photo-eye | BLOG: June 2016

Horizon Avenue. By Aaron Stern. 205-A, 2016.

Horizon Avenue

Reviewed by Christopher J Johnson

Horizon Avenue: San Francisco and other places
Photographs by Aaron Stern. Poetry by Aaron Stern and David Wagoner.
205-A, New York, USA, 2016. 66 pp., 39 four-color illustrations, 5½x8½".

The lyrical photobook, by which I mean those photobooks whose main content is something elucidated through sequence and not necessarily something immediate, is a difficult subject to address. Staples of the lyrically sequenced photobook are: A.) a lack of adroit, in-your-face single images that contain individualized meaning, B.) no or minimalized text, and C.) a progression of story, idea or thought presented through the sequence of the images. Outside of these three central ideas we see a wide range of subject matter and, of course, effectiveness of the methods used.

Magda Biernat's Adrift installed at photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space

Magda Biernat's Adrift, currently installed at photo-eye's Bookstore + Project Space, was recently awarded Center's 2016 Director's Choice Award. Adrift is Biernat's commentary on global climate change as witnessed in the areas most affected: the earth's polar regions. Photographed throughout 2013, Adrift pairs Alaskan Inupiat hunting cabins along side Antarctic icebergs in compelling color diptychs. Drawing on her experience photographing architecture, Biernat's images are precise, clean, and even, giving the icebergs and fishing huts the same visual weight within the frame despite their massive difference in scale. Gallery Associate Lucas Shaffer interviewed Biernat about her inspiration for Adrift, what it took to make the images, and her ultimate goals for the project.

The Encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel.
By Kurt Caviezel. Rorhof, 2015.

Christopher J Johnson selects The Encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel by Kurt Caviezel from Rorhof as Book of the Week.

"The Encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel is composed of an unbelievable number of images gathered from 15,000 publicly streaming webcams across the globe. It compiles people kissing, birds napping, solitary clouds, bus stops, cafe tables seen top down and Coke advertisements; its main subject matter is those situations, behaviors, locations, natural phenomena and encounters that are globally universal.

The Castle. By Federico Clavarino. Dalpine, 2016.

The Castle

Reviewed by Adam Bell

The Castle
Photographs by Federico Clavarino
Dalpine, Madrid, Spain, 2016. 160 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 8¼x11¾".

Conceived in the aftermath of Word War II, the European Union is in a precarious state. The UK tragically voted for the Brexit, the economic state of various member states remains in peril, and the rise of divisive policies and rhetoric threatens to undo the goodwill that has held the EU together for years. Visualizing the elusive bonds that hold any group of people together as a nation is always a challenge, but a loose affiliation of nations is even more challenging. Traditional symbols of nationalism no longer suffice and what bonds do exist are even less tangible. Although infused with doubt and paranoia, Federico Clavarino’s The Castle offers a cautiously optimistic assessment of Europe in the early 21st century. Over the course of the book’s four chapters, Clavarino points at the tragic roots that inspired the formation of the EU and attempts to visualize the illusory and often alienating bureaucracy that holds it together. Filled with vague iconography of power, dissolution, separation, and tension, The Castle does not offer easy solutions or glib propaganda about Europe and its fate in the 21st century. Like the castle in Kakfa’s famous novel of the same name, Clavarino’s castle rules with inscrutable authority; we live at its mercy. How we choose move forward is up to us.

PRE-ORDERS

Scandalous
Photographs by Daido Moriyama

Limited Edition available to order!

Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies.

The book contains Moriyama's own selection of 'visually scandalous' images including unreleased works, taken mainly from the Accident series made in the late 1960s, and entirely silkscreen printed for this edition.

photo-eye is taking pre-orders for Limited Edition copies of Scandalous. If our supplier runs out, orders will be fulfilled in the order in which they are received. The cutoff time for ordering in our shipment is Tuesday, June 28th at 12:00 PM MDT.

Pre-order Limited Edition copies of Scandalous or read more

Road to Factory with Zebra, 2014 – © Nick Brandt

On Friday June 10th photo-eye Gallery was thrilled to open our newest exhibition Inherit the Dust by Nick Brandt. As we outlined in our series introduction, Brandt's latest body of work is a compelling and emotional call-to-action regarding conservation efforts to curb rampant urban sprawl and loss of natural habitat across Africa. Photographed in East Africa, Brandt erects oversized panels of his iconic animal portraits on location at quarries, garbage dumps, and urban developments, effectively transforming the animals to mere ghosts in the landscape. Gallery Associate Lucas Shaffer spoke with Brandt to find out more about the artist's activism, his desired outcomes for the project, and what it took to realize his vision. Inherit the Dust is on view at photo-eye Gallery through July 23rd, 2016.

On A Good Day. By Al Vandenberg. Stanley/Barker, 2016.

Sarah Bradley selects On A Good Day by Al Vandenberg from Stanley/Barker as Book of the Week.

End. By Eammon Doyle. D1, 2016.

End.

Reviewed by Colin Pantall

End.
Photographs by Eamonn Doyle
D1, Dublin, Ireland, 2016. In English. 140pp pp., 293 illustrations, 19¾x28".

Watch Hitchcock’s Vertigo and you quickly understand Saul Bass’s belief that it’s important that the film starts with the titles, that they have a message that goes beyond the merely functional or decorative.

It’s the same with photobooks. In a good photobook, the book should start with the title. And everything that is in that book, the text, the images, the cover, the end pages, should serve the message of the book as a whole. That doesn’t often happen, but in an ideal world, in an ideal book, it should.

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Hong Kong Rubber Boots and Shoes
Photographs by Michael Wolf

Whether hung up to dry, propped between pipes and walls, neatly arranged in rows, tucked into nooks, or upside-down on poles, this mundane and often grubby type of work footwear also comes in all kinds of colours and sizes. As if patiently awaiting the next opportunity to perform their function, when their user pulls them on again and goes about cleaning fish, cooking food, or sweeping gutters, the boots express unspoken urban narratives of their own.

photo-eye is taking pre-orders for SIGNED copies of Hong Kong Rubber Boots and Shoes. If our supplier runs out, orders will be fulfilled in the order in which they are received. The cutoff time for ordering is Tuesday, June 21st at noon MDT.

Purchase SIGNED copies of Hong Kong Rubber Boots And Shoes or read more

Libyan Sugar. By Michael Christopher Brown.
Twin Palms Publishers, 2016.

Forrest Soper selects Libyan Sugar by Michael Christopher Brown from Twin Palms Publishers as Book of the Week.

"In Libyan Sugar, Michael Christopher Brown has created a body of work, unlike anything I have ever seen before. Shot almost exclusively on a mobile phone, the images in this book document the Libyan Revolution in 2011 and the photographer’s experiences in two separate trips to the country. Alongside the imagery, text, predominantly in the form of electronic messages from the photographer’s family, friends, and colleagues, provides insight into the life and mind of Michael Christopher Brown. The result transforms this book from a mere document of a time and place into an incredibly personal journey as a photographer experiences a war zone.

The Swimming Pool. By Deanna Templeton. Um Yeah Arts, 2016.

Deanna and Ed Templeton do nearly everything together, often photographing in the same locations, though photographically their voices are unique. Deanna Templeton’s voice has perhaps never been clearer than in her most recent monograph from Um Yeah Press titled The Swimming Pool. Made over the course of 8 years simultaneously with projects like Scratch My Name on Your Arm, Templeton captures the beauty of bodies. Featuring both men and women, shot in color and black and white and on a variety of film stocks, Templeton approached the subject from a true place of exploration, creating an environment around her backyard pool conducive to experimentation. As a result, her subjects notably exude confidence and a sense of freedom as they glide below the shimmering surface of the water, allowing Templeton to considering the expression of the human form and the particular qualities of water for reflection and distortion.

The results are stunning. photo-eye Bookstore Manager Christopher J Johnson describes the book as a “quiet meditation similar to the act of swimming” and being alone underwater. Christopher J Johnson talked to Templeton about making The Swimming Pool, her current projects and the benefits of taking your time with your art.

Mississippi History. By Maude Schuyler Clay. Steidl, 2015.

Mississippi History

Reviewed by George Slade

Mississippi History
Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay. Foreword by Richard Ford.
Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2015. 240 pp., 110 illustrations, 9¾x14½".

When I first saw this book, some months ago, it stuck a barb in my mind; I’m still trying to work out that little pricker. Life is like that, though. Certain things attach and won’t let go.

Quarry with Lion, 2014 – © Nick Brandt

Nick Brandt has been making images in East Africa for more than 15 years. In that time the British-born, California-based artist has become a conservation activist for the continent, seeking to bring awareness of the massive changes caused by accelerated urban expansion and industrialization. His latest series, Inherit the Dust, is the artist's most dynamic, emotional, and important work to date. photo-eye Gallery is proud to feature this work in an exhibition opening Friday June 10th and continuing through July 23rd, 2016.

Matatabi. By Koji Onaka. Super Labo, 2012.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Christian Michael Filardo who has selected Matatabi by Koji Onaka from Super Labo.

"In Koji Onaka’s Matatabi, the viewer is bathed in a photographic silence unlike any other. Onaka has somehow managed to isolate himself through transience and illustrates this ghostly feeling through his camera. Figures are frozen in the distance, vehicles sit empty in the glow of the sun, and buildings feel like relics untouched by time.

When I look at Onaka’s photographs I can’t tell if he is leaving or staying, but I can tell that his photographs are uniquely his own. Onaka is comfortable being alone and knows how to step back and take the right photograph. The distance Onaka allows between camera and subject provide the viewer with a cinematic look into life in rural Japan.

One could easily confuse this work as bleak, sad, and empty. However, that would be a mistake. To me Onaka’s work in Matatabi is patient, quiet, and thoughtful. His use of color and composition creates a feeling of stability; comfortable silence as embodied by wooden houses on a hillside, yellowed grass at sunset, and the shadows of electric lines at midday. Rather than wallow in nostalgia, Matatabi serves as a guide to those seeking to learn the value of waiting. It’s the type of book one can look at over and over again, the type of book where each individual image has a story to tell, the type of book that reminds us that life isn’t a sprint but a marathon."—Christian Michael Filardo

Purchase Book

Matatabi. By Koji Onaka. Super Labo, 2012.

Christian Michael Filardo is a photographer and composer living and working in Santa Fe, NM. Filardo has worked for VICE Magazine, Believer Magazine, the Phoenix New Times, and is the shipping manager at photo-eye Bookstore. He is a recent recipient of an honorarium in new music from Oberlin College’s Modern Music Guild. Filardo’s first book, Say My Last Name Softly, a collaboration with Marie Claire Bryant, was released in April 2016 on Holy Page Records.

See more Book of the Week picks

Unassisted Readymade. By John Stezaker.
JRP | Ringier, 2016.

Unassisted Readymade

Reviewed by Adam Bell

Unassisted Readymade
Photographs by John Stezaker. Text by David Campany. Edited by Jürg Trösch, Lionel Bovier, and Markus Bosshard.
JRP | Ringier, Zürich, Switzerland, 2016. 132 pp., 79 color illustrations, 9½x13½".

Sometimes all it takes is one cut. Here or there. Other times, the most radical gesture is simply moving something from one place to another, a shift in context. For over forty-years, Stezaker has mined cinema’s golden era for strange and forgotten images, cutting and reworking them to unlock their powers. Departing from the more aggressively cut or collaged images of his best-known work, the appropriated images found in John Stezaker’s Unassisted Readymade are no less disorienting or uncanny in their straight-forward presentation. Brought forth from the shadows, the displaced, cut, stained, and rotated images in Unassisted Readymade have been given new life. With each cut and intervention, Stezaker has opened up a space and allowed us to step in, making something new or revealing what’s always been there.

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Saudek
Photographs by Jan Saudek

Jan Saudek is the most famous living Czech photographer, and simultaneously the most provocative. He is worshipped and condemned, celebrated and rejected, honoured and execrated. He absorbs a viewer with a combination of tenderness and violence, traditionalism and extravagance, lyricism and irony, romance and obscenity.

Magda Biernat: ADRIFT

Artist Reception and Book Signing

June 3rd 5-7pm

photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space
376-A Garcia St, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Exhibition continues through September 3rd

photo-eye Bookstore Project Space presents Magda Biernat’s Adrift. Recipient of CENTER’s 2016 Director’s Choice award, this body of work is a personal commentary on the parallel effects of global climate change at opposite ends of the Earth.

Adrift is a series that uses visual language as a means of polar comparison. Biernat pairs photographs of Antarctic icebergs and empty Iñupiat Eskimo hunting huts, whose shapes and volumes echo one another. The juror Louise Clements, Artistic Director of QUAD & FORMAT festivals writes "Magda Biernat's award winning series Adrift is concerned with the changes in the Polar ice, focused on the Arctic and Antarctic. In both of these environments the culture, land, architecture and geography is changing rapidly. By combining stunning images that study icebergs and Eskimo hunting structures she draws our attention to the effects of climate change and its impact on cultural identity.”

Biernat will be in attendance at the opening reception signing copies of her beautiful book of this series Adrift.

For more information on Biernat's work and to purchase prints, please contact Christopher J Johnson, Book Division Manager, at 505.988.5152 x113 or info@photoeye.com.

View the 2016 Director's Choice Award Page
Order the book Adrift

INHERIT THE DUST
Photographs by Nick Brandt

Opening June 10th, 5–7 PM

photo-eye Gallery

541 S. Guadalupe St, Santa Fe, NM 87501

Exhibition continues through July 23rd, 2016

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

photo-eye Gallery is excited to announce Inherit the Dust, an exhibition of black-and-white panoramic photographs by Nick Brandt opening Friday June 10th and continuing through July 23rd, 2016.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born and raised in England, Nick Brandt has worked exclusively in East Africa since 2001. Brandt’s trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, Across the Ravaged Land, eulogized the continent’s disappearing landscape and wildlife in stirring, monumental animal portraits. Each portion of the trilogy has been published as a best-selling monograph. Brandt’s work has been exhibited widely internationally, including Salo Art Museum, Finland; Preus National Museum of Photography, Oslo, Norway; Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, Virginia, and Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea. In 2011, Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm, Sweden, hosted the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition. Nick Brandt currently lives and works in the mountains of Southern California.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Three years after the conclusion of his trilogy On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt returns to East Africa to photograph the escalating changes to the continent’s environment. In a series of epic panoramas, Brandt records the impact of man in places where animals used to roam, but no longer do. Brandt erects a life-size panel of one of his animal portrait photographs on location, setting them in landscapes of explosive urban development, factories, wastelands and quarries. Human life and work continue within the frame with the people oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals featured in them, creatures who are now no more than ghosts in these areas. The interactions between the animals depicted on the panels and the scenes that surround them are striking; some animals appear to be suffering through this new reality alongside the humans, while others appear to survey the destroyed landscapes in lament of the land they once inhabited. By the end, we see that animals are not the sole victims in this out of control world.

PRAISE FOR INHERIT THE DUST

“The wasted lands in Inherit the Dust were once golden savannah, sprinkled with acacia trees, where elephants, big cats and rhinos roamed. These now dystopian landscapes – as Nick Brandt’s unvarnished, harrowing but stunning work reveals — brings us face to face with a crisis, both social and environmental, demanding the renewal of humanity itself.”

— Kathryn Bigelow, Film Director, The Hurt Locker

"In Inherit the Dust… Nick Brandt’s astonishing panoramas are a jolting combination of beauty, decay, and admonishment. The result is an eloquent and complex 'J’accuse,' for the people are as victimized by 'development' as the animals are.

The breadth, detail, and incongruity of Brandt’s panoramas suggest a collision between Bruegel and an apocalypse in waiting."

— Vicki Goldberg, Art Critic, Author

View Inherit the Dust

Purchase the book

For additional information, and to purchase prints, please contact Gallery Director Anne Kelly at 505.988.5152 x 121 or anne@photoeye.com.

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