photo-eye | BLOG: April 2017

Contains 3 Books. By Jason Fulford.
The Soon Institute, 2016.

Contains 3 Books

Reviewed by Sarah Bay Gachot

Contains 3 Books.
Photographs by Jason Fulford. Edited by Lorenzo De Rita.
The Soon Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2016. 216 pp., 88 color illustrations, 5¼x7¼".

Mild Moderate Severe Profound is one of the three small books tucked into the silver slipcase drawer of Contains: 3 Books, by Jason Fulford, his latest collection of photographs and text. Paging through, I paused on one of the captions across from an image of Zelda Sayre and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave, a close-up corner of it, silhouetted by the sun just out of frame; there are airplane-sized liquor bottles straggled about, and an empty vase (save for some dead leaves) catches a tiny glint of a sunset on its rim, some wine bottles hold more dead flowers, coins tossed about, other gifted mementoes...

20. Save Me the Waltz
In a letter to Zelda Sayre’s doctor, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that he would rather her be a sane mystic than a mad realist. She had been diagnosed with schizophrenia

This is just one of several references to madness and aberrance throughout Contains: 3 Books — the title Mild Moderate Severe Profound, the common terminology for addressing levels of intellectual disorder, being one of them. Further photographs allude to institutionalization — the psychiatric file of Robert Walser, who spent much of the latter part of his life in a sanatorium, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s modernist bust of Ezra Pound, who was incarcerated in an insane asylum for 12 years, Vincent Van Gogh’s view from his room in an asylum — as well as views that reference institutions themselves such as the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, and Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Contains 3 Books. By Jason Fulford. The Soon Institute, 2016.

The two other books in Contains: 3 Books are titled I Am Napoleon and &&. These are accompanied by a letter-pressed mustard-hued board displaying an alphabet festooned with raucous and randy characters reminiscent of R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, or the viral doodle of the WWII-era “Kilroy Was Here.” Contains: 3 Books could be a drawer full of madness, but it is much more fun — and fitting, considering the vividly luminous imagination of Fulford — to embrace it as the visual ramblings, journal, and research of the sane mystic.

Contains 3 Books. By Jason Fulford. The Soon Institute, 2016.

This is a project with rules that guide in the most unruly way. I Am Napoleon seems to pair texts taken in their original fonts with original page numbers with Fulford’s photographs, noted in the colophon by those numbers. The first text is Roman numeral V, an excerpt from the preface to The Inmates by John Cowper Powys, a fictional love story told in an insane asylum:

PREFATORY NOTE
I think any book or picture or composition of any sort, once out into the world, so to say, produces a different effect on each person who seriously tries to follow it. I certainly do not think that the author of it has any monopoly on its interpretation.

Across from this is what I took to be a sopping-wet, green-haired guinea pig on a beach. Actually, it’s a seaweed-swathed rock embedded in sand — but if you look at it in a half light, it really could be the head of a corpse, buried and revealed by the sea. From guinea pig to corpse in less than a minute.

Contains 3 Books. By Jason Fulford. The Soon Institute, 2016.

Fulford explains the title I Am Napoleon on the last page by way of an asterisked note credited to the “acid Marxist” of psychiatrists, R.D. Laing, in which a patient undergoing a lie-detector test results in lying when he responds “no” to the question “Are you Napoleon?” Subtle paradox runs through Contains: 3 Books like madness itself — seemingly normal until it isn’t; seemingly mystic, until one digs. But Fulford seems to have a magnetic ability to attract just the amount of madness needed to make art.

Contains 3 Books. By Jason Fulford. The Soon Institute, 2016.

Despite its genesis in heavy research, three years of travel to 15 countries (Fulford was awarded a Guggenheim grant in 2014), and a weighty theme, Contains: 3 Books has a lightness to it — shiny silver slipcase, photos that one can’t help smiling at, like a broken ceramic duck next to a cigarette butt, a reference to Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety, a topiary branding of a barber shop in Scranton, and even the tongue-in-cheek letterpress handwriting listing book titles on the cover of && — “The Tower & The Abyss / Agony & Epitaph / Feminism & Psychoanalysis / Trust & Violence / Surfaces & Essences / Symbolization & Creativity...” It goes on — a procession of titles that seems to poke fun at the endless academic study of the mind.

Contains 3 Books. By Jason Fulford. The Soon Institute, 2016.

As this project came to print in 2016, the most unusual election year to date (to say the least), an exploration of madness is an apt response to the fractured condition of politics and society in the United States. “I don’t know what to do / two states of mind in me,” Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, faces a photograph of a blue van tucked into a garage, protected by a hanging tarp and a traffic cone. Contains: 3 Books is ultimately a collection of pithy stories that touch upon the mind, accompanied by Fulford’s graphic or curiously comic photographs, stories in their own right. Dig as deep as you want — the reflection is yours to consider. — Sarah Bay Gachot

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SARAH BAY GACHOT is a writer, educator, and artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the editor and author of Robert Cumming: The Difficulties of Nonsense (Aperture, 2016) and will be curating a show of Cumming’s photographs at the George Eastman Museum in 2017. Lylesfur.tumblr.com

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Untitled, 2008 – © Pentti Sammallahti

photo-eye Gallery is delighted to announce Warm Regards, an exhibition of small-scale traditional silver gelatin prints by prominent Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti. photo-eye Gallery will host an Opening for the exhibition Friday, April 28th from 5 –7pm, corresponding with the Railyard Arts District’s Last Friday Art Walk. Warm Regards will remain on view through June 24th, 2017.

all that cannot be said. By Colin Stearns.
Kris Graves Projects, 2017.

Christian Michael Filardo picks all that cannot be said by Colin Stearns from Kris Graves Projects as Book of the Week.

"Colin Stearns returns with a pile of ash, something ethereal to share with the viewer. A blurred illustration — defined just as much by what isn’t there as by what is. Everything seems to be a sign, a totem defining a new mystery. In all that cannot be said we are asked to take a deep look at something that is slipping away. Smashed cars mirror wilting flowers. Graffiti scrawls mimic a knot tied around a chain link fence. Urbanity becomes precious, cold asphalt grows familiar, and a vague memory is triggered by a shadow — another face you thought you knew. Can a person really be missing?

In all that cannot be said we find Colin Stearns playing the role of a conductor. His photographs become the instruments. Crumpled automobiles are the percussion. The woodwinds are bouquets of flowers. Spray-painted walls become the brass. Missing posters are the string section. It’s a well-charted journey; we are given the idea of light and dark and taken up and down the staff. Despite the compositions’ fragmentation, the narrative is strong and the choices made are all the right ones. This book feels familiar and relatable. Whatever darkness Stearns is traversing, we go there with him, and he keeps the instruments in time. Each photograph nudges the other along. It’s almost as if Stearns says, “I told you so” every time you turn the page.

I really love this book; it’s subtle, clever, and dangerous. At times it can feel really cinematic, a philosophical drama that leaves you with just as many questions as answers. I could look at it over and over again. As soon as I think I’ve solved the puzzle the conclusion escapes me. It’s almost as if Stearns puts out the fire as soon as he starts it and all the secrets are drifting away in the smoke — a riddle that can only solve itself." — Christian Michael Filardo

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all that cannot be said. By Colin Stearns. Kris Graves Projects, 2017.

Christian Michael Filardo is a Filipino-American composer and photographer living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He recently had a solo exhibition called Tumbleweed Replica at Current Space in Baltimore, MD and is the current shipping manager at photo-eye bookstore. .

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Tokyo By Sohei Nishino.
amana, 2015.

Tokyo
Reviewed by Arista Slater-Sandoval.

Tokyo.
Photographs by Sohei Nishino.
amana, Tokyo, Japan, 2015. 496 pp., 496 illustrations, 5¾x8¼".

Cities are motion; buildings go up and come down, shops close and change occupants, people use various methods of transportation from day to day, today there is a parade and tomorrow there will be a street closure. Differing spokes of activity create the dynamic portrait of Tokyo in Sohei Nishino’s first book Tokyo. Short-listed in 2016 for the First Photobook prize by Aperture and Paris Photo, the book dissects the nature of assemblage through a large-scale map of Tokyo created by the photographer. With this dialectic of destruction and regeneration, we see the city ebb and flow through multiple vantage points compressed to one plane.

To view the book is to question process itself. Sohei Nishino will spend an average of three months on location capturing thousands of exposures on 35mm film in vastly different areas of a city. He will then create contact sheets from the film, cut the individual exposures out and reassemble a flexing yet familiar large-scale map of the city. The resulting single image composed of thousands of smaller images creates a portrait of place from the memory of the photographer. “A record of how I, as a human being have walked through their streets and how I looked at those street ” — Sohei Nishino.

Often focusing on a known landmark, the map will gently spiral out from an obvious city layout to produce pockets of what can be considered street photography. Focusing on smaller sections, we are thrust into the micro and are given a view into daily life and happenings of a city, while still in the presence of its entire map.

Tokyo By Sohei Nishino. amana, 2015.

Adding to the complexity of this seemingly straightforward process of assemblage is the mix of genera encountered when traveling from page to page. Street and architecture are the obvious first methods presented. However, moving to the corners of the map where vast swaths of gray present themselves as water and sky creates abstraction. The subtle changes in tones create a study in pattern and form.

Tokyo By Sohei Nishino. amana, 2015.

At first glance the book itself is disorientating. Full bleed close ups of sections from the Tokyo map fill the book. Without prior knowledge of the final map, the pages present an onslaught of abstracted, yet intriguing views of a city; intriguing from the assemblage feel of each frame physically lying on top of the other and the snapshot aesthetic working in tandem. Thankfully we are given a folded insert of the full final map so that we can literally see the big picture. Despite the never punctuated continuation of images on every page, the book is an incredibly intricate and intimate look into a continuously growing metropolis. — Arista Slater-Sandoval

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ARISTA SLATER-SANDOVAL was born and raised in Grand Rapids Michigan. She moved in 2007 to washington D.C. to pursue a BFA in photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. After completing her BFA, Arista moved to Cambridge MA, and attended the College of Art and Design at Lesley University where she completed her MFA in Fine Art Photography in 2013. While in grad school she focused in gum bichromate, and large scale image transfers. Currently Arista lives and works in New Mexico with her husband while traveling and working on her various mediums of choice.

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photo-eye Gallery's LOCAL EIGHT is a diverse exhibition featuring work from represented artists who live in northern New Mexico. Jamey Stillings and Edward Ranney's images in LOCAL EIGHT both prominently feature New Mexico as a subject, but with exceedingly different intent, experience, and aesthetics. We reached out to Stillings and Ranney for some insight and information about their photographs and we're pleased to share their thoughts with you here. LOCAL EIGHT is on view through this Saturday, April 22nd.

Jamey Stillings

"Since 2010, when I first photographed over Ivanpah Solar in the Mojave Desert of California, I have been working on a long-term project, CHANGING PERSPECTIVES, about renewable energy development. As this project gradually builds into a global project, I also want to document energy development closer to home in New Mexico.

The San Juan Basin of New Mexico is a region of incredible beauty and geologic diversity. The ancestral Pueblo peoples, who lived in and around Chaco Canyon and throughout the Basin from around 850 to 1250 A.D., represent an important example of a highly developed native culture in North America prior to European contact. The San Juan Basin is also a region with significant fossil fuel resources in the form of coal, petroleum and natural gas that have been tapped from the 1920's to the present.

As might be expected, the area's natural beauty, the livelihood of native and non-native peoples, and invaluable anthropological sites compete with our contemporary culture's thirst for energy. Energy exploration, mining, and drilling continue to encroach on limited water resources, scar the land, disrupt its natural beauty, and impact the region's people in complex ways, both positive and negative.

The work I shot over the San Juan Basin looked at the area's diversity from coal-fired power plants west of Farmington, to oil and natural gas exploration around Navajo Lake, to the protected lands of Chaco Culture National Historical Park and the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness.

This group of four images selected for this exhibition shares the natural beauty of mystique of Chaco Canyon and the Bisti Badlands. While you may not have the opportunity to experience these incredible sites from the air, I hope you will make the point of visiting them and savoring their natural beauty on the ground."

–– Jamey Stillings

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Edward Ranney

"I was intrigued to learn recently, when asked to make some comments regarding the four photographs I had chosen to exhibit in photo-eye gallery’s recent show called “Local Eight”, that the pictures resonated, surprisingly, with a preoccupation of Dorothea Lange. Invited in 1957, toward the end of her working career, to teach a course at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), she often asked her students to make photographs in response to the question, “Where do I live?”. Her interest was not to have her students make portraits, or depict human interaction, but to photograph the “most meaningful and personal place” of their environment, and in doing so to look inward, not away from themselves.

Beginning in 1973, my wife and I settled at a rural homestead south of Santa Fe known as Chaquaco, previously occupied by cattle ranchers and earlier settlers who had raised sheep. While we raised our three daughters there, I photographed our life in this isolated setting, recording changes in the surrounding landscape and subtle nuances of light around the house, in the process becoming adept at using the large format camera in a way that has informed my work at ancient sites of the Andes. The pictures run the gamut from some surprising successes to many of inconsequence. But at their best, they correspond to a comment recollected by one of Lange’s students, as published by Milton Meltzer in his biography of Dorothea Lange." – Edward Ranney

“We ought to know beyond a doubt that the things we look at in these pictures are the most important things in the world, that to the photographer this desk, this garden, is home. And by the time we have looked at all these pictures, we ought to feel that our own homes, our own hearts - by the view we have been given of the hearts of others - are not what they were when we began to look.”

– Nancy Walker Katz As quoted in Dorothea Lange, A Photographer’s Life, by Milton Meltzer, pg 305, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY, 1978

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For more information, and to purchase prints please contact photo-eye Gallery Staff at 505-988-5152 x 202 or gallery@photoeye.com.

LOCAL EIGHT is on view through this Saturday, April 22nd at photo-eye Gallery.

Ending. By Leif Sandberg. Boecker Books, 2017.

Forrest Soper selects Ending by Leif Sandberg from Boecker Books as Book of the Week.

"At the age of 64, Leif Sandberg learned that he might have pancreatic cancer. Ending, Sandberg’s first monograph, is a poetic exploration of the thoughts and emotions that followed shortly after this news. Aside from a brief introductory statement and a 12-part poem by Bob Hansson in the back of the publication, the book is devoid of text, allowing the viewer to interpret the images in their own fashion and apply them to their own unique life experiences. Ultimately, Ending is a book that confronts the ideas of mortality, life, and those we choose to spend our time with.

The images in Ending are dark and full of emotion. Rather than create a journalistic document of his treatment process, Sandberg uses experimentation and manipulation to explore the emotions that arose in his mind. After a series of anxiety attacks, Sandberg used photography not only as a means of expression but also as a form of therapy and the result is incredibly powerful. Self-portraits with blurred faces and multiple exposures fall alongside stark photographs of reptile corpses. Throughout the book, flashes of color break the pattern in a book that is overwhelmingly black-and-white. It seems that whether Sandberg is in front or behind the lens, the entire body of work is heavy with performance, anxiety, fear, and intimacy.

Ending was recently chosen for the 2017 Kassel Photobook Award – The Expert’s Selection, and for good reason. This book is incredibly well designed. It has a pace and flow that is both intriguing and riveting. The sequencing is impeccable and there never seems to be a dull moment throughout the book. Most importantly the images don’t pretend to have any direct answers to the reader. In fact, after reading the book one may find that they have more questions than when they began the book. Ending is scheduled to have a following publication, Beyond the Mirror, and I cannot wait to see how Sandberg’s work progresses and evolves." — Forrest Soper

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Ending. By Leif Sandberg. Boecker Books, 2017.

Forrest Soper is a photographer and artist based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. A graduate of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, he also has previously worked at Bostick & Sullivan. Forrest is the Editor of photo-eye Blog.
http://forrestsoper.com/

Kassel Photobook Award 2017 - The Experts Selection

Established in 2008, the Kassel Photobook Award reaches out to numerous distinguished photo-arts professionals, asking them to select and provide a brief statement on a photobook of their choosing. The post below highlights the books selected for the 2017 Award.

The Expert's Selection was made by Laia Abril, Martin Amis, Gerry Badger, Daniel Blaufuks, Tamara Berghmans, Pierre Bessard, David Campany, Chiara Capodici, Federica Chiocchetti, Rémi Coignet, Anatole Desachy, Yuan Di, Thobias Fäldt, John Gossage, Yumi Goto, Brian Griffin, Thomas Gust, Sebastian Hau, Rob Hornstra, Klara Källström, Volkan Kiziltunc, Eva-Maria Kunz, Jeffrey Ladd, Frederic Lezmi, Lesley Martin, Martin Parr, Markus Schaden, Markus Schaden, Willem van Zoetendaal, Laurence Vecten, Lars Willumeit, Zhang Xiao, Ekaterina Zueva, and Wolfgang Zurborn .

Louis Faurer By Louis Faurer.
Steidl/Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2016.

Louis Faurer
Reviewed by Blake Andrews.

Louis Faurer.
Photographs by Louis Faurer.
Steidl/Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, France, 2016. 208 pp., 100 black-and-white illustrations, 6¾x9¼.

Poor Louis Faurer. If there were any justice in the photo world he might be as well known today as his former studio-mate, Robert Frank. But as it is, he's remembered as a second tier photographer if at all, his legacy mostly lost amid the glut of other mid-century humanists. It hasn't helped that he never published a monograph during his lifetime, or that his gritty style of streetwork careened increasingly toward the personal, and away from straight documentary. So he was working uphill to gain recognition. That's if he'd bothered. Instead, he followed his own muse, ditching the U.S. mid-career to live and work in Paris and Montreal, cementing his outsider status. By the time he returned to America in 1974 he'd been largely forgotten. What followed was an erratic succession of career boosts —an exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, an NEA Fellowship, a Guggenheim— interspersed with generally dimming prospects. Being struck by a car in 1984, an event that hobbled his photography, was perhaps the final nail in his reputation's coffin.