On Saturday February 25th, 2012 photo-eye celebrated our newest represented artist, Steve Fitch with a book signing and reception for his work Highway Culture: photographs from 1971-present.

If you missed the opening, or just haven't had a chance to see the exhibition, not to worry!  Highway Culture will  be on exhibition through April 14th.  You can also view all of Fitch's portfolios here.

The show received an excellent review in the Santa Fe New Mexican's Pasatiempo

From the Pasatiempo

Photograph Magazine

And Douglas Fairfield wrote a wonderful article about Fitch's work in Photograph Magazine, which you can read here.

It's also not to late to acquire a signed copy of any of Fitch's titles: Diesels and Dinosaurs, Gone, Llano Estacado, and Motel Signs.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the gallery at gallery@photoeye.com or by calling (505) 988-5152 x202

from the book As Long As It Photographs

Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs new self-published two-volume newsprint As Long As It Photographs, It Must Be A Camera sure does bring out the inner photo nerd.  I mean, really… there is a photograph of a camera made from a turtle shell and it's pointed at another live turtle. How disturbing is that? And to top off the nerd factor, Onorato & Krebs started up a conversation about the turtle camera on the Large Format Photography Forum (screen shots of the dialogue appear in the book). There is also a camera made out of a rock, and while I'm not sure how that quite works… it's fairly curious. My favorite camera in this book looks like something out of Dr. Strangelove… it might be a time machine, but I'm not entirely sure.

And while the first volume focuses on the oddly constructed cameras, it also points to a larger intent. The artists made a company name for themselves, Honour & Crab Ltd and then sold these precious items on ebay.  In the book's pages are more screen shots of the dialogue between the artists and potential buyers of these odd cameras. And while some of the conversations are crude, the more interesting ones come from the buyers actually invested in purchasing the objects.

from the book As Long As It Photographs

from the book As Long As It Photographs

This book really relays the idea that the possibilities of photography are endless. You can make an image out of just about anything, you don't even need a camera. I remember seeing a pinhole skull-camera once on boing boing. Made from the skull of a 13-year old girl who died some 150 years ago, it was pretty strange to say the least, and the guy who made it even made photographs with it. Onorato and Krebs really aren't out to disturb, but to humor and create a dialogue about self-reliance and creativity. Most of us reading this blog love self-published books, so why not have an affinity for self-produced cameras?

from the book It Must Be A Camera

from the book It Must Be A Camera

 And then there is the second volume featuring a selection of images taken by the photography duo. My assumption is that these photographs were not taken with the cameras shown in the first volume. But the images are no less interesting. In fact, they are some of the most out-there and striking series of pictures I have seen in some time. The pair's first book The Great Unreal is one of the top photography books in my collection; it might very well be my favorite book I own. The photographs in The Great Unreal are surreal depictions of the American West, a place so well documented that the duo's approach was a surprising breath of fresh air. Manipulated landscapes and interior images appear closer to a nuclear apocalypse or alien invasion than the ideal notion of the western United States. Their new publication is no less odd.  At times the photographs in this new two-volume book give the sensation of being flung into an LSD induced world of apparitions and magic spells, while other images in this series are simply unexplainable, seemingly concentrating more on surrealist forms and cleaver notions of framing. I will warn the buyer that Onorato & Krebs have certainly evolved from their last publication, but it is no less engaging or wonderful to look at. -- Antone Dolezal

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2011 by:
Anouk Kruithof

Purchase a copy of As Long As It Photographs, It Must Be A Camera

Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures, By John Gossage.
Published by Super Labo, 2012.

Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures

Reviewed by Adam Bell

_______________________________________

John Gossage Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures
Photographs by John Gossage
Super Labo, 2012. Softcover. 36 pp., 27 color illustrations, 7-1/4x10-1/4".

Place has always played a central position within photography. If photographers or artists are lucky, they may find a place, or subject for that matter, that transforms their practice and informs the work they make throughout their lives. In his new book, Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures, John Gossage returns to Berlin and pays tribute to the fertile terrain that shaped and informed him as an artist. Dedicated to Gossage's friend and artist Eva Maria Ocherbauer, this slim volume is a love-letter and tribute not only to Eva but also to the city and period where he made his own greatest artistic discoveries.

Primarily shot in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the work is a return to black and white and Berlin for Gossage. It is also some of his most frankly erotic work. This may come as something of a surprise to people who only know his recent color photography, his work in Berlin, or the recently reprinted book The Pond, but portraits and nudes have appeared before in his images. The book begins with a dark shot of a landscape painting, then moves on to an image of a woman in the distance who appears to be taking a photograph or perhaps luring us down the dark hallway and into her apartment. After these two images and the title page, we move to a series of erotically charged images of a nude woman, presumably Eva, lying in bed or in various states of undress throughout an apartment. Interspersed throughout these images, are signature Gossage images of cityscapes, buildings, debris and fragmentary details. Erotic tension permeates the book as Gossage circles Eva, explores her apartment, searches under the tables and scrutinizes the odd sculptural quality of her shoes. Although the images often take us outside to Berlin, we are always led back to Eva – the book's guiding force and heart.

Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures, by John Gossage. Published by Super Labo, 2012.

Gossage's previous book with Super Labo, The Absolute Truth, can be seen as a companion volume to Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures. Both books are dedicated to close friends of Gossage, Lewis Baltz and Eva Maria Ocherbauer respectively, and share a similar design structure built on existing or appropriated books. For this volume, a tattered and crudely taped copy of Memphis in Pictures acts as the new cover. The sole alteration is the 'Berlin' boldly scrawled in red across the Memphis in the original title. Books have long served as a source of creative and graphic inspiration for Gossage. In another recent book, The Auckland Project, a tiny field guide to star gazing in the southern hemisphere became the structural inspiration for his contribution. In this case, the Memphis book doesn't so much provide a structural framework for the work, but alludes to one of the central themes of the volume – namely a sense of displaced longing, or dreaming about a place or time far away, but loved dearly.

Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures, by John Gossage. Published by Super Labo, 2012.

Measuring a discrete 10"x7", the book only contains 27 images but both the edit and design are excellent. The book also contains one of Gossage's signature design elements - the use of color or actual image fragments to counterbalance the main image. This technique was used to great effect in both The Thirty-Two Inch Rule/Map of Babylon and Secrets of Real Estate. Here Gossage uses colored bars to animate the spreads and break up the image and design. My only criticism with this book is I wish the black and white reproductions were a little better. Ultimately this is a minor criticism, because the slightly rough reproductions seem to lend themselves to the modest book and design.

Eva's Book/Berlin in Pictures, by John Gossage. Published by Super Labo, 2012.

The book's copy states that it is a "portrait of an artist and a dreamer in Berlin." As with most books, the copy can be deceiving or speak a half-truth. In this work, we can see Gossage revisiting one of the most artistically fruitful periods of his life as a photographer. On its surface, the work is a frank love letter to Eva, but seen in light of Gossage's work, it must also be acknowledged as a loving tribute to a period and place full of restless creativity, growth and possibility.—ADAM BELL

purchase book

ADAM BELL is a photographer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and his work has been exhibited and published internationally. He is the co-editor and co-author, with Charles H. Traub and Steve Heller, of The Education of a Photographer (Allworth Press, 2006). His writing has appeared in Foam Magazine, Lay Flat and Ahorn Magazine. He is currently on staff and faculty at the School of Visual Arts' MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department. His website and blog are adambbell.com and adambellphoto.blogspot.com.

Found and Lost, Shut Down by, Kosovo in Progress, Voices & Images from Bulgaria

Found and Lost by Nicu Ilfoveanu showcases the photographer's year-long trek through a flea market where a bustle of people crowd around new and old goods in an almost frenzied manner. The photographer's grainy black-and-white snapshots reveal the hysteria of the close-quartered flea market, as well as consumerism in an almost surrealist approach.

Shut Down: Industrial Ruins in the East is a beautifully designed handbound book. Each cover is individually crafted out of a multi-coated, rusty metal plate. Christoph Lingg's striking photographs take the viewer through fourteen countries in search of industrial ruins, baring witness to overconsumption and wasteful decay. This curious object leaves us pondering the significance and environmental impact of the progress of industrial practices.

Kosovo in Progress by Åke Ericson is an intense document on the reconstructive efforts underway following the war in Kosovo. Focusing on the village of Loxha, this book reconstructs the path back to normal living environments and life. Receiving high praise and widely exhibited, the photographs in this book are both timely and offer a staggering account of the aftermath of war.

Voices & Images from Bulgaria by Martin Koenig offers selections from the artists many years documenting Bulgarian music, dance and ceremonies through the use of film, recording and photography. While often quiet and subtle, the images in this book are simply stunning. Beautifully reproduced, this book contains a 53-minute CD of traditional Bulgarian songs and instrumental music recorded by Koenig.

All Publisher Direct titles are available for order through the publisher via a special link within their listing.

See all the Publisher Direct books here.

Paradis, Al Lavoro! and Retrieved by Charlotte Dumas

I can understand approaching Charlotte Dumas' work with hesitance. Images of animals are among the quickest ways to attract interest in humans, play on our sympathies, tug on our heartstrings. Advertisers seem to be well aware of this, using animals for cheap attention grabs to manipulate our empathy for the promotion of a product. While Dumas' images may initially gain attention due to their subject matter, her photographs move beyond this basic attraction, speaking to the core of the human desire for a connection with animals. Depictions of animals are everywhere, omnipresent in videos and memes on the internet, and growing in importance in the family structure of our homes -- there seems to be a sizable societal yearning for closeness with animals. Not only is the way we relate to animals shifting, but also how we relate to each other -- animals often become a proxy for human relationships, but can also be a foundation for relationships between humans, a bonding element in a world of increasing disparity.

from Paradis by Charlotte Dumas

Dumas has said of her own images, "the state of mankind can be read and studied by the way we relate to animals." She is a formidable portrait artist, her subjects captured as elegantly and thoughtfully as we expect of the best portraits of humans. Painterly lit and sculpturally rendered, her subjects seem to emote through every part of their being, their posture, and most compellingly, their eyes. The animals captured by Dumas are soulful and her images feel revealing. But what is it, exactly, that we are seeing when we look at Dumas' images? Are we glimpsing the soul of these animals, or are we seeing a reflection of our desires for them? In his essay for Al Lavoro!, Francesco Zanot states: "What you can read in the expressions of these dogs is, above all, a projection of our thinking. Their eloquence is, at least in part, the eloquence of those viewing them.” That eloquence is also a large part from Duams, the expressions captured a reaction, or not, to her lens and presence.

from Paradis by Charlotte Dumas

Paradis collects images from a number of Dumas' projects, including her sold out book Heart Shaped Hole. It opens with a few portraits of dogs, soft and low lit, leading into two of Dumas' series of horses, the first of many well-sequenced and surprisingly natural transitions between projects centered on different species. The first equine image depicts a horse in an oddly vulnerable position, lying down, back to the camera, creating a striking parallel to an image of a German Sheppard a few pages prior. Moving through these images, we are left with an overwhelming sense of an inner life behind the eyes of these creatures, but as the book progresses the animals depicted grow more wild -- from domesticated dogs and horses, to strays, to wolves, and here the expressions become more inscrutable. A street dog sitting in a box is paired with an image of a wolf, the animals linked by the similarities of their coats, but the wildness of the wolf is notable. Without the generations of co-evolution that have made man and dog so compatible, these canines are harder to connect with, but the urge to find meaning in their gazes is still palpable if only in its attainable absence. A wolf with downy white fur leads into an image of a white tiger, here again, back to Dumas' lens. In these images the viewer is also confronted by the captivity of her subjects, the power of the cats contrasting with the shabby concrete human-made surroundings. Ultimately I am left wondering -- what is it that we do to these creatures in our attempt to make them part of our lives, in our attempts to bond with them? The book opens with a delicate essay by Mooseje Goosen and finishes with a plate listing, including images from these projects that are not pictured in this book.

from Al Lavoro! by Charlotte Dumas

from Al Lavoro! by Charlotte Dumas

More straight forward in concept, Al Lavoro! features a series of Duams' images of working dogs with jobs ranging from lifeguard to retired lab animal. The book also reveals a bit of Dumas' process, featuring seven medium format images filling the page in fantastic reproduction, but also 24 of her preparation Polaroid images, presented in smaller size in the intervening pages. The essay by Francesco Zanot in English and Italian accompanies the smaller images on these pages, which has the dubious attribute of being a bit too engaging for this format -- at times it can distract from the images. Ultimately, the effect is rather like a slide lecture, and the publisher can be forgiven for not wanting to hide the text at the end of the book. In these portraits, Dumas captures the canines in their work environments or at home, each photograph captioned with the dogs name, age and occupation. There is a subtle tension in these images -- the animals occupying a space more complex than the average pet, they are employed in our service. The cover image, Ursus, the 16 year old lifeguard dog, is a showstopper, eyes fixed to the ocean with what seems to be concerned vigilance. One gets the sense that Ursus finds his job fulfilling, which contrasts with the images of Cannella and Diva, a laboratory dog and racing dog, who are depicting lounging, grateful in their retirement.

from Retrieved by Charlotte Dumas

Retrieved follows the theme of working dogs, but Dumas achieves something different in this book. Following up on the rescue dogs who worked at the World Trade Center and Pentagon sites during 9-11, Dumas photographed dogs who were still living 10 years after the event. For Dumas, the images of these events that most stuck with her were of the animals, sniffing through the rubble, and captured here in her tender, thoughtful style, for me, these images become a representation of the psychological usefulness of our emotional connection to animals. In Retrieved the dogs provide a proxy, an easier way in to the tumultuous ordeal of dealing with a paradigm-shifting tragedy ten years later. Time passes quickly, and our distance from the events can be hard to perceive. Here, that time is written on the faces of the dogs, grey appearing around many of their eyes and snouts. Photographing them in their homes, the dogs look noble and alert, brave. There is catharsis in these images; the silence of these dogs allows them to become symbols, a perfect space to project what we humans may have difficulty dealing with. The book ends with a statement from Dumas and bios of the 15 dogs portrayed in the book.

from Retrieved by Charlotte Dumas

All three books are slim and modest sized books, all approximately 8-1/2"x11". Retrieved is a soft cover, the images beautifully printed on Japanese-bound pages. The others are hardcover, Al Lavoro! with splashy bright yellow endpapers and big glossy images. Paradis is more understated, the images smaller, but finely reproduced, and ultimately the most intimate of the three books.

Purchase signed copy of Paradis
Purchase signed copy of Al Lavoro!
Purchase Retrieved

Longmont, Colorado, 1979 -- Robert Adams courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery

Since I moved to Santa Fe, there are only two men for whom I have driven to Denver and back in one day (720 miles roundtrip): James McMurtry, who played a show at the Bluebird last year, and Robert Adams, whose work was recently on view at the Denver Art Museum (DAM). McMurtry is unlikely to be bested by anyone but I was excited about seeing Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, 1964-2009, a traveling exhibition organized by The Yale University Art Gallery. After almost six hours in the car, I was road weary and ready for the visual pleasure of the maestro’s poignant, gelatin-silver stylings. The show was featured in the DAM’s special exhibition space and I was delighted to see that photography and Mr. Adams were given that honor and that Adams’ work would have room to breathe. For those of you who haven’t yet seen it (it now travels to Los Angeles, then Yale, before a generous tour overseas), the show offers selections from Adams’ major bodies of work (twenty!) throughout his long career. Given Adams’ significance, it’s a worthy and ambitious undertaking, one that resulted in a three-volume publication that accompanies the exhibition and an informative, easy-to-use website that I particularly admire.

Nebraska State Highway 2, Box Butte County, Nebraska, 1978 & Neahkahnie Mountain, Oregon, 2004 -- Robert Adams courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery

While I am not the rabid Bob-o-phile that many of my friends are, I oversaw a large collection of his work during my years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I recently included two of his photographs in Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment, which I organized at the New Mexico Museum of Art. I love that Adams found a way to visually express the tension he felt between the miraculous beauty of our earth and the dubious addenda made by mankind. I love that if you take the time with each picture, it continues to unfold and never gives you a definitive answer. I love his simplicity (in the best sense of the word), his eloquence, his lyricism. I love an English major who makes magnificent photographs. The show is classic, understated, perchance elegant, and in that sense respects the artist’s esthetic. DAM’s photography curator, Eric Paddock, did a good job of creating individual spaces for the bodies of work, offering small helpings of pictures with pauses in between. The walls were painted in sherbet colors that were somehow both anemic and distracting but served to differentiate the galleries. I enjoyed seeing many of the photographs, some old favorites and some new discoveries, especially the work from the series Along Some Rivers and the very recent Alder Leaves.

So I’m glad I saw the show but I didn’t like it. That is not meant to denigrate the considerable efforts of my colleagues to put together a comprehensive survey of work by an important photographer. My inquiry is more about how exhibitions work, what they are for, what they can offer. In this case, quality isn’t the issue but quantity is; it’s about a big retrospective not feeling like a good fit for an artist of such subtlety. Certainly the idea of examining the depth and breadth of Adams’ considerable oeuvre is a good one, offering the opportunity to assess

covers of Robert Adams: The Place We Live and What Can We Believe Where?

what it adds up to. Creating a retrospective book that will undoubtedly be indispensible for reference and reflection is also surely a great service to the field (it’s $250, so neither I nor my museum’s library has it), as is Yale’s commitment to reissuing Adams’ monographs and publishing books for some of his newer bodies of work. But the book Adams and his wife Kerstin put together on the occasion of the exhibition, What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West ($25, with an afterword by exhibition curators Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds), also spans Adams’ career and reminds us that less is more.

Adams is known for his books as much as his photographs and over the years has put together a group of remarkable publications characterized by their careful selection and sequencing. They are small books, easily held by human hands, easily picked up and put down while thinking. In their structure and their pacing, these books invite leisurely, contemplative consideration, which is probably the best way to apprehend Adams’ work. A retrospective exhibition is, almost by definition, antithetical to that kind of ease, intimacy, and thoughtfulness. All of Adams' work is black-and-white, all of it is the same size, all of it was matted and framed identically in the exhibition. While that kind of consistency of presentation is standard in a museum show, with the intention of keeping emphasis on the pictures themselves, what tends to happen is that they all look the same. It’s hard to fight that effect, especially with small pictures that require the viewer to get up close to view each one individually. Adams’ work demands and indeed merits that kind of attention, but the march of frames across pastel walls wasn’t particularly enticing, even for someone as invested in seeing the show as I was that day. Seeing all those pictures didn’t support the message of Adams’ work for me, it diluted it.

Northeast of Keota, Colorado, 1969 and From the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon, 1991 -- Robert Adams courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery

What would I have done differently? If each room held just one picture or three, it would have been too precious. If some bodies of work had been left out, it wouldn’t have been a genuine retrospective. I guess what I’m most interested in is what connects the bodies of work, what does seeing them together add up to. Perhaps the essays in the three-volume publication address this in depth but I’d like to see a summary of that for museum visitors. I’d like to come out of that show with a clear sense of why Adams' work warrants a retrospective, why it was important when he made the work and why it is relevant now. Each viewer can and should address that question for himself, but a lifetime of work aspires to be rich enough to require more than an hour or so to digest. That’s part of why it takes a lot of time to write a catalog, to organize a show. Perhaps the curators, and perhaps Adams himself, prefer that we each bring to and take away from the work an unmediated individual experience. But I’d like to benefit from their considerable thought on the subject.

After I returned home, I found the statement I was missing, written by the curators as the afterword to the aforementioned book What Can We Believe Where? I don’t think I have ever had occasion to write these words before, clichéd as they may be, but the book is a triumph. Three paragraphs of words at the beginning by Robert Adams and a half dozen at the back of the book by Chuang and Reynolds are just right in offering clarity and resonance to the selection of pictures in between. The images reproduced are, again, from across the artist’s career. But this time they are unconstrained by chronology and are arranged with great sensitivity into a river of joy and sadness and laughter and shock, concluding with the inexorable tides that will surely outlive us all. What a beautiful testament to Mr. Adams and his work.

from the book What Can We Believe Where?

For me, the exhibition alone was too standardized, too factual, too neutral, too big. Before getting back in the car for another six hours, I would like to have tasted the wonder and the tears that motivate Adams’ art. His pictures work best when they are allowed to be in direct conversation with you, each individual, and I’m not sure that works well in a big exhibition. To be sure, his photographs are quiet and his approach is gentle, but that’s forged out of the artist’s conflict and passion on a topic no less monumental than the nature and quality of human life on this planet. Adams and McMurtry might not be so far from one another in that respect, come to think, both railing against a broken world while holding it in a tight embrace. Yes, broken windshield glass can glitter like stars, but so can actual stars, when you can see them through the haze of man-made pollution and electric lights. Adams’ work is ostensibly restrained and so is the show, honoring his style without interpreting his contributions. I would rather have seen a retrospective that revealed and illuminated the tremendous complexity of this artist’s life of work for museum viewers at its many venues.--KATHERINE WARE

Robert Adams: The Place We Live was selected as one of the Best Books of 2011 by Raymond Meeks, Kevin Kunishi and Anne Kelly

Read Antone Dolezal's blog post on Robert Adams: The Place We Live here

Purchase a copy here

Read Tom Leininger's review of What Can We Believe Where? in photo-eye Magazine here

Purchase a copy here

KATHERINE WARE, Curator of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art. Before serving at her post at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Katherine Ware was the Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ms. Ware served as Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum during the 1990s. She has also worked with the photography collection at the Oakland Museum of California and began her career at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in Washington, D.C. She is a frequent juror and reviewer of contemporary photography and has written essays on the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

photo-eye Gallery is pleased to announce our newest Gallery artist Steve Fitch!

Starlite Motel, Mesa, Arizona, December 28, 1980 © Steve Fitch

Steve Fitch is a photographer and educator who has been making photographs of the American West for more then four decades. As a boy, the scenes that he observed out of the window of his father's 1951 Buick fascinated him. In the introduction of Fitch's first book Diesels and Dinosaurs, he recounts memories of observing small towns, glowing neon signs and 18-wheeers roaming the highway. Fitch was also witness to the rise and fall of the drive-in theater. All were experiences that molded his interests as an adult, leading to his visual studies of the highway culture of the American West and man's encroachment upon the land.

Fitch currently has five portfolios of work on the photo-eye website: Vernacular Assemblages, Llano Escandado, Gone, Diesels and Dinosaurs, and Western Landmarks. All of the portfolio's may be viewed by visiting www.photoeye.com/SteveFitch.

If you are in the Northern New Mexico area, please stop by the gallery Saturday February 25th from 3-6pm for an artist reception and book signing with Steve Fitch. The photo-eye Gallery exhibition of Fitch's images,  Highway Culture will run through April 14th, 2012. Signed copies of Fitch's books, including Diesels and Dinosaurs (1976), Gone (2003), Llano Estacado (2011) and Motel Signs (2011), are available at photo-eye Books.

This past monday Steve Fitch was interviewed by Mary-Charlotte on the Santa Fe Radio Cafe. You can listen to the interview here.

If you would like to reserve a signed copy of one of Fitch's books or have any questions regarding the exhibition, please contact Anne Kelly (anne@photoeye.com) or Cliff Shapiro (cliff@photoeye.com) or by call the gallery at (505) 988-5152 ex 202.

Farms by Bernhard Fuchs and Stone By Stone by Taj Forer

For years now I have been fascinated with how photographers examine their/our personal relationship to food and its production through art to comment on how we as a society interact with what we eat. I started examining this imagery and my own personal relationship with what I consume in Fraction Magazine years ago in The Un-Natural Nature of Food. This curated online exhibition focused on how many in contemporary society cultivate, raise, hunt and forage for what they consume through indirect and direct means. I included the work of Brian Ulrich, Colleen Plumb, Dan Nelken, Jake Chessum, Susanna Raab and many others whose images or entire projects have considered the chasm that separates many of us from what we eat. Photography, along with the numerous books and documentaries on the subject, was a catalyst for me to further consider what I consumed and how I consumed it. In contrast to the somewhat aggressive and political work I chose for the Fraction exhibit, two recently published projects, Bernhard Fuchs' Farms and Taj Forer's Stone By Stone, take a more subtle approach to the subject of food production and our relationship to the resources of the land.

Farms features images from many of the agricultural regions near Bernhard Fuchs' birthplace in Helfenberg, Austria. The cover is unassuming with linen wrapped boards and earth toned embossed text. Upon opening the book, Fuchs (and his designer) takes us for a walk in the Austrian countryside to see fallen fruit in an orchard near Piberschlag, a pitchfork resting against a plastered wall in a fodder store (the building for storing dry food to feed cattle) in Thurnerschlag, a white and weather-stained farmstead in Herrnschlag.

From Bernhard Fuchs' Farms

From Bernhard Fuchs' Farm

Fuchs notes that the region's 'climate is bleak' and all of the photos displayed benefit from the seemingly numerous overcast days. Fuchs' photos lack animated life - he shows no humans or animals in the photos and images are mostly devoid of vibrant colors. He reminds us briefly in his afterword that the family farm is losing to regulation and urbanization. Fuchs' images question the growing state of disuse of this land with a light-handed and nostalgic aesthetic. The images and book, beautiful and unassuming, add to Fuchs' theme of meandering journeys previously presented in the projects Roads and Paths and Streets and Trails.

Taj Forer's work in the book Stone By Stone is like Fuchs in that he often chooses to capture his images on the overcast days: the days we are most in need of shelter, days that remind us that winter, if not here, is on its way. Unlike Fuchs, whose images are more of a meditation on the land, Forer is creating a visual how-to-manual: this is how I do it; this is how I keep the cycle going and make use of the resources I have. Forer presents a photographic exploration of how we interact with nature to supply us with the basic necessities - food, water and shelter. He shows us images of the life of a hunter/gatherer - his mud and straw structures, a tinder nest and grooved fireboard, a hand reaching for the foraged apple, a gourd canteen, and a pelt contrasted against the white tent wall. The debossed cover image shows foraged Jerusalem artichokes supported in a bed of pine needles, an image that fully represents the idea of living off the land with each of the materials supplied by nature. Many of Forer's self-made structures remind me of Edward Curtis' images of Native American structures like the primitive Apache hut image from 1903 - the continuation of a cycle of living off the land. Forer is documenting his experience of reconnecting with what has always surrounded us.

From Taj Forer's Stone By Stone

From Taj Forer's Stone By Stone

From Taj Forer's Stone By Stone

It is an art book with intent and purpose carefully and lovingly produced by Forer with the publisher Kehrer Verlag. Forer was able to oversee the printing with the help of an AOL grant. Watch the grant follow-up video to hear more about the project in Forer's own words.

The messages in Forer and Fuchs' books are not  blatantly about the evolving nature of agriculture and human sustenance, but undertones relating to this theme are present in both. It may sound like a heavy subject, but neither artist is proselytizing with the work, the images produced in the both books are light and meditative. The books physically match in weight, both measuring approximately 10x10 inches and around 100 pages and would fit well into the shelves of a consciously-minded foodie, food activist or art book collector.

Purchase Farms here

Purchase Stone By Stone here

The Altogether, By Chris Coekin.
Published by Walkout, 2012.

The Altogether

Reviewed by Colin Pantall
_____________________________________________

Chris Coekin The Altogether
Photographs by Chris Coekin
Walkout, 2012. Hardbound. 124 pp., 28x4 page gatefolds, 27 color illustrations, 8-3/4x6-3/4".

"The Altogether is inspired by manufacturing and the manual workers who make and produce, craftsman who are skilled and work with their hands," says Chris Coekin of his latest journey through English working class culture. 

Part of that craftsmanship is found in the book itself. Every detail is thought out and included so it connects into a narrative whole. First off, the book comes with a foil-blocked embossed cover of a man pulling on a rope. It's chalk white against coal black cloth, a touch-and-feel introduction to a book in which tactile, visual and auditory combine to perfect effect. 

Open the book, and you don't see any pictures. Instead you get lines from a verse; "Days, Days at the factories," "They come and they go," "As sure as the sun sets." Coekin wrote the verse, a parallel text that pulls the book and the images together through language, rhythm and song.

The Altogether, by Chris Coekin. Published by Walkout, 2012.

The lines are printed on gatefolds. Flick these over and you see the three sets of pictures that form the heart of the book. The first set shows the factory workers; men stand in a line pulling on a rope against a background of oil-stained concrete and heavy machinery, four men stand in a quadrant, one hand shaking a diagonal across the human square, the other holding the tools of their manufacturing trade; a spade, a sledgehammer and a pick.

The Altogether, by Chris Coekin. Published by Walkout, 2012.

Inspired by old Trade Union banners, the pictures aren't so much the idealised propaganda images of old but a restaging with imperfections added. The poses are stiff, the backgrounds too real and the economics more complex than those of the past. These are real people with real jobs.

The Altogether, by Chris Coekin. Published by Walkout, 2012.

At least they used to be real jobs, because the complexities are added to by the setting for the book; John Pring & Son Wire, a wire-making company in Cheshire, England. The factory closed down as Coekin was making his photographs, giving a sense of loss to the book. This sense of mortality is accentuated by the second set of pictures: photographs that show leaks and stains, geological formation of chemical leakage on walls, floors and machinery.

The final set of pictures shows old tools lying in damp recesses of the factory floor; the fossilised remains of labour lost perhaps?

The Altogether, by Chris Coekin. Published by Walkout, 2012.

The Altogether is a memorial to the people who worked in the British manufacturing industry, and the pride and organisation of the labour movements that helped make it something to be proud of. In that sense, it's not a very fashionable book. How it is made, though, is of the moment. The cover is tactile, the layout is manual and the pages are handfolded. The special edition comes with a seven inch disc that plays the lines scripted into the body of the book, an analogue detail that is both archaic and of the moment. Even the typeface Coekin sourced for the book has an industrial feel.

The Altogether is a small but perfectly formed book, the latest in what is becoming an impressive body of published work by Coekin, a memorial to an old England, a veritable blue-collar Jerusalem that is lost but not forgotten.—COLIN PANTALL

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COLIN PANTALL is a UK-based writer, photographer and teacher - he is currently a visiting lecturer in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales. His work has been exhibited in London, Amsterdam, Manchester and Rome and his Sofa Portraits will be published as a handmade book early next year. Further thoughts of Colin Pantall can be found on his blog, which was listed as one of Wired.com’s favourites earlier this year.

Desire Lines by Jan Dirk van Der Burg investigates the human desire to get from point A to point B as soon as possible. By focusing on the methodically organized paved sidewalks and other pedestrian areas, Dirk van Der Burg highlights the small intrusion and grassless paths left by the human footprint. These diagonal paths, created as a shortcut to bypass the grid like sidewalks and streets give both a curious insight into human behavior and the small footprints we tend to leave behind.

Strawberry Snow by Yves Suter is a documentation of the photographer's travels alongside snowboarder Dominik Betschart. The pair embarked on a one-month snowboard journey through central Japan and traveled to Hokkaido and back. Accompanying Suter's photographs are written accounts of their journey that make for an intimate and unique view of the Japanese landscape.

All Publisher Direct titles are available for order through the publisher via a special link within their listing.

See all the Publisher Direct books here.

from the book The Place We Live

A few weeks ago my pal Jonathan Blaustein wrote a "non-review" of Robert Adams' The Place We Live, a retrospective selection of photographs from 1964-2009 on A Photo Editor.  In all of its headiness Jonathan's review made a few poignant and satirical remarks on the state of collecting and possible over-exposure of Adams' work as of recent. I agree, what else is there to really say about his work? With his current travelling exhibition and the ever-growing number of reprints of older titles, those of us paying attention are going to continually rehash and reevaluate the importance of such a prolific voice in photography. But by God, I can't stop picking up The Place We Live, and it's my turn to write for the blog, so here we go.

from the book The Place We Live

One of my top 5 photography books of all time is Summer Nights Walking. The new reprint by Aperture is incredibly gorgeous. I continually pick this book up, and it reminds me of nights walking through the dense neighborhoods of my childhood. This book always sucks me in -- it's dangerous to pick up on a busy day. While not as enticing, The Place We Live brings me back to the full scope of Adams' career. Its beautiful reproduction quality and large size fit well with the elegant and simple design, but elegant and simple is also at the heart of Adams' images.

from the book The Place We Live

 The three-volume set weaves Adams' most well known work together. From the prairies and suburbs of Colorado to the gravel roads of Wyoming and Nebraska, Volume-One provides a sweeping introduction to the photographer's earliest, and in my opinion, best photographs. Volume-Two takes the viewer to the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington,  as well as their inland landscapes of pastures and ghastly depictions of deforestation in the Northwest Forests. Volume-Three provides a visual anthology of Adam's monographs and extensive essays and books on the photographic practice. The final volume also includes essays by Tod Papageorge, Joshua Chuang, Jock Reynolds and John Szarkowski, all of which provide thoughtful accounts of Adams' life and work.

from the book The Place We Live

Back to the subject of collecting, we all collect for different reasons. For me, collecting serves as a reference for both my understanding of the history of the medium as well as a way for me to track the pulse of contemporary trends regarding image making relevant to my own photographic practice. Adams' is someone whom I have followed, been influenced by and keep rediscovering. His photographs inform my broader scope of how social and environmental landscape photography has been shaped and why it continues to change. In my mind, Adams is one of the most important photographers of the last half century, and this book pays a timely tribute to his life and work. 

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2011 by:
Raymond Meeks
Kevin Kunishi
Anne Kelly

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Pontiac, By Gerry Johansson.
Published by Mack, 2011.

Pontiac
Reviewed by Karen Jenkins
______________________________________________
Gerry Johansson Pontiac
Photographs by Gerry Johansson
Mack, 2011. Hardbound. 160 pp., 102 duotone illustrations, 7x9-3/4".

I must leave it to a different expert to say whether the car on the cover of Pontiac, with its solid body and custom wheels, is the namesake of this Michigan town and its now-defunct auto brand. Regardless, it's a funny sort of portrait, proud but behind the times, an uneasy emblem of a beleaguered industry town on the decline. Gerry Johansson has produced six books of photography that focus on specific geographic places from his native Sweden to America. And this spare beige volume from MACK, with its hyper-legible font and immaculately printed photographs certainly starts off like some sort of primer. Its didactic first note is underscored by the photographs' only companion text: a list of demographic facts and figures for Pontiac from the state's housing and development authority. Some are relatively neutral in tone, while others spell out a ten-year, relentless rise in unemployment and poverty. And surely the book contains images of chewed-up parking lots and overgrown yards seemingly inhabited by no one. Yet the collective impact of these photographs defies a narrow meaning or foregone conclusions.

Pontiac, by Gerry Johansson. Published by Mack, 2011.

Pontiac has a lot to do with the idea of architecture as the defining vernacular of a city or town. All the basic forms are here: house, church, school, office building and shopping mall. Johansson's photographs collect the idiosyncrasies and hallmarks of this place – from small cottages with vinyl siding to windowless churches marked by hand painted signs. Johansson also situates each scene precisely in time and space. Over one hundred photographs dated to April 2010 are labeled as to the particular street name or intersection where they were shot and include some sites photographed repeatedly from multiple points of view. There is a compelling push-pull between the specifics of this place and a generalized portrait of a worn-down, small American town. This reminds me of the documentary film, "Los Angeles Plays Itself" which describes how the L.A. cityscape has stood in for all manner of other places in movies filmed there. The specificity of its landmark buildings and vistas are no obstacle for an audience largely from somewhere else and primed to see a story first, projecting its fiction back onto the chosen setting.

Pontiac, by Gerry Johansson. Published by Mack, 2011.

Pontiac, by Gerry Johansson. Published by Mack, 2011.

The narrative potential of Johansson's photographs of Pontiac is slow to emerge and somewhat filmic in its nature. The book's reproductions are small for a monograph, and call for a measured pace in their size and quiet content. Pontiac sometimes feels like a film that lingers on a static image, a disconcerting stance full of the anticipation of movement or action. The trees that appear throughout are major characters, as anthropomorphized sentries and intruders as well as more passive markers of regimented order or gradual neglect. The banal meets the slightly strange where bare flag polls on an abandoned shopping mall roof look like armaments that failed to ward off its closing, but now fortify a cavernous bunker for the few who remain. A playground rocket toy and parking lot lights and wooden crosses feel like beacons or antennae to somewhere else. Pontiac is a worth a careful look, for what it says about stasis and summary and the potential of such places to reveal something new to come.—KAREN JENKINS

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2011 by:
Antone Dolezal
Darius Himes

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KAREN JENKINS earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.