photo-eye | BLOG: December 2014

The Way to the Golden Mountain. By Xiaoxiao Xu.

STRUM & DRANG, 2014.

The Way to the Golden Mountain

Reviewed by Janelle Lynch

The Way to the Golden Mountain
By Xiaoxiao Xu
STURM & DRANG, 2014. 104 pp., 49 color illustrations, 8¾x8½".

Photographer Xiaoxiao Xu was born in the village of Gangtou and raised in the nearby city of Wenzhou. In 1999, when Xu was 15 years old, she and her family moved to The Netherlands. Ten years later, after finishing her studies at Amsterdam’s Fotoacademie, she returned to China for the first time. The Way to the Golden Mountain, her second book, includes images she made during her month-long stay in Wenzhou and those she made four years later during her month-long stay in Gangtou.

The Last Road North by Ben Huff.

Kehrer Verlag, 2015.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Jennifer Schwartz who has selected The Last Road North by Ben Huff published by Kehrer Verlag.

Sudden Flowers. By Eric Gottesman.

Fishbar, 2014.

Sudden Flowers

Reviewed by Adam Bell

Sudden Flowers
By Eric Gottesman
Fishbar, 2014.

In our overly commoditized art world that fetishizes authorship and individual genius, it is often difficult to define a work of collective art. The answer defies the market-centric logic of most contemporary art, and often has more lasting power than any high priced print, painting, or sculpture. Sudden Flowers by Eric Gottesman is a unique book and document that only hints at the larger and more important work it records. Founded in 1999, Sudden Flowers is the name of an artistic collective based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and coordinated by Gottesman for children whose parents have died of AIDS related illness. For almost fifteen years, the collective has created photographs and films that document their lives, imagine their futures, and deal with personal trauma. Gathering together photographs, letters, transcribed text, and stills, Sudden Flowers offers a sampling of the incredible work done by the group. While the book cannot contain the real work done by the collective, the images and text offer a glimpse into the transformative effect the collective has had on the kids’ extraordinary lives.

The Lines
By Edward Ranney

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Melanie McWhorter

"The Lines is a small and very handsome excerpt from Ranney’s geoglyph photographs, 44 black-and-white images from a much larger practice that covers archaeological sites and monuments along the Andean coastline. The images are printed in tritone on paper that was first varnished to ensure that the ink did not soak too far into the paper. The warm matte finish of the pages allows your eyes to rest easily on the work for long periods of time under various light conditions."—From the review by William L. Fox

Fractal State of Being
By Sara Skorgan Teigen

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Sarah Bradley
Christopher J. Johnson
Melanie McWhorter

"For Teigen, the process is about recursion; motifs of hatched lines and tendrils of hair, seaweed and fractal-like natural forms embellish and expand the photographs outwards, repeating across pages, but also on the body depicted in the photographs — marks on the body, marks on the photographs, marks on the page. Tape both holds the images in place and creates another surface and type of mark to play with."—From the review by Sarah Bradley

Cairo Diary. By Peter Bialobrzeski.

The Velvet Cell, 2014.

Cairo Diary

Reviewed by Christopher J. Johnson

Cairo Diary
By Peter Bialobrzeski
The Velvet Cell, 2014. 104 pp., 50 color illustrations, 5¼x8".

“Red, green, blue, yellow/ Red, green, blue, yellow,” begins the CocoRosie song Joseph City; as if entering a city by car or walking through it on foot what we see, people aside, is a style defined by a repetition of architectural taste, regional allegiances and color. Color can define a city in unexpected ways, we often know when we’re looking at a humid, temperate, or arid place based on the colors present. Duller hues in the desert, richer hues on a tropical island; it is likely sun and water that lead to these variables; fabrics that have absorbed more water are deeper and darker, while those which retain none are more subtle and often sun-faded; to this add the fact that a city’s face is always exposed. Ever more than the people that it shelters, a city bolsters the days and nights, the extremes of cold and hot and the sun.

The Home Stage. By Jessica Todd Harper.

Damiani, 2014.

The Home Stage

Reviewed by David Ondrik

The Home Stage
Photographs by Jessica Todd Harper
Damiani, 2014. 112 pp., illustrated throughout, 11x9½".

The Home Stage is a tender book of family photographs that refine the personal style of Jessica Todd Harper’s first book, Interior Exposure. In The Home Stage, the domestic scenes of twenty-somethings have morphed into domestic scenes of newish parents adapting to life with children. The images are so well done that they should engage even those who are not usually seduced by pastoral photographs of charming urchins and glowing parents.

Ernie Button – Glenlivet 232

Photographer’s Showcase artist Ernie Button and his Vanishing Spirits series are in the news — again, and this time science has a response to his observations. Recently, venerable publications such as The New York Times, Scientific American, and The Smithsonian all featured Button’s colorful photographs of whiskey remains along side the research of Dr. Howard A. Stone, Chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering program at Princeton University. Stone, along with his associate Dr. Hyoungsoo Kim, found that the delicately striated plumes in Button’s images are the effect of disparately evaporating water and ethyl alcohol bound to a framework built by a “yet unidentified” polymer — somehow entering the whiskey during the aging process. Follow the source links above of the full story behind whisky’s curious fluid dynamics, and if you are unfamiliar with Vanishing Spirits read photo-eye's 2013 interview with Ernie Button about the project. In celebration of the research publication, photo-eye is pleased to publish 15 brand new images from the Vanishing Spirits portfolio. In light of Dr. Stone's findings we reached out to Ernie Button for his feelings on the research, its publicity, and of course, making pictures.

Let us now Praise Infamous Men by Brad Feuerhelm.

Paralaxe Editions, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Josef Chladek who has selected Let us now Praise Infamous Men by Brad Feuerhelm published by Paralaxe Editions.

Metamorphosis. Meatpacking District 1985 + 2013. By Brian Rose.
Golden Section Publishers, 2014.

Metamorphosis. Meatpacking District 1985 + 2013
Reviewed by Karen Jenkins

Metamorphosis. Meatpacking District 1985 + 2013
By Brian Rose
Golden Section Publishers, 2014. 56 pp., 50 color illustrations, 9¼x11½".

In 1985, Brian Rose wandered around New York’s Meatpacking District in search of a new subject, bringing little expectation or preconceptions of what this place might offer him. At that time, it was not a part of the city that invited the casual visitor or passerby. For much of its history, this section of Lower Manhattan was home only to those laboring in the production of meat, all hooks and hangars, smells and stains. Rose’s photographs from 1985 show us the bones of all that in cityscapes and factory facades with their graffiti tags and faded signs, and an abandoned elevated rail line, set against winter’s dull sky and dirty snow. But these negatives were tucked away, of little consequence and largely unexamined until Rose pulled them out again in 2012, prompted by their unassuming documentation to return to the Meatpacking District to look again. He may have felt as much a trespasser in an alien realm, but in 2013, this place was no one’s best kept secret; now a high-end destination with a High Line vantage point.

19.06_26.08.1945
By Andrea Botto

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Eric Miles
"Andrea Botto produced this book in memory of the journey his grandfather made, travelling from Northern Germany back to Tuscany after his release from Nazi captivity at the end of World War II. As Andrea states, the book is dedicated to all the Italian Military Internees who shared this terrible experience with his grandfather. By interweaving images from the internet, relating to the dates and places of the journey, with astonishingly accurate reproductions of his grandfather documents and letters, the book invites the reader to follow a personal path along the journey rather than outlining a sequential narrative."—Picked as Book of the Week by Nicoló Degiorgis

The Day the Dam Collapses
Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:

Sarah Bradley
Anne Kelly

"Oh well. If the dam bursting on our heads is inevitable, we might as well make some photographs while waiting for it. Watanabe's been busy as usual doing just that, and The Day The Dam Collapses collects some of his recent work. Watanabe has switched in recent years from black and white to color, and he's given up film for digital, at least for this book. But the photographic style he developed in the mid 1990s has remained consistently his own. That's the contemplative streak I mentioned earlier. It's always been in his photos, and it's in this project too."—From the review by Blake Andrews

On a Wet Bough. By Keliy Anderson-Staley.

Waltz Books, 2014.

On a Wet Bough

Reviewed by David Ondrik

On a Wet Bough
Photographs by Keliy Anderson-Staley
Waltz Books, 2014. 144 pp., 85 duotone illustrations, 11x14".

On a Wet Bough is a collection of Keliy Anderson-Staley’s black and white portraits. The eighty four sitters reflect the tremendous diversity of humanity — young, old, gay, white, black, brown, big nosed, pierced, disheveled, straight, coifed, slick — it’s all here in crisp detail. Each portrait is reproduced at about 8”x10”, except for the few group portraits, horizontal images scaled to fit the page. There’s no information about the physical images themselves, so it’s not clear if we’re looking at one-to-one reproductions or not.

Russian Interiors. By Andy Rocchelli.

Cesura Publishing, 2014.

Russian Interiors

Reviewed by Colin Pantall

Russian Interiors
By Andy Rocchelli
Cesura Publish, Pianello Val Tidone, Italy, 2014. 125 pp., 70 color offset illustrations, printed in Italy by Grafiche Antiga., 6¼x8½".

Andy Rocchelli died in 2014, killed while covering the conflict in Ukraine. Before that happened he’d worked in Russia. On his days off from doing serious work, he photographed single women in their apartments. It was a way of making money and provided relief from the stresses of attempting to make it in the world of hard-core photojournalism.

TDTDC 16 (Swallowtail Butterfly), 2009 — Hiroshi Watanabe

We are thrilled to have a selection of images from Hiroshi Watanabe’s series The Day the Dam Collapses currently on exhibit in the Bookstore + Project Space through February 14th. All 21 exhibition images can be viewed online in a new online portfolio on Watanabe’s photo-eye Gallery page.

People of the Twenty-First Century. By Hans Eijkelboom.

Phaidon, 2014.

People of the Twenty-First Century

Reviewed by Christopher J. Johnson

People of the Twenty-First Century
Photographs by Hans Eijkelboom
Phaidon, London, 2014. 512 pp., 6000 illustrations, 8½x6¾".

We like to believe that we’re making choices. Not just in the larger things like deciding to go to college, get married, be an asshole, or have kids, but in everything: what we take home with us from the grocery store, the department store or optometrist’s. That these things, especially the latter ones, define us by building up our external character and making up not so much what we are to ourselves, but who we are to others. “Tom likes chocolate,” “Susan is a Mets fan,” “Jasmine’s favorite color is blue.” These facts are like decals that we peel off of commercialism and apply to ourselves.

People of the Twenty-First Century shows us that the idea of these little choice is both true and false. Eijkelboom captures the ghost of our fashions, page after page, decades of the stereotypical unfortunates who, having been invited to the same party, arrive in the same gown so to speak and must confront one another in the pages of this book. But why does that happen at all? How is it possible?

El Porqué De Las Naranjas. By Ricardo Cases.

MACK, 2014.

We’re all off to Sunny Spain

A review by Colin Pantall

El Porqué De Las Naranjas
By Ricardo Cases
MACK, 2014. 128 pp., 67 color illustrations, 5¾x7¼".

A few years back, Spanish photographer Ricardo Cases was going through a difficult time. His mother and a best friend had died and Cases had, in his own words, become “a monster.” To get over his grief, anger and pain, he moved to the Spanish town of Valencia and started on a new photographic project, El Porqué de las Naranja, now available in book form courtesy of MACK.

Dodo
By Adam Broomberg + Oliver Chanarin

$55 — Purchase Book

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Cristina de Middel

"The project is quite cryptic (starting with the title) and it forces you to study and understand the specific historical anecdote that unchained the brains of the artist duo of the moment. I didn't have the chance to visit the exhibition at the Jumex Museum in Mexico but the book for sure conveys the multi-layered and brainy approach to this pseudo-archaeological expedition in a very intelligent way and with the perfect dose of design. I just wish all exhibition catalogues were as brilliant as this one."—Cristina de Middel

Die Mauer ist Weg!
Text and photographs by Mark Power

$60 Signed — Purchase Book

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Manik Katyal
Markus Schaden

"On the spot. A historic moment in history and special for Germans like me who were sitting faithless (breathless?) in front of the TV screen. The night of the Berlin Wall Fall at the checkpoint Bornholmer Strasse. We’ve seen only a small amount of footage from Bornholmer Strasse, but Mark Power was there too! Shooting pictures. 25 years ago he made a fantastic self made book, a tribute to that night of nights. Incredibly touching. And a visually impressive statement with his camera. Thank you Mark! Fantastic."—Markus Schaden

It is with great pleasure that we present to you photo-eye’s Best Books of 2014.

For the past six years, we gear up for Best Books by making the difficult decision of selecting contributors. We pick from a long list of bibliophiles to find the right mix of personalities and tastes and then we invite and wait. Weeks later, the eagerly anticipated lists of best books picks start to roll into our inboxes. Despite our finest attempts throughout the year to keep up on all the great photobooks out there, we inevitably discover an abundance books we’ve missed, and begin the process of searching for images and information on every title. It’s a ton of work, but as die-hard photobook lovers, we’re happy to do it, and we’re always excited to share the list with equally enthused readers.

The Winners

By Rafal Milach

Gost

The Winners is the kind of book you feel you need to have in your library and I badly wanted to have in my hands. It not only collects a series of intriguing, intelligent, awkwardly beautiful portraits of the most outlandish kind of Belarusian winners, but also the clever project concept that deserved a book indeed; in this case, a multi layer narrative with a sleek but clever design approach.

Out West

By Kyler Zeleny

The Velvet Cell

My fascination with the mundane: Zeleny, a visual sociologist, documents the fading past and uncertain future of the rural Canadian West. Nothing much happens in any of these pictures and maybe that’s the point. Out West is a sad, beautiful portrait of the small communities that speckle this landscape and the remnants of the people who still inhabit the place. With smart essays by Zeleny, Craig Campbell, and Ginger Strand.

Chewing Gum and Chocolate

By Shomei Tomatsu

Aperture

A long overdue look back at post-war Japan through the eyes of a monochrome master, this work fertilized the field for much that grew later.

Tsugaru

By Masako Tomiya

Hakkoda

I first saw this book at Obscura Photo Festival in Malaysia this year; it’s rare for me to be so taken with a book from the get-go. The purity and simplicity of the photographer’s vision is astounding. The quality of the paper and black-and-white printing is equally fantastic. Tsugaru is the place where Tomiya was born and grew up — and the journey of the book through spring-summer-autumn-winter and spring once more provides a peaceful and melancholic meditation on place, memory and growing up.

8 Women

By Collier Schorr

MACK

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