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Book Review Collaboration A Potential History of Photography Reviewed by Brian Arnold "In 1992, I traveled to Bali, Indonesia for the first time as part of a study abroad program. I spent 6-months studying Balinese Hinduism and the remarkable music unique to the island. Since that time, Indonesia has been central in shaping my ideas about music, photography, art, and art history..."

https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=TH153
Collaboration
A Potential History of Photography
Thames & Hudson, 2024. 288 pp., 724 color illustrations, 8¾x11½".

In 1968 Sontag recorded her impressions of a first visit to Vietnam in a book titled Trip to Hanoi, where she confessed early doubts about photography. She landed in Hanoi, only to realize that photographs had clouded her perspective with preconceptions of Vietnam. To understand how the war truly affected the people in the North, she needed to see beyond photographs.

— Thy Phu, Warring Visions

Collaboration is informed by decolonial, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, feminist and abolitionist struggles. We tried to reconstruct, challenge, imagine, and reenact collaboration as the different protagonists experienced it…We have not stopped with the photographer’s ‘intentions’ or ‘statements’, but rather we look at the photographic event as it unfolds over time. Attending the mode of participation of the photographed persons, in particular, enabled us to reconfigure also the participation of the photographers, not as solo masters but rather as parties to the event of photography.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography

In 1992, I traveled to Bali, Indonesia for the first time as part of a study abroad program. I spent 6-months studying Balinese Hinduism and the remarkable music unique to the island. Since that time, Indonesia has been central in shaping my ideas about music, photography, art, and art history. For decades now, I’ve struggled with the ethics of my work, a white man working in a colonized nation. I’ve always questioned my privilege in relation to my work in Indonesia — at times, I’ve been disgusted by it — and, as a result, I’ve found myself wrestling with complex ideas about power, imperialism, and personal identity. At times, my work with Indonesia has been profoundly humbling, empowering, and confusing, but, ultimately, I cling to the belief that I can contribute to new, anti-colonial histories. In developing my projects in Bali and Java, I have come to the conclusion that a truly revisionist approach to history has to be collaborative. We can’t erase colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, so we must think of new ways to share resources and try to tell larger stories about the consequences of subjugation.

Uyghur Community by Carolyn Drake

As one fully devoted to photography, I’ve been fascinated by the history of the medium since I first picked up a camera. I’ve hungrily read many different approaches to the subject, but none of them reflect the kinds of issues I found researching photography in Indonesia (the Szarkowski history, included Gordon Parks and Roy Decarava, but certainly never ventured into the dark history of photography as an essential tool of colonialism). Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, a new book developed by Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler, comes as a breath of fresh air. It is the first history of photography I’ve read that starts with the understanding that the medium has been essential in establishing the racist, classist, and sexist foundations of our “democratic” institutions.

 Scherzo di Follia by Pierre-Louis Pierson

The book is divided into 8 sections (the authors call them clusters), each of these based on the premise that any photograph is an event, built on collaborative give-and-takes between the photographer(s) and subject(s). In presenting the various projects, the editors attempted to include the voices of both the makers and the subjects (to be clear, there is nothing about landscape or experimental approaches to photographic materials, this is strictly a sociological study of the medium). Indeed, Collaboration takes this a step further by encouraging all readers to treat the book as a living document; we as viewers are part of the collaboration by bringing meaning and conversation to photographs. The editors encourage us to use the book as a conversation starter, not necessarily as a completed work, and to bring it to our studios, galleries, and classrooms. This all-inclusive paradigm, for defining the photographic act and our understanding of the resulting images, is intended to help create a revisionist history, undermining Szarkowski’s (and so many others) need to point to individual genius.

Sabrina and Katrina by Endia Beal

Everything about the book is a collaboration, fully embracing its own core ideals. Compiled by the 5 editors, each representing different disciplines or approaches to photography, the clusters are built around different themes, each detailing a variety of photographic projects. The projects are each presented with a selection of pictures accompanied by quotes from their makers, including both the photographers and, when possible, the subjects. The editors selected the work, but rather than giving their own reasons for inclusion, they asked different writers to respond to each of the individual projects, ensuring that every component of the book is a collaboration, enriched with layers of conversation. Some of these writers are familiar names, but many I had to look up. And, like the editors themselves, the contributing authors represent an array of disciplines and perspectives, creating a truly interdisciplinary approach to the medium.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography

I want to conclude by returning to Indonesia; this book facilitated a great deal of introspection on that work in ways that are helpful in relating my understanding of the editors’ intentions. About 2-months after returning from my study abroad program, I met with a Peace Corps volunteer on my college campus. We talked about a lot of things, but what sticks with me is our conversation about privilege. I’d spent the previous months living in Peliatan, a village of about 6,000 in south Bali. There was one phone and one fax machine for the entire village (this was pre-internet). Most people had refrigerators and TVs, but electricity could be intermittent and there were no such things as laundry machines or VCRs. When I got home, I felt so disgusted by the American abundance that I saw clearly for the first time. I told the volunteer I wanted to give away everything I own and move back to Bali so that I could spend the rest of my life studying gamelan and Hinduism. The volunteer was an African American woman who just returned from service in Ghana. She too was wrestling with some big questions about personal and cultural identity. I remember one thing she told me quite clearly — never give up your privilege, but always strive to make sure you are using it for good instead of propagating more abuse. Indeed, this stuck with me to the point that I’ve worked to make it the defining element of my work in Indonesia since.

Aaliya, digital collage by Hamida Zourgui. Original photograph by Jean Besancenot.

Notions of privilege aren’t overtly discussed in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, but I do think this is important in understanding the ideas presented by the authors. If collaboration is defined by sharing and exchanging resources, then sharing privilege is necessary for tipping the balance of powers, making a society that is truly democratic, not just in name, and escaping the boundaries of imperialism, patriarchy, and dominance. To be honest, there are things I don’t like about Collaboration (there is just a little information about a lot of photographic projects and ideas, making it read a bit like a historical tapas), but I also feel it offers essential ideas for recreating cultural and photographic paradigms. And, regardless, I think the book a must for anyone interested in photographic history or education.

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Brian Arnold
is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.
Book Review Winogrand Color Photographs by Garry Winogrand Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Alas, poor Winogrand. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He was only 56 when cancer cut him down in 1984. Curators have spent the succeeding years attempting to reanimate the corpus. Task number one was to develop and sort the reams of film he’d left behind..."

Winogrand Color. By Garry Winogrand.
https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=TT186
Winogrand Color
Photographs by Garry Winogrand
Twin Palms, Santa Fe, NM, 2023. 212 pp., 156 color plates, 12½x12½".

Alas, poor Winogrand. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He was only 56 when cancer cut him down in 1984. Curators have spent the succeeding years attempting to reanimate the corpus. Task number one was to develop and sort the reams of film he’d left behind. John Szarkowski and crew tackled that one. They processed, proofed, and sifted thousands of unseen rolls, paving the way for the blockbuster MoMA exhibition/book Figments of The Real World in 1988. By Szarkowski’s reckoning Winogrand was “the central photographer of his time.” A definitive judgement it would seem. But his opinion was merely the first of many to come.

After Szarkowski, various others took a stab, each mixing unpublished work with reconsidered favorites in varying ratios. The Fraenkel Gallery produced The Man in The Crowd in 1998. In 2002, Trudy Wilner Stack’s Winogrand 1964 focused on the titular year. She was the first of his posthumous champions to dip a tentative toe into his color work. Alex Harris focused on airports the next year with Arrivals & Departures.

These efforts helped set the stage for Leo Rubinfien’s monster SFMoMA retrospective in 2013, the eponymous exhibition/book Garry Winogrand. You might think this exhaustive tome would put his legacy to rest for a while. But it wasn’t too long before Geoff Dyer had a go. His 2018 book of essays The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, borrowed from Szarkowski in format if not assessment. It dived further into his unseen color slides, with photos spiced with roaming asides. “I’m sure Dyer's book won't be the last on Winogrand,” I speculated at the time. “Another one will come along in, say, five years or so.”


Right on cue, the latest Winogrand book has hit the shelves. Co-curated by Michael Almereyda (director of William Eggleston In The Real World) and Susan Kismaric (photo curator at MoMA), Winogrand Color is the first book to cast the late maestro under a fully chromatic lens. With most of the photo world embracing a color palette now, such a reconsideration was probably inevitable. Indeed, it joins a glut of rose-colored crate digs, alongside recent monographs on Joel Meyerowitz, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Vivian Maier, Saul Leiter, and Werner Bischoff. As it turns out, Winogrand left more than enough breadcrumbs to blaze a color trail. Black-and-white may have been his first love, but he also shot Kodachrome and Ektachrome on occasion, at least in his early career. By the late 1960s those color efforts had mostly fizzled, discouraged by expense, printing difficulties, and a carousel mishap at the 1967 New Documents exhibition. Nevertheless, he managed to expose 45,000 color slides alongside the millions of monochromes. They’re stored with his archives at CCP in Tucson.


Almereyda and Kismaric were given full access to the mounted slides. They were stored in boxes, some seen, some unseen. The pair went about their task with patient diligence, beginning in 2017. “Susan and I were looking for needles in the massive archival haystack,” Almereyda writes. By the time they’d finished six years had passed, with a midpoint detour for a yet another blowout Winogrand exhibition. This one, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019, was presented as a rotating installation of 425 color slides. It served as a rough precursor to the book’s final selection of 150 plates.

Technically speaking, Winogrand Color spans the early 50s through late 60s. But the vast majority are from a narrow sweet spot, roughly 1962-1966. This was a period of active transition and experimentation for Winogrand. He was still doing commercial assignments, and he viewed color photos as a potential window to job opportunities. At the same time, he felt increasingly drawn to photography as an art form, as a way of life in fact. As he would say later, “my only interest in photographing is photography.” In the early 60s he hadn’t yet fully adjusted to the sentiment, but the ingredients were in place. His 1963 Guggenheim application signaled an aspirational leap from commerce into fine art. Fortunately his application was approved. Better yet, from the POV of Almereyda and Kismaric, he brought color film along on the subsequent road trip. His magical year of 1964 produced a hit parade of all-time winners, and some strong color images. As Almereyda explains in the introduction, Stack’s Winogrand 1964 was the initial inspiration for Winogrand Color.


Winogrand’s 1964 road trip sketched a loose map of his life journey. He traced a path westward over his career, from New York to Texas to California, with various stopovers in between. Winogrand Color is structured accordingly. The sequence is roughly chronological, and follows a general trajectory to LA. The earliest photo is from Coney Island in 1951, when Winogrand was just 23. By the final few pages, he’s reached the Pacific. He’s soaking up the California surf culture, the leading edge of the sixties sunbelt migration.

What transpired in the intervening years? Well, that is the story of Winogrand Color. The book presents a remarkable study of Winogrand’s young life and his rapidly maturing style. We’ve seen glimpses of this period before, but almost exclusively in b/w. If those facts were mysterious, the color work is more clearly described. With rainbowed hindsight, it carries a Wizard of Oz punch. The book’s initial sequence is shot with a long lens, isolating beach goers in moments of reverie. These photos probe the inner thoughts of strangers in a way that would become a Winogrand hallmark. But they are narrow snatches, a far cry from the stilted wide-angle inhalations to come. That style comes into sharper focus as the book moves gradually onto New York City sidewalks. These mid-60s street candids are restless. He was hungry for action, but color was a bucking bronco. His lassoings were scattershot, with mixed lens lengths, depth of field, and clarity. Still, they have a kernel of Winogrand’s wit. His naked curiosity comes through, his penetrating gaze in search of serendipitous moments. And some of the resulting frames are well seen, e.g. a woman in white gloves departing a taxi and a gawking family surrounded by urban greyscale. Both lean on color for visual power. As b/w pictures they would probably miss, at least by my rough guess.


Soon enough we get a chance to test this theory in practice, in the form of a color frame from the Central Park Zoo in 1967. It’s the chimp-holding mixed raced couple made infamous by Winogrand in black-and-white. But in this version the racial subtext is defanged, its content subjugated by colorful outfits and vibrant mood. Alas, form wins again. Just another relaxing Sunday stroll in the park. “The photograph should be more interesting or beautiful than what was photographed,” preached Winogrand. But in this case he’s fallen short. One reason he may have preferred monochrome is that its translation divorced itself naturally from reality. He could slot illusions into the breach. Color film could do the same of course, but the dance was trickier.


He seemed to have similar difficulties elsewhere. Winogrand Color includes several dozen “almost” photos. These are decent frames that work pretty well. But they lack the je ne sais quoi which lifted so many of Winogrand’s pictures into stellar territory. The New York sidewalk photos are entertaining enough, but none are exceptional. The same can be said for his western roamings. Feeling unmoored, he clung to events, fairs, and resorts. “When you put four edges around some facts,” he said, “you change those facts.” The same might apply to car-bound photographers. Nevertheless, he captured static scenes dutifully. When he broke free, he hit occasional pay dirt, as with random green phone booths in El Paso, or a windshield cowboy snapshot from Texas. These are among perhaps a dozen exceptional frames in a book which is largely pedestrian. By the time it winds down on the beach in California, Winogrand has reverted to the same stale long-lens closeups of his youth.

He’s come full circle it seems, and so have his readers. The book’s two best single images — a prismatic poolside from Tahoe and ghostly angel from Dallas — appeared already in Winogrand 1964. If the bones of his archive hadn’t yet been picked clean for Stack’s book, they certainly have by now.


Or have they? The most tantalizing questions raised by Winogrand Color concern the process of curation. For this book is not an unfiltered sample. Any view into his unseen oeuvre is tantalizing, but it comes with a guide. As with other posthumous curations, Winogrand’s archive presents a Rorschach test for scholars. Do they look for pictures to match preconceptions or defy them? Did Winogrand shoot any strange mistakes, half frames, mis-advanced rolls, light leaks, double exposures? Did he shoot photos of his family? Of his home? Of subways? Of nature? Did he shoot outside the U.S.? Who knows. One thing is certain though. Winogrand Color won't be the last book on Garry Winogrand. Another one will come along in, say, five years or so.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.
Book Review Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage Photographs by Deborah Turbeville Reviewed by Cheryl Van Hooven “Many years ago, I fell in thrall to Deborah Turbeville’s photography. Turbeville’s world was female centric and female authored. Her dreamlike images were infused with a feminine interiority like nothing I’d seen: a solid counterpoint to the widespread circulation of the male gaze and objectification of women..."

https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=TH144
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage
Photographs by Deborah Turbeville
Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2023. 240 pp..

Many years ago, I fell in thrall to Deborah Turbeville’s photography. Turbeville’s world was female centric and female authored. Her dreamlike images were infused with a feminine interiority like nothing I’d seen: a solid counterpoint to the widespread circulation of the male gaze and objectification of women.

Published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition beginning at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a comprehensive journey into the work of Deborah Turbeville. Although she is renowned primarily for the genre of fashion photography, her entire body of work is that of an innovative and experimental artist.

By focusing on Turbeville’s use of collage throughout her practice, Photo Elysée Director Nathalie Herschdorfer not only brings unknown images to light, but also proposes that the genius of Turbeville’s work can be found in her collages. Drawing from the MUUS Collection’s archive of Turbeville’s estate and working with Richard Grosgard, advisor to MUUS Collection, Herschdorfer has produced a retrospective in book form, "situating Turbeville in the pantheon of 20th century photographic artists" and revealing the process of her singular practice.


From her breakout 1975 Vogue magazine succès de scandale, ‘Bathhouse,’ to individual women waiting in the woods (for what, for whom?), to the uninhabited palace of Versailles, Turbeville’s work implies a fictive narrative. Along with the human characters she introduces, her collages and photographs evoke the personification of location. A Turbeville mise en scène is unmistakably hers — atmosphere is everything, mood is all.

Mining her own archive, reusing images, and defacing photographs to create a sense of the timeworn and timeless, Turbeville removed her photographs from the here and now, placing her subjects in suspension in a liminal world. Her models are as singular as her photos: often women with unconventional faces, a sense of life lived — self-contained and inwardly focused. When one regards the reigning fashion photography trends of the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, Turbeville’s unique imagery is iconoclastic in the extreme.


Lavishly produced and sumptuously printed, at 240 pages, this is a big, beautiful book. The images blur the line between photographic reproductions and actual 3-D replications of Turbeville’s collages, complete with dressmaker’s pins, attendant shadows, yellowed tape, and brown paper backing. To turn the pages is to travel through her work with no distractions. Much care has been taken to reflect Turbeville’s aesthetic. The book’s design is elegant in every respect and fully illustrates both her photographic interests and the connections between personal work and paid assignments.

Bringing Turbeville’s body of work to a wider audience, Nathalie Herschdorfer has produced an expansive reappraisal of a brilliantly unique and generative artist. Photocollage is both a generous, deeply researched visual profile (and itself a work of artistry), but also, and principally, a tribute to an artist who followed her own true muse.

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Cheryl Van Hooven is a photographer and writer based in New York and often working in the California Mojave Desert. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs, Imagery Estate Winery Permanent Collection at Sonoma State University, among others. She is currently working on a photo/text book.
Book Review Rivers Run Through It Photographs by Mark Ruwedel Reviewed by Brian Arnold "I first encountered Mark Ruwedel’s work 10-15 years ago at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. It was an exhibition of Westward the Course of Empire. The show was remarkable..."

Rivers Run Through It. By Mark Ruwedel.
https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZK427
Rivers Run Through It
Photographs by Mark Ruwedel
MACK, London, England, 2023. 136 pp., 12x9½".

I first encountered Mark Ruwedel’s work 10-15 years ago at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. It was an exhibition of Westward the Course of Empire. The show was remarkable. It was a marathon day spent visiting galleries in Chelsea with a group of students. Ruwedel’s small, exquisitely crafted black-and-white Western landscapes seemed so much more heartfelt and innovative than the flashy color work we’d seen previously. Ruwedel’s technique was mesmerizing (I can think of few black-and-white photographers of that caliber, but Andrea Modica and Mark Steinmetz come to mind). The images were deceptively simple, and somehow managed to be reminiscent of both Carlton Watkins and Bernd and Hilla Becher, exemplifying a deep understanding of the Western landscape.

Perhaps surprisingly, after this first experience with Ruwedel’s work I’ve had little engagement with it since. Certainly, I’ve known about his prolific output of photobooks, but I never really sat down with one until getting a copy of his newest book with MACK, Rivers Run Through It, a collection of photographs made along the Los Angeles River, the first in a series of four called Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.


I think of particular locales as photographic genres in and of themselves, like New York City street photography and Los Angeles landscapes. There are so many photobooks about Los Angeles and its environs — Los Angeles Spring by Robert Adams, ZZYZX by Gregory Halpern, and Ecology of Dreams by Ewan Telford all come to mind, as well as works by Catherine Opie, Lewis Baltz, and Anthony Hernandez. Los Angeles, the city of dreams, represents some of the most complex issues and histories that define America. It epitomizes Manifest Destiny and colonial expansion; as the second largest American city, despite such few resources for water, it represents American ingenuity; and as home to Hollywood, it embodies lush dreams of fame and fortune.


Rivers Run Through It
is photographed in a style reminiscent of the New Topographics, scrutinizing the margins of Los Angeles and highlighting the environmental issues (water and waste) that define the city. Ruwedel has spent decades documenting the landscapes in and around the city. The pictures in this book focus on the Los Angeles River Basin, looking at mud-caked wastelands, trickles, streams, and the river flowing in and out of the city. The complex issues of water in Los Angeles and, more generally, the American West, are common knowledge, but Ruwedel finds interesting ways to document the landscapes defined by this precious resource. His photographs are beautifully visualized — really photographer’s photography, using a simple but incredibly refined approach to the medium — and traverse a vast array of landscapes around the Los Angeles River and its tributaries. Ruwedel both embraces tropes of the American West — seen with the horseback riders in cowboy hats along the riverbeds also romantic pictures of a heron nesting along the banks — and the incredible corruption and pollution that are consuming these landscapes.


Anyone interested in the American West, New Topographics, or classic, well-executed black-and-white photography will find a lot to love in Rivers Run Through It, but I will confess that I wasn’t quite as mesmerized as I’d been by my earlier experiences with Ruwedel’s work (this feels like a genre work, nothing groundbreaking in how he pictures the landscape). Early in the book, there is a lovely picture that for me clearly defines Rivers Run Through It. In the background we see the mountains that surround Los Angeles, hazy and majestic in the distance, but most of the picture shows an arid and harsh landscape. In the foreground are two sun-drench boulders — glowing with beautiful tones of white and grey — which I see as a reference to a famous picture of paint-stained rocks in Robert Adams’ book Los Angeles Spring. Rather than paint, however, Ruwedel’s picture shows a plastic water bottle subtly positioned between the rocks. It’s one of those cheap, disposable bottles purchased from convenience store, with just a little water remaining in the bottom. The picture captures so much of what is at stake in Los Angeles, a beautiful landscape crippled by its need for water.

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Brian Arnold
is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.
photo-eye Gallery Chris McCaw | photo-eye Conversations LIVE + NEW book photo-eye Gallery Last month we hosted a conversation between artist Chris McCaw and photo-eye Gallery director Anne Kelly, via Zoom in honor of McCaw's new book Marking Time. In case you missed it or would like to revisit or share it, the good news, we recorded it and are pleased to share it today.
Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP #932 (Idaho), Unique Silver Gelatin Print, 8x10 in.


Last month we hosted a conversation between artist Chris McCaw and photo-eye Gallery director Anne Kelly, via Zoom in honor of McCaw's new book Marking Time. In case you missed it or would like to revisit and share it, the good news is that we recorded it and are pleased to post it today!


photo-eye Conversations is a series of causal conversations with photographers 
 we have the honor of working with. 



View | Order  Chris McCaw's new book Marking Time HERE

Marking Time, Photographs by Chris McCaw, Datz Press, 2023. 

Sunburn was a conceptual experiment and adventure in connecting time and analog photographic tools. … I continuously study what directions and shapes of sun trajectories I can obtain in various times and spaces on the Earth. I expect a magical scene to appear, but it is not just vague waiting. I study meticulously. To obtain the traces of the rising and setting sun, you must personally travel to that time and space. It cannot be manipulated. And I just love that process. 
— Chris McCaw 

 
Marking Time, Photographs by Chris McCaw, Datz Press, 2023. 

Chris McCaw works with a manually modified large format camera, loading vintage photo paper in place of film, and letting the sun come through the lens to physically burn the paper. This analog photographic method holds the unique documentary aspects of photography, as it captures the day and night of a distinct time and place. The passage of time is also recorded on the vintage paper, marked through varying levels of sunlight throughout the day. This book is a compilation of McCaw’s diverse work from the past 20 years, featuring the significant Sunburn series along with his Heliograph, Poly-Optic, Cirkut, and Tidal series, allowing us to experience the full scope of his variations flowing as one body centered around the sun. 

 *from the publisher's description


View unique works by Chris McCaw

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For more information, and to reserve one of these unique works, please contact 
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Book Review Pictures from the Outside By Chantal Zakari and 13 incarcerated men Reviewed by Meggan Gould "I have a folder, somewhere on my hard drive, of screenshots that I collected in a short-lived mad frenzy to wander Google Earth and find every house or apartment in which I had lived..."

By Chantal Zakari and 13 incarcerated men.
https://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZK447
Pictures from the Outside
By Chantal Zakari and 13 incarcerated men

Eighteen Publications, 2023. 136 pp., 5¾x8¼".

I have a folder, somewhere on my hard drive, of screenshots that I collected in a short-lived mad frenzy to wander Google Earth and find every house or apartment in which I had lived. I moved a lot in my twenties — multiple cities on two continents — in short, a horrifying number of lease agreements. In Providence alone I count five apartments within a 2-mile radius. A few years back, yearning for more peripatetic days and armed with the easy familiarity of the shift-command-4 gesture, I traveled the world and captured each address, as frontally as possible (the joy of the selective screenshot capture: in-camera framing and cropping of screen landscape). Somewhere in my studio there is a small box with the tiny test cyanotypes I made of these screenshots. They are equal parts poignant (to me) and unremarkable.

It is worth noting that I had the privilege of access to this imagery when this flight of fancy overcame me. The privilege to sit at a computer and revisit sites of memory, to attempt to clutch them through an act of collection (followed, in my case, by a peculiar penchant for a chemical translation). Many (too many) do not share this privilege, this freedom of virtual or physical movement to explore the reliability — or friability — of memory. In Pictures from the Outside, Chantal Zakari engages in a collaborative photo-making process with a group of incarcerated men, acting as a visual conduit to memories of specific architecture that molded their pasts. The architecture in which they are currently housed is hinted at in the structure of the book itself: exposed board covers shelter the book in a heavy casing, and the open-spine binding is reminiscent, dare I say, of barred windows.


Zakari allowed the men a visual reprieve from the prison walls, in the form of external image-making on their behalf. She established parameters: no photographs of people, and within a driving radius of two to three hours. Reminiscent of a scavenger hunt, Zakari was asked to visit specific childhood houses, a bodega, multiple schools, a flight of stairs, a portentous courthouse door. She asked the men to tell her how to take the envisioned picture. What corner should she stand on, what direction should she aim her camera? Often they sketched the framing; one reproduced sketch asks the artist to stand at the starred intersection of Mead and Russle Streets, with a note to “please take photo approximately where star is. I trust your judgment.”

Judgment is a recurring theme throughout. That of the law, of course, but also one’s own judgments and their consequences. Multiple levels of text intersect with Zakari’s photographs: the initial prompts, the men’s jotted observations upon receiving the photographs, and longer reflection pieces that use the architectural structures visualized as launching points for broader narratives about childhood, education, love, parks, abuse, prayer, violence, and play. Zakari includes her own notes and observations as she looked to faithfully execute each requested image; the layered voices intermingle and form a rich tapestry of personal experiences of place, often spanning decades.


I am struck that the collaborative aspect of this project is as interesting, if not more so, than the resultant photographs. To be a stand-in for someone else’s vision, possibly warped with the weight of time and emotional baggage, and to channel vision through multiple lenses — optical and conceptual — is an extraordinary exercise in communication and trust. A banal street corner, ostensibly unremarkable, is rendered poignant through the way in which photography accesses it, holds it, and delivers it back to the eyes yearning to see it. Or, it is an extraordinary privilege to visit our past, and photography can be an exquisite gift.

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Meggan Gould is an artist living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,, the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and Speos (Paris Photographic Institute), where she finally began her studies in photography. She received an MFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts — Dartmouth. She recently wrote a book, Sorry, No Pictures, about her own relationship to photography.