photo-eye | BLOG: September 2017

Candy/A Good and Spacious Land
Photographs by Jim Goldberg and Donovan Wylie.
Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Candy/A Good and Spacious Land
Reviewed by Blake Andrews.

Candy/A Good and Spacious Land.
Photographs by Jim Goldberg and Donovan Wylie. Text by Christopher Klatell and Laura Wexler and Pamela Franks.
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, USA, 2017. 300 pp., 150 color and 50 black-and-white illustrations, 13x11".

Yale's new photobook duet Candy/A Good And Spacious Land reminds me of the old Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. You've probably heard the tale. Six blind men attempt to determine what an elephant looks like by touching it. Each one touches the elephant in a different area, and each one comes away with a radically different impression based on his limited encounter. The man who feels the tusk thinks of an elephant as a smooth, sharp spear. The one touching the trunk assumes it's more like a snake. And so on. In the end, there is no general agreement.

Assign two photographers to shoot one American city and you might wind up in a similar predicament. You could hardly generate more disparate results than those produced by Donovan Wylie and Jim Goldberg, two veteran Magnum photographers who each documented New Haven, Connecticut during joint residencies at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2013. Wylie's New Haven is an industrial nexus, its residents dwarfed by surrounding infrastructure. Goldberg's version of New Haven — his birthplace and childhood home — is a warren of interwoven lives and a metaphor for the human condition.

A Good and Spacious Land Photographs by Donovan Wylie. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

That the two men could explore the same city and come away with such different impressions is a tribute not only to their strength as photographers, but to one of photography's paradoxical tenets: Less is more. Photographers often work effectively by pruning away visual information, choosing carefully what to reveal and what to hide. Wylie and Goldberg leverage this tenet to focus each on his own slice of New Haven. Although neither attempts to tell the city's whole story, together their two books describe a sizable chunk of it. If the entire elephant is beyond their scope, that's just fine. The restricted perspectives are still quite enlightening.

A Good and Spacious Land Photographs by Donovan Wylie. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

The Irish photographer Wylie's A Good And Spacious Land — the title taken from the biblical myth of the promised land — is the smaller volume and the more conventional. While exploring the area initially, he became enamored with the reconstruction of the I-95 / I-91 interchange, a massive highway project then underway in New Haven. Shot from ground level, Wylie's photographs are dominated by sweeping forms of concrete and steel. The urban landscape appears stressed, fraught, and transitional, an uninviting backdrop for residents. When people appear in Wylie's New Haven they're an industrial afterthought, an impression Wylie enhances by shooting them often at a distance, with backs turned or bodies slouching. New Haven's residents take a back seat here to Wylie's primary concern, the highway interchange. This he has engaged with precision, carefully plotting its spatial layering and formal interplay. The reader's eye bounces here and there around the frames, always entertained and occasionally astonished.

A Good and Spacious Land Photographs by Donovan Wylie. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Goldberg's Candy takes a nearly inverse approach. Whereas Wylie's volume is cleanly sequenced, one photo per page, Candy is a sprawling jumble of collage, cutouts, Polaroids, handwriting, scrapbook, personal diary, and strong portraiture. Formal interplay be damned, these photos are a gut punch, and a messy one at that. If Wylie's vision is somewhat impersonal, Goldberg's is deeply intimate, rooted in his New Haven childhood. Candy is the name of a bygone store from his youth lost to "model city" urban redevelopment. A handwritten sequence early in the book encapsulates the generation gap of his early years: "My dad's dream was to go to become a singer, go to Yale, and become a successful businessman… Mine was to get out of New Haven as soon as I could."

Candy Photographs by Jim Goldberg. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Get out he did, moving west to pursue his photo career. But not everyone escaped New Haven so easily. Goldberg returns to befriend two residents who never left, Germano Kimbro and Joe Taylor. He sketches out their life stories through their own photos and journals, supported by Goldberg's own sharp editing and photography. Kimbro and Taylor each faced adversity but were ultimately resilient. To their stories, Goldberg piles on reams of other material — Goldberg's childhood photos, New Haven portraits, homemade streetview photos, movie stills, etc. He puts the whole mix through an anything-goes editing blender — think Boris Mikhailov's Diary or Peter Beard's The End Of The Game. The resulting book is a densely layered tome which defies easy understanding, the sort of book that can be read straight through as narrative, or opened to any page for expressionist burst.

Candy Photographs by Jim Goldberg. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Candy and A Good And Spacious Land may come packaged together but they are a million miles apart, two very different parts of the New Haven elephant. They're joined for a fleeting moment when Goldberg describes the candy store being torn down for I-91, and along the broad theme of rehabilitation. But essentially it's a union of opposites, an antipodal dynamic which is quite entertaining.

Candy Photographs by Jim Goldberg. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Stacked together the books weigh 9 pounds and span 372 pages. The set is packaged handsomely in a sturdy blue slipcase with a thin explanatory placard. With this production, Yale has pulled out all the stops. Candy/A Good And Spacious Land exemplifies top-notch image reproductions and beautiful binding, with an eye toward collectibility. It's priced accordingly, but still a good value considering the contents.— Blake Andrews

Purchase Book

BLAKE ANDREWS is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Read more book reviews

When enjoying an exhibition, gallery clients often ask me which image is best to collect? When surrounded by work you love, sometimes deciding which image to take home and live with can feel overwhelming. One answer is to start with the work you most respond to and build a portfolio of that particular series by that artist, but most collectors we work with prefer some diversity in their collection. My best advice still circles back to our blog post on collecting photography – buy what you love.

Some might come to find that they have a personal connection with the image – say a dirt road that takes them back to childhood, others might be operating purely on intuition and others on a certain aesthetics in mind. Part of the benefit of working at photo-eye Gallery is being surrounded by captivating images on a daily basis. This gives us the chance to live with the work – which is helpful in developing our own personal collecting strategy – and helping others find theirs.

In honor of our current exhibition, Tempest, this month we have turned our focus to Mitch Dobrowner and are recommending our favorite of his unique stormy landscapes.

– Anne Kelly, Gallery Director

Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay.
By Debi Cornwall. Radius Books, 2017.

Forrest Soper selects Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay by Debi Cornwall from Radius Books as Book of the Week.

"I first encountered Debi Cornwall’s Welcome to Camp America one year ago when I saw it as a book dummy at Review Santa Fe. I’ve been captivated by the work ever since. Revolving around the US detention center at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, commonly referred to as Gitmo, this book uses photographs, redacted documents, and personal accounts to paint a picture of the detention center and the effects on its detainees. A combination of three photographic sequences, Cornwall uses photography to give us an enigmatic glimpse into the secretive world of this controversial military base. The images are interspersed with text, translated in both English and Arabic, which provides historical evidence of acts of dubious legality that have occurred at the facility since 2002.

The first body of work, Gitmo at Home, Gitmo at Play, shows the living spaces of both guards and detainees at Gitmo. This section paints a picture of the naval base that few have encountered before. While the detainee facilities are sterile and restricting, the guard’s quarters are quite shocking in comparison. Bowling alleys, playgrounds, lounge chairs and driving ranges hint at why Gitmo has been called the “best posting a soldier can have.” It’s odd to associate tranquil scenes that almost seem domestic with Gitmo and the events that have been brought to international attention.

The second section, Gitmo on Sale, displays items from Gitmo Souvenir shops. From Fidel Castro bobbleheads to Gitmo purse clasps and beer cozies, this surreal sequence documents the bizarre commodification of the military base. There is a kitsch and cheery sense to these objects, again creating a striking juxtaposition with the text.

The final section of images, Beyond Gitmo, is presented in the form of 14 photographic inserts. These inserts depict 14 men who had been detained at Gitmo and released without charges. Like the photographs of the US guards, the photographs of former detainees are shot with their backs facing the camera, as to not show their faces. This series is the most impactful as it comes with the realization that the overwhelming majority of detainees held there have never been convicted or charged with a crime in the US.

Ultimately this book needs to be experienced personally to grasp its full impact. The amount of research that went into this book is too expansive to even begin to mention in this brief review. This book is haunting, revealing, personal, and shocking. The relatively innocent photographs are paired with text and evidence so alarming that it hardly seems real. Recently shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards, this book has already begun to gain the recognition it deserves, and I hope it continues on that path of success. I know that my brief words will not do this book justice so I will end on this note: Welcome to Camp America may be the most important photobook I have read in 2017." — Forrest Soper

Purchase Book

Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay. By Debi Cornwall. Radius 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/

Slant Rhymes.
Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.
La Fabrica, 2017.

Slant Rhymes
Reviewed by Collier Brown.

Slant Rhymes.
Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.
La Fabrica, Madrid, Spain, 2017. 112 pp., 80 color illustrations, 8x9½".

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Of course, we don’t have to wait for special occasions to quote Emily Dickinson. But with the publication of Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb’s new collaborative work, Slant Rhymes, we’d be remiss not to doff our caps to the master.

Pico Iyer made the unsurprisingly astute observation about the slant rhyme we sense between Alex’s street photography and Rebecca’s impressions of the moment. It’s in the way they both capture the tenacity and stillness of a place like Cuba, says Iyer. And it’s in their sensitivity to color, the way Rebecca’s image of a bird’s lemon feathers, for instance, draws out Havana’s sun-inflected streets in another of Alex’s photographs.

As much as I adore Dickinson’s poem, I feel a little weary when I see the word “truth,” and especially, “Truth”—not because I take sides in the tiresome debate between photographers who want the truth told straight and those who prefer it slant, but because Truth so rarely shows up for its own party. In any case, Slant Rhymes is less abrupt, less impetuous, in its revelations. There’s a slow burn in the book that delights me: amber yellows that, on a first look, hint at trees trapped inside, then a cloud, then a hemisphere; or greens so soft you don’t recognize, at first, how much catastrophe they actually bear. “Truth must dazzle gradually,” says Dickinson’s poem. This book has exactly that feel.

Slant Rhymes. Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. La Fabrica, 2017.

Slant Rhymes is not the first collaboration between these two photographers. Before this volume, there was Memory City (2014), a book inspired by Italo Calvino’s classic novella, Invisible Cities, and t as an exploration of Rochester, New York, after Eastman Kodak’s bankruptcy in 2012. Before that, there was Violet Isle (2009), the poetic precursor to Slant Rhymes in its vivid pictures of Cuba and its eye for the surreal within the real.

Slant Rhymes. Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. La Fabrica, 2017.

There’s a kind of strange affirmation of the fantastic in Alex’s and Rebecca’s work that has nothing to do with their collaboration. Both are documentary photographers in their own right. And both, according to Geoff Dyer, play with contradiction in ways that convey the mystery of places like Haiti, Mexico, Turkey, the Amazon—even places a little closer to home, like Florida and South Dakota. Take, for instance, the photographs Alex made for his book, Under a Grudging Sun: Photographs from Haiti Libéré 1986-1988 (1989). Each one brims with death and vitality, ruin and youth, color and shadow, revel and lamentation. One knows the history; nevertheless, the images defy explanation.

Rebecca adds to these contradictions the imbalances of the man-made: wilderness seen from car windows, hand-me-down dresses without bodies. In books like The Glass Between Us: Reflections on Urban Creatures (2006), the distinctions between the human and nonhuman world break down or are called into question. The borders (a subject familiar to Alex’s work on Mexico-U.S. relations) are all transparent or permeable. Nothing is ever entirely divided. Rebecca’s photographs appeal to the eye for new biological metaphors, new ways of conceptualizing the interconnectedness of living things.

Slant Rhymes. Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. La Fabrica, 2017.

For me, the question comes down to this: What does Slant Rhymes offer that Violet Isle does not? Both collaborations explore the resonance between Alex’s and Rebecca’s color photography. Both do a great job pairing thoughtful texts with meaningful images. But some of the photographs appear in both books. Sometimes they are even paired the same, such as Rebecca’s Havana pigeon alongside Alex’s two boys and plastic bag.

It seems to me that in Slant Rhymes, Alex and Rebecca reflect on one another’s work with more intention. In Violet Isle, the photographs sometimes appear as spreads, but mostly they follow one another, front to back. In Slant Rhymes, they are printed side by side in a dialog of tone, color, and sometimes content. If scale is important to you, Violet Isle may go easier on the eye, it being a larger paperback. But Slant Rhymes feels more intimate. It’s a smaller book, 8.5" x 11"— a cool mint green cloth hardcover that fits easily on the shelf among your editions of Dickinson’s poetry.

Slant Rhymes. Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. La Fabrica, 2017.

The most endearing thing about Slant Rhymes, however, is that it really is more for Alex and Rebecca than it is for anyone else. In this collection, we eavesdrop on two friends slanting their truths toward one another; two partners sharing memories, curiosities, and affections. And this, to my mind, is what truly distinguishes Slant Rhymes from Violet Isle. It’s not a collaboration. It’s a conversation—intimate, illuminating, and circuitous. (“Success in circuit lies,” says Dickinson). For Alex, it’s an “unfinished love poem.” For Rebecca, “A gift, this distance we’ve traveled so far.” . — Collier Brown

Purchase Book

Collier Brown is a photography critic and poet. Founder and editor of Od Review, Brown also works as an editor for 21st Editions (Massachusetts) and Edition Galerie Vevais (Germany).

Read more book reviews

Images from the Opening of Mitch Dobrowner's Tempest

A sincere thank you to all who attended the gallery opening of our new exhibition, Tempest last Friday, September 15th as well as the Artist Talk given by Mitch Dobrowwner on Saturday the 16th. Tempest features the debut of new work in Dobrowner’s ongoing series STORMS celebrating nature's beauty, power, and energy.

Mitch Dobrowner speaking at photo-eye Gallery

Tempest will be on view at photo-eye Gallery through November 11th, 2017.

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

» Inquire

» View Tempest

» Read More about
Mitch Dobrowner

Mitch Dobrowner Lectures at Google

This past summer represented artist Mitch Dobrowner was honored to lecture and exhibit at Google's Venice California Studio Facility as a part of the company's Talks at Google series. The exhibition was installed from May 30th – September 4th, 2017 and contained 21 selected works from Dobrowners Still Earth and Storms series in sizes ranging from 7x9" to 34x50".

In his lecture (video above), Dobrowner speaks in detail about his early beginnings in photography, being unexpectedly courted by National Geographic, as well as sharing stories surrounding a few of his iconic images such as Shiprock Storm and Rope Out. It is a joy to hear Mitch speak about his approach to photography and reverence for the landscape in his humble, gracious, and good-humored manner. The full lecture is just under an hour long.

Mitch Dobrowner's work installed at Google's Venice, CA Studio Facility. Image courtesy of the artist.

Detail of Mitch Dobrowner's work installed and didactic panel at Google's Venice, CA Studio Facility.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Supporting Relief Efforts for Hurricane's Harvey and Irma

Mitch Dobrowner and photo-eye Gallery are donating 10% of all proceeds from Tempest to Direct Relief in their effort to aid those affected by hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Direct Relief has an efficiency rating of 100% from Forbes and provides targeted assistance to help safety net providers prepare for and respond to emergencies. Response efforts—which include distribution of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, personal care items, equipment, and cash—are swift, involve local partners, and are coordinated with other nonprofit organizations and public health authorities to ensure the most effective use of resources.

» Learn More

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo. Aperture, 2017.

Laura M. André selects Rinko Kawauchi's Halo (Aperture, 2017) as Book of the Week.

Rinko Kawauchi's latest book, Halo, presents a poetic series of images taken mostly in darkness: from the smoky blues, pinks, and grays of dusk to the inkiest nights. But as the title suggests, light — and her attraction to it — remains Kawauchi's favorite subject.

But this is no mere formalist investigation of light. Throughout the book, which presents imagery from three different series, Kawauchi challenges readers to connect her work, which is undeniably compelling visually, to contemporary social and economic issues.

The book's most dazzling images, which inspire a cover design of holographic indentations amid a field of black, depict dazzling showers of molten iron, flung in the air as part of a centuries-old Chinese New Year's ritual in Hebei province. As Kawauchi reveals in her brief text, these "poor man's" fireworks represent both celebration and struggle: "For those who live in poverty, every day is a battle in its own way--perhaps it's only natural that this ritual reminds one of a struggle."

The flocks of migratory birds that soar through the book's matte black pages thus not only perform a glorious dance in which smaller flocks join together to form an enormous swarm that appears as a single, shadowy organism; they also serve as metaphors for individuals and society. The whole is greater than the parts.

Finally, Kawauchi includes a number of photographs taken in Japan's southern Izumo region, site of the country's oldest Shinto shrine, where traditional beliefs hold that the gods congregate during the tenth month of the Lunar calendar. A concurrent festival gathers worshippers on the beach to welcome the gods. During Kawauchi's visit to this festival, she photographed beach bonfires in a light rain, which echoes the rain of molten iron in other images. She clicks the shutter and "the lights strobe and refract against the raindrops, and they glitter. The thoughts of the people in prayer, invisible to the human eye, too, take form and reflect in the drops."

Like halos, Kawauchi's images are magical signs of transformation and divinity in the form of glimmering light. — Laura M. André

Purchase Book

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo. Aperture, 2017.

Laura M. André earned a PhD in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught photo history at the University of New Mexico before leaving academia to work with photography books. She is the manager of photo-eye's bookstore.