, 2016 & 2016.

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AUDITORY DEPRIVATION – JOHN CATES

Off-kilter photographs of noise performances in and around American music’s fertile crescent: Detroit, Michigan. “Auditory Deprivation”, Cate’s debut photo book, offers views of a genre known for its impenetrability that are graceful but remain accurate. His detailed index gives the project a formal, documentary feel, even when the photographs are more perplexing than informative. On one page we see a metalhead seated next to a table covered in blood-stained electronics and a woman’s leg about to kick it over, on the next page we see a woman playing a saxophone side by side with a motion-blur abstraction. Cates captures strange meetings and head-scratching performances as charming tableaus, by “depriving us of audio” he makes the often sonically unpalatable enjoyable. Self Published in 2018, Edition of 50

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HELENA GONI – BEHIND BLUE EYES

Last month we were visited by Bilbao based photographer Helena Goni, who was in the States on a Guggenheim fellowship and stopped by to donate a copy of her 2016 book “Behind blue eyes” to the library. Goni uses portrait and interior photography to create a striking narrative about the hopelessness and vitality of youth and counterculture. Her images of young people and their accouterments function as something of an index of contemporary Bilbao. Measured portraits sit montage style within a pastiche of abstractions; the people we meet in this book exist in an impossibly fast chaos. Bookended by pages of instant photographs which function as something of an artist statement or fore/afterword of the main body of work. Self Published in 2016

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NAKASHIMA YUKA – FUGU

Nakashima Yuka’s “FUGU” is a project about pufferfish that when eaten produce a mild high and when improperly prepared can be lethal to the consumer. Nakashima’s subjects are found in murky fishtanks, the glass between the camera and the creature is often dirty and scratched, and the photographs dwell in an uncanny zone between playful documentary and psychedelic abstraction. Depth of field is thrown out the window, and washes of color from neon signs and restaurant ornamentation give a glamorous yet mysterious aura to these dangerous fishes. The edges of the tanks are never included within the frames, so there is no sense of scale. The fish could be any size, floating in a bubbly, eternal abyss ~ a purgatory before they are thrown onto the cutting boards of late night eateries. Each page is a photo print, with the photo on one side and the paper watermark (FUJICOLOR Ever-Beauty Paper for LASER) shown on the back with writing and signature in sharpie by Nakashima. Self Published in 2015. (previously written about in this post)

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LUCAS REIF – DISRUPTOR ISSUE 5

Disruptor is Lucas Reif’s dexterous and impeccable ongoing zine series documenting underground punk and hardcore in the United States. Issues contain risograph printed, black and white photographs of bands-in-action, audiences dancing, and the occasional mise-en-scene, alongside interviews with musicians and organizers. Reif is the photographer, editor, interviewer, printer, designer, and publisher, under the name Shelf Shelf. Issue 5 is the cleanest risograph publication I have ever seen, and focuses on Chicago, Illinois. In addition to photographs, 5 features illustrations by Kyle Butler, a lofty and enlightening interview with Behavior, another with the provocative Chicago Musical Development Collective’s Suzy Vogenthaler, and a third with sound engineer Mike Kriebel. Printed in black and red on classic “off manila” paper stock in an edition of 150. Shelf Shelf 2018.

Thank u for reading, stay tuned for part 2 !!!!!