photo-eye | BLOG: November 2014

We are happy to present our 2014 Photobook Gift Guide featuring a broad selection of titles to delight a variety of tastes, ages and interests, and make photobook lovers out of anyone on your shopping list. Each day through Monday we'll feature a new selection of five titles in a range of genres, styles and prices, all of which are in stock or arriving soon. Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

And if nothing on these lists seems quite right, we also offer gift certificates in any amount.

We are happy to present our 2014 Photobook Gift Guide featuring a broad selection of titles to delight a variety of tastes, ages and interests, and make photobook lovers out of anyone on your shopping list. Each day through Monday we'll feature a new selection of five titles in a range of genres, styles and prices, all of which are in stock or arriving soon. Read Part 1.

And if nothing seems quite right, we also offer gift certificates in any amount.

We are happy to present our 2014 Photobook Gift Guide featuring a broad selection of titles to delight a variety of tastes, ages and interests, and make photobook lovers out of anyone on your shopping list. Each day through Monday we'll feature a new selection of five titles in a range of genres, styles and prices, all of which are in stock or arriving soon.

And if nothing on these lists seems quite right, we also offer gift certificates in any amount.

24 HOUR SALE ON FRIDAY, NOV. 28

20% off ALL IN STOCK BOOKS

INCLUDING signed, sale and limited edition books*

Free matting & domestic shipping on ALL PRINT SALES**

Use code BLACKFRIDAY in the Special Instructions field

when finalizing your order.
Discount will be applied when your payment is processed.

An Everchanging Monument. By Christina Capetillo.

Aristo Publishing, 2012.

An Everchanging Monument

Reviewed by Alexandra Huddleston

An Everchanging Monument: A photographic narrative about The Musical Gardens by Carl Theodor Sørensen
By Christina Capetillo
Aristo Publishing, 2012. 80 pp., 65 black & white illustrations, 11¼x11".

The seasonal narrative in Christina Capetillo's An Everchanging Monument begins in winter when snow-covered ground and grey skies allow the barren hedges to form intricate, lacy silhouettes that emphasize the rigid, geometric landscaping. We barely notice that the photographs are in black and white until late spring brings forth a harsher sunlight and dandelions scatter across the carefully manicured lawns. The hedges and lawns photographed are The Musical Gardens by renowned Danish modernist landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen.

A Perpetual Season. By Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine.

MACK, 2014.

A Perpetual Season

Reviewed by Adam Bell

A Perpetual Season
By Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine
MACK, 2014. 80 pp., 39 color illustrations, 6¾x8¾".

There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought. - F. Kafka (The Castle)

Picture a city, like most cities, but there is no exit. Concrete buildings extend upwards and out, they wrap around corners and form ornate patterns where they meet. Vines creep up the walls and even the flowers sag wearily in the morning. Walking down the street, it is easy to get confused. Each building looks like the next. Each corner and doorway forms its own elaborate pattern. The dark corridors and canyon-like streets don’t allow much light, and the day hovers at the threshold of night. With few markers or monuments, it’s easy to move in circles until you’re exhausted or outraged. Tightly edited and smartly designed, Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine’s A Perpetual Season is a psychological short story that leads us through this bleak city. Intimate, yet claustrophobic, order seems to be all around, but the faces of the city’s inhabitants are marked by confusion and bewilderment. Trapped in a labyrinth of their own making, they are left circling and searching.

Animal Imago by Lucia Nimcova.

sittcomm.sk / see photo fund, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from photo curator Hester Keijser who has selected Animal Imago by Lucia Nimcova published by sittcomm.sk / see photo fund.

Isla. By Ernesto Bazan. BazanPhotos Publishing, 2014.

Isla

Reviewed by Tom Leininger

Isla
By Ernesto Bazan
BazanPhotos Publishing, 2014. 200 pp., tritone illustrations, 16¾x10".

Isla overflows from your lap; the cinematic black and white panoramic photographs made by Ernesto Bazan in Cuba envelope you. Multilayered compositions textured in film grain are a reminder of the raw storytelling potential of photography. The book, Bazan’s third and final in his Cuba trilogy, tells a hopeful yet mournful tale.

Shadows and highlights create a roadmap for how each image is meant to be read. The raw pictures are a throwback to the idea of the photographer as an interpreter. Bazan’s aesthetic can be a bit heavy handed in places, but it is refreshing to see images that look this way. Seeing the blacks printed down and the highlights bleached or dodged up in places reminds me of work from the 70s and 80s, Bazan’s era. This is his vision, in all of its glorious roughness. A vision he embraces to tell his story.

East or West: A Walking Journal Along Shikoku’s 88 Temple Pilgrimage
by Alexandra Huddleston. Kyoudai Press, 2014.

Alexandra Huddleston recently released her third self-published book titled East or West: A Walking Journal Along Shikoku’s 88 Temple Pilgrimage. This paper-wrapped book features a carefully edited selection of her personal journal entries and photographs from an 800-mile pilgrimage across Japan. This book follows 333 Saints: A Life of Scholarship in Timbuktu, a project documenting the ancient tradition of Islamic scholarship in Africa, and a collaborative piece Lost Things with images by the photographer and poems by her brother Robert Huddleston. In this interview, we focus on Huddleston’s three successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns that financed the publications, her decision to make East or West a modest publication and the editing and design choices that Huddleston faced with 333 Saints after the conflict in Mali lead to the destruction of some of the same scholarly texts that she photographed.—Melanie McWhorter

The Night Climbers of Cambridge.
By Thomas Maileander. AMC Books, 2014.

The Night Climbers of Cambridge

Reviewed by Sarah Bradley

The Night Climbers of Cambridge
By Thomas Maileander
AMC Books, 2014. 88 pp., 64 tritone illustrations and 14 inserts, 10x13¼".

The internet has made many of us aware of the furtive exploits of urban climbers; we’ve all seen those vertigo-inducing videos shot from the tops of the scaffolding of unfinished skyscrapers, right? (If not, I recommend this one.) As evidenced by a new book from Archive of Modern Conflict, this type of activity has been going on for a while. The Night Climbers of Cambridge is a collection of nocturnal images made in the 1930s of men scaling the buildings of Cambridge University — a photographic archive acquired by artist/photographer Thomas Mailaender. The book borrows its title from the volume for which these images were made, first published in 1937, which served as guide to both the art of night climbing and the buildings themselves. The original book has been reprinted several times, each iteration becoming a coveted oddity, leading someone to decide that it’s time for it to resurface. The most recent reprint was in 2013. For those interested, it’s a fun read. Written under the pseudonym Whipplesnaith, it’s composed in an easy helpful manner, filled with precise instructions guiding the would-be climber handhold to foothold, punctuated with a dry, at times melancholy, humor. You’ll find most of the images in the AMC book in the original, but in Whipplesnaith’s document, they are merely photographic examples. Reproduced full bleed in the pages of the AMC book, the photographs are given room to exist on their own, revealing a distinct quality.

Monument Valley, 2014 — Mitch Dobowner

We are thrilled to announce that an exhibition of photographs by Mitch Dobrowner, Still Earth | Storms, opens this Friday at photo-eye Gallery. This exhibition debuts a selection of new landscapes recently made in Canyonlands National Park and a selection of new storm images. The new works from Canyonlands depict a still, vast and isolated — almost alien — landscape, with the same power as his turbulent storm-scapes. In anticipation of Dobrowner’s visit to Santa Fe, I've asked him about the inspiration behind his new images. We hope to see you at the artist reception, this Friday night from 5-7 pm. —Anne Kelly

Shooting Space edited by Elias Redstone.

Phaidon, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from senior editor of The Monacelli Press Alan Rapp who has selected Shooting Space edited by Elias Redstone published by Phaidon.

North Philadelphia. By Daniel Traub.

Kehrer Verlag, 2014.

North Philadelphia

Reviewed by Adam Bell

North Philadelphia
By Daniel Traub
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2014. 124 pp., 50 color illustrations, 11¾x9½".

Philadelphia is an underrated city. Eclipsed by its neighbors to the north and south, New York and Washington, D.C, Philadelphia is often unjustly dismissed. Having grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I’ve always loved the city and regard its diverse conglomerate of neighborhoods with great affection. For as long as I lived in the area, from the late 70s to late 90s, North Philadelphia was best known for its crime and poverty, a stereotype that held some truth, but also masked its complex social, cultural, and economic diversity and history. Like many US cities, Philadelphia is deeply segregated, and economic decline, which began in the 50s and picked up greatly in the 70s and 80s, hit the largely African-American and Hispanic community of North Philadelphia especially hard. Like any large urban area, North Philadelphia defies pat stereotypes and demands closer scrutiny. Weaving together multiple subjects — rehabilitated and abandoned lots, portraits, Chinese restaurants, stately churches, and neglected buildings — Daniel Traub’s North Philadelphia is not only a portrait of this often misunderstood neighborhood, but it is also a deeply personal exploration of a community Traub has long known and loved.

photo-eye's Nudes/Human Form Newsletter features books that explore the human form in a variety of ways. Past editions can be found here.

Polaroids (Second Edition)
By Carlo Mollino

"Sometime around 1960, Carlo Mollino began to seek out women-mostly dancers-in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totaled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publically shown, until the acclaimed first edition of this volume was published by James Crump in 2002."

Purchase Book or Read More

Doll House, 2014 and Landspout, 2014 -- Mitch Dobrowner

Opening Friday, November 21st from 5-7pm

photo-eye Gallery, 541 S. Guadalupe St, Santa Fe
Exhibition runs through January 10th, 2015

Sight Seeing. By Paul McDonough.

Sasha Wolf Gallery, 2014.

Sight Seeing

Reviewed by Blake Andrews

Sight Seeing
By Paul McDonough
Sasha Wolf Gallery, 2014. 48 pp., 20 duotone illustrations, 9¾x8¼".

You can take the street photographer out of the city, but can you take the city out of the street photographer?

That's the question posed by Paul McDonough's recent book Sight Seeing. To date McDonough's reputation has rested largely on urban work. His classic black and white candids of 1970s New York pedestrians fall firmly in the street photography tradition. Many of these were collected in 2010's knockout monograph New York Photographs 1968-1978, which established him somewhat belatedly as a leading practitioner of the craft.

Blisner, Il. By Daniel Shea.

fourteen-nineteen, 2014.

Turning the pages of Daniel Shea’s Blisner, Il, I think about the way a curve in a road is calculated so we can turn the wheel once and stay on course, the way every building is engineered to support itself. I think about how I take these things for granted.

Blisner, Il is a subtly dramatic book set in Illinois. Shea uses photographs from small towns to story a fictional small town that uses its history as a lifeline, creating a myth of itself and the industry that once made it. The photographs, often juxtaposed or narratively sequenced, portray the kind of mundane details that we ignore in the places we live, and then look back on with nostalgia: statues, objects, insects, birds, and buildings; people pictured in murals, or occasionally living, pausing and looking off somewhere.

If one person believes in a god that no one else believes in, they are usually crazy. If a hundred people believe in that god, they are a cult. If a million people believe in that god, they have a religion. Whether or not the this small town is real, whether or not it is holy, I think this is a book worth believing in.

Below is a recent conversation between Shea and I that I recorded and transcribed, part of an ongoing dialogue that we started in 2010.—Lucas Foglia

The Epilogue by Laia Abril

Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from photographer and publisher Baptiste Lignel who has selected The Epilogue by Laia Abril from Dewi Lewi Publishing. Lignel also asked Abril to make a statement on the creation of the book and project.

Photoshow. Edited by Alessandra Mauro.

Constrasto, 2014.

Photoshow

Reviewed by Colin Pantall

Photoshow
Edited by Alessandra Mauro
Contrasto, 2014. 272 pp., illustrated, 8x10½".

Since the publication of Fotografia Publica in 2000, there have been a mass of books about photobooks. The Parr and Badger series are the most notable but there have been individual books on the Dutch, German, Swiss, South American and Spanish photobooks to name but a few.

But what about the exhibition? You can find little snippets here and there on the best known exhibitions of the photographic age, but there seems to be no publication dedicated solely to the fabrication and exhibiting of photography.

Chris McCaw,Sunburned GSP #691 (Anza Borrego), 2013

Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP #687 (Pacific Ocean), 2013

Materials have meaning. This axiom has a long and storied history among photographers, and has prompted countless discussions about the implications of paper type, printer brand, or chemical developer upon image outcome and overall viewer perception. I myself have clear memories from my own photographic education justifying paper and developer combinations to instructors while dissecting the subtle nuances of print tone and patina amidst classmates. This week, however, I’d like to showcase two Gallery artists whose implement of photographic materials transcends those more common usages. Chris McCaw and David Emitt Adams forge robust and sculptural photographs with entirely unique results.

Perhaps photographer Chris McCaw doesn’t need an introduction. His ongoing project Sunburn has caught fire in recent years, and McCaw’s work exhibits internationally, including: the Getty museum in LA, the Somerset House Trust in London, and right here at photo-eye Gallery in the 2012 exhibition Solar. Using giant homemade large format cameras, McCaw exposes antique and obsolete silver gelatin enlarging paper to direct sunlight for up to twenty-four hours. The effect is incredible. Over the duration of the extended exposure the paper solarizes, forming a visual positive, and the sun literally burns a hole in its jagged arching wake. These scenes are a dark and primordial expression of time, entropy, and the cyclical process of creation and destruction. Currently photo-eye Gallery has five of these one of a kind images on hand.

Fractal State of Being. By Sara Skorgan Teigen.

Journal Publishers, 2014.

Fractal State of Being

Reviewed by Sarah Bradley

Fractal State of Being
By Sara Skorgan Teigen.
Journal Publishers, 2014. 48 pp., 55 color illustrations, 8¼x11½".

About ten years ago I was given one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received. I’d spent a lot of time with that friend over the previous year, us sitting across tables from each other, him doodling in his small moleskine, me jotting illegibly in mine. I’d peer across cups of coffee and dirty plates to see what he was drawing in that little sketchbook; my admiration was often received with an eye roll.

Several months after my birthday he sat across from me again, familiarly consumed in that black book, this time drawing with silver pen on the cover. He answered me, half-distracted as usual, occasionally looking up to laugh or make a statement, and when he was finished, he blew on the ink to dry it and handed me the book. “Happy Birthday,” he said. On the spine he’d written “For Sarah,” and on the endpaper above a cartoon drawing of himself it said, “Because I’ve owed you some shitting drawings for a long time.”

Carpoolers #24, Carpoolers #37 and Carpoolers #40 — Alejandro Cartagena

We are thrilled to have a selection of images from Alejandro Cartagena's Carpoolers series hanging in the photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space in Santa Fe with an opening Friday November 7th from 5-7pm. The work is also being released in an online portfolio on the Photographer's Showcase, which can be viewed here.

Almost There by Aleix Plademunt

MACK, 2013.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from photographer Donald Weber who has selected Almost There by Aleix Plademunt published by MACK.

Somewhere Between War and Peace. By James Hill.

Kehrer Verlag, 2014.

Somewhere Between War and Peace

Reviewed by Tom Leininger

Somewhere Between War and Peace
Photographs by James Hill
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2014. 160 pp., 60 color and black & white illustrations, 6¼x9".

Truth hits you in the face before you ever see an image in James Hill’s book Somewhere Between War and Peace. Hill, a freelance photojournalist since the 1990s, has created a book where he writes about the memories and experiences associated with his pictures. For him and the reader, this can be an unsettling process; after recording scenes of tragedy, violence and pain, darkness has crept into his psyche. The book reads like the meditation of a man looking back at his life, recounting the joys and agonies of his chosen profession.

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