Book Of The Week Anthropocene Photographs and text by Edward Burtynsky Reviewed by Karen Jenkins Anthropocene is a multidisciplinary body of work which serves as both a visceral expression of humanity's incursions on the planet and an urgent cry to acknowledge humankind's responsibility.

Anthropocene. By Edward Burtynsky.

Anthropocene
Photographs and text by Edward Burtynsky

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2018.
224 pp., 104 illustrations, 11¼x14¼".

Edward Burtynsky is working harder than ever to reveal (his carefully chosen word) landscapes the world over—marked, scarred, and irrevocably transformed by human activity. For his latest project, Anthropocene, he has partnered with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier to create a publication, traveling exhibition, feature-length film, and an interactive website.

Tyrone Mine #3 Silver City, New Mexico, USA, 2012

In the service of these multi-disciplinary efforts are the latest and greatest technologies and tools. Having first adopted digital photography in 2006, Burtynsky now employs a 40-foot pneumatic monopod, drones and airplanes, and satellite imagining to achieve the dizzying comprehensiveness of his photographs. When his vision strains against the typical constraints of clarity and print size, he digitally stitches together images on a massive, mural-size scale.

The project title itself is epic in its scope and implication. Anthropocene refers to this period of time beginning in the mid-twentieth century, when our impact on the Earth was deemed more than an aberrational blip, but rather a dire and lasting intrusion. And still, Burtynsky’s photographs overflow these parameters, in stripped layers of ancient rock and depleted fossil fuels, as well as in ominous signs of future peril.

Dandora Landfill #3, Plastics Recycling, Nairobi, Kenya 2016

Short runs of images arranged in sections such as urbanization, agriculture, and energy are paired with detailed texts that contextualize the visual evidence offered in Burtynsky’s views. Equal to the challenge of digesting all that’s contained in each large color plate (this is a big, heavy book), is the concentration required to simply keep one’s eyes on track while reading these densely impactful texts stretching across long pages.

Saw Mills #3, Log Booms, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

A thorough analysis of deforestation around the world, and its ripple effects on biodiversity and human habitation, for example, primes us for the comparably information-packed photographs to follow. Images such as Saw Mills #3, Log Booms, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016 and Log Booms #1, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2016 depict the downstream aftermath of burgeoning timber operations. Splintered and fractured log groupings appear on a staggering scale, and flip from macro to micro in my perception. Suddenly, diseased cells manifest against thick, opaque grounds, eerily elegant on matte black and cloudy green.

Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

Images in the Extraction section, such as Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia, 2017 hum with a deep interiority, with Earth’s gouged out subterranean spaces mimicking a vividly colored scene inside a troubled mind. The analogy the book offers to a fossil-like form is apt, but not as a benign and static artifact. These hypnotic spirals threaten to suck you in, echoing the reality of those giant sinkholes which have endangered the local Russian community.

Rock of Ages #15 Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont

I’ve always been drawn to Burtynsky’s work through a sense of my own responsibility not to turn a blind eye to the unprecedented environmental crises of our time. And surely, this work at first seems a close second to seeing the evidence “with my own eyes.” But, does revelation lead to action? And is this word, revelation, even a just label of Burtynsky’s work? He writes, “We feel that by describing the problem vividly, by being revelatory and not accusatory, we can help spur a broader conversation about viable solutions.” His collaborators, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, echo this sentiment, adding that their (and our) shared culpability disallows a position of separation or superiority relative to the other, the perpetrator. And yet, I would argue that such a reservation of judgment precisely indicates a point of remove, between artists and the problem at hand. And, furthermore, that it is possible, and important here, to be both revelatory and accusatory (as the publications’ essayists seem to be given liberty to be).

Log Booms #1, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2016

In particular, poems by Margaret Atwood (no stranger to going dark, in dark days) inserted throughout Anthropocene do just that. In “Fatal Light Awareness,” she writes of a bird meeting its death flying into an illuminated window pane: “your light is the birds’ last darkness,” and further, “We are a dying symphony—No bird knows this, but us—we know, what our night magic does.” A certain stunned paralysis is commonplace in the face of nearly incomprehensible peril. May we all find ways to zoom back in, and each one, do what we must.

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Building Ivory Tusk Mound, April 25, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016

Karen Jenkins earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.

Book Of The Week Southbound Edited with introduction by Mark Sloan and Mark Long Reviewed by Karen Jenkins Southbound comprises fifty-six photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Accordingly, it offers a composite image of the region. The photographs echo stories told about the South through Americanization and globalization, and as a land full of surprising realities.

Southbound. By Mark Sloan & Mark Long.

Southbound

Edited with introduction by Mark Sloan and Mark Long

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, USA, 2018.
384 pp., 300 illustrations, 11x12".

Organizing “the largest exhibition of photographs of and about the American South in the 21st century” is no small objective. The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art’s sizeable ambition is nearly matched by the physical heft of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Southbound. Fifty-six contemporary photographers are represented, each with five, full-page reproductions. Additional images are then shared on a companion website.

In their Introduction, curators Mark Sloan and Mark Long seek to delineate how their chosen artists challenge, reframe, and move beyond entrenched and often problematic ways of depicting the South. While emphasizing the necessarily incomplete, open-ended nature of their project, they do nonetheless provide some conceptual frameworks.

Shelby Lee Adams

A collection of maps, for example, refutes a fixed geography of the South, by instead representing the region through historical, economic, and religious lenses. Contributor Eleanor Heartney considers commonalities among the photographers’ approaches to their subject, offering a high-level list of resulting themes such as: “Engage, but also critique clichés” and “Mix personal history with the complicated political and social history of the South.”

True to the curators’ stated commitment, a broad re-visioning of the contemporary American South, I found within Southbound a commanding array of established photographers (Shelby Lee Adams, Alex Harris), those who have contributed significantly in the last decade (Lucas Foglia, Gilliam Laub), and emerging artists not yet known to me.

Tammy Mercure

The authority intrinsic to this powerful collection of imagery is, however, undermined by the one-page essays that accompany each photographer’s set of illustrations. The prominence given to facts of personal geography (place of birth and subsequent areas of residence) and CV credentials (education, important exhibitions, commercial clients, and major collections) begs a number of questions that largely go unanswered. What does it mean for her vision of the American South that photographer Magdalena Solé was born in Spain, raised in Switzerland, lived in New York City for 30 years, and now photographs the Mississippi Delta? How do these photographers’ depictions of the American South enter into their commercial work and potentially shape perceptions outside of a fine art context? Page after page, these rote accolades begin to (inadvertently) suggest curatorial insecurity; a need to validate their selections, rather than let the images and their critical commentary speak for themselves.

Sheila Pree Bright

The companion essays also over-explain concepts that a reasonably well-informed reader might be expected to understand, such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the context of Sheila Pree Bright’s work. They rely too heavily on superficial descriptions of the images’ component parts, and at times, an overly reductive analysis of the work’s meaning vis-à-vis “the South.” For example, contributor Mary Trent writes of the porch and exterior wall seen in Lucinda Bunnen’s image Pink Porch:

It depicts a rundown trailer home in the South, which is not an unusual subject in and of itself; however, the work captures something surprising about the style of the trailer. Its owner has painted it a shade of bubblegum pink, making it both delightful and somewhat absurd. A pink leopard-print beach towel is also draped across the porch, suggesting that the trailer’s owner favors the flashy feminine color. Two doormats decorated with coffee cups are hanging nearby, suggesting the owner’s appreciation of a leisurely cup of coffee. These indulgences contrast with the dilapidated trailer and the obvious financial struggles of its owner….

Lucinda Bunnen

Bunnen’s photographs offer so much more than this. In Pink Porch, the choice of these household objects may just as well reflect affordability or availability in the face of the owner’s “obvious financial struggles.” Her photograph Georgia Goats conjures the work of Kara Walker, in the black silhouette cutouts of a clichéd Southern guy and gal mounted to the side of the house depicted there. And in Dixie Dogs, a line-up of real and toy dogs, behind a retired Dixie sign, populate a fenced-in yard for tired tropes. Surface and artifice are at play in these images, and beg a deeper dive.

Tom Rankin

There are, however, also passages within Southbound that spark the kind of expansive thinking that the curators aspire to facilitate here. The statement by KH (presumably Katie Hirsch, not defined as a text contributor), “A person’s relationship with their dog is sacrosanct in the South…” offers a sweeping path through this collection, beginning with photographer Tammy Mercure, and on to Tom Rankin, Jerry Siegel, Mike Smith, and others. Dogs in cars, dogs on the hunt; the hunted as human chattel, taxidermy trophy or dusty décor. Images like these suggest myriad ways to explore relationships to the natural world, organic and artificial, in domination and stewardship. Written in response to several photographs, Nikki Finney’s commissioned poems perfectly embody the deeply subjective meanings that this excellent collection of photography can elicit.

It is a challenge to create a broad-based take on a massive subject, rooted in shifting sands with contentious roots. Despite the pitfalls of the Southbound project, it assembles bodies of work well-worth exploring, by artists committing to shuffling the deck of what the new South can mean.

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Daniel Beltrá

Karen Jenkins earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.

Book Of The Week Frail Sister Artist's book by Karen Green Reviewed by Karen Jenkins Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance, whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life.

Frail Sister. By Karen Green.

Frail Sister

Artist's book by Karen Green

Siglio, Catskill, New York, 2018.
164 pp., color illustrations throughout, 7½×10".

In Frail Sister, Karen Green has created an elaborate, imaginative archive of a life that might have been. Using photographs, drawings, letters and ephemera, she (re)constructs the tale of her “disappeared” Aunt Constance in an artful synthesis of materials both found and (mostly) fabricated. Yet this is not only an additive project. The story is told as much in its subtractions, via overlaps, masking, and most cleverly, in the diminishing effect of words and images that challenge and contradict.

By bending the familiar tropes of the unreliable narrator and “based on a true story,” Frail Sister both obfuscates and reveals. With varying degrees of respect and irreverence for an absent “truth,” Green builds the story of Constance’s childhood during the Depression in Oil City, Pennsylvania, her escape as a musical USO performer in war-time Italy, return to a tarnished existence in New York, and a gradual diminishment via violence and illness.

Objects of correspondence provide much of the narrative arc of Constance’s story. Sometimes, letters and postcards are the substrates of the layered episodes that emerge from their fertile soil. In other passages, vintage-seeming ephemera (a musical score, ration book, menu) are used as impromptu stationery—the starting point for handwritten and typed messages further transformed with photos and drawings, strikeouts and redactions. As many a researcher must do, Green offers a one-sided version of her subject as gleaned from correspondence Constance (might have) received. A collection of letters from her many male admirers may reveal each man’s particular ardor, but they are also reduced to generalized types in their literal ordering from A (Al), B (Bill), C (Clyde)…to Z. We, like them, wait expectantly for Constance’s reply, only to be met with her absence.

Music figures prominently throughout Green’s story. At first connecting Constance to her sister, later embraced as a vehicle of escape, and ultimately found to be an inadequate shield against life’s harsh realities. Onto a yellowed USO postcard, Constance writes, “We are the bridge in a song, sis, forever linked, together we make the music and there is nothing and no one can asunder us, not even war!” The bridge imagery resonates throughout Frail Sister, appearing at each important junction in Constance’s story. Running the metaphorical gamut from “bridge leading to nowhere” to that which might “bridge the gulf,” these increasingly heartbreaking permutations are revealing of Constance’s present state while foregrounding Green’s nimble command of language and imagery.

Late in the story, Constance returns to New York, trading in her USO past for a burlesque (and worse) future. This tragic stage unfolds in a new wave of letters and manipulated photographs, revealing Constance’s experience of domestic violence and other horrors. A typewritten inventory trailing down the face of a woman in a faded photograph makes explicit the slang term that gives this book its title––frail sister, guttersnipe, harlot, harridan, hussy (again in an alphabetical reduction to type). Deterioration in Constance’s circumstances and resiliency are also suggested in the increasingly illegible handwriting, which delivers missives back home that no longer wear a brave face. The fading of this one (perhaps unknowable) woman permeates a final gallery of studio portraits of anonymous women; their faces stitched in with thread or obscured in overlays of color wash. Paired with descriptions of nameless bodies discovered after violent ends; Constance’s fate is now powerfully intertwined with other vulnerable women lost to exploitation and violence.

The final spread in Frail Sister shows the front and back side of an image of Constance playing the violin; now thoroughly sewn-over with colored threads, forever obscured as if by an invasive vine. With no more strands to follow, I closed the book and immediately saw the cover photo anew. What at first reads as an unperturbed found photograph of two young sisters soon reveals the subtle traces of internal manipulation and embellishment. A crack in the emulsion runs down the side of this aged print, dotted by a few now-shifted spot tone corrections. And a thin run of threaded embellishment emerges from the waist and neckline of Constance’s outfit as if to prime us for the mesmerizing concoction of subtext and wishful thinking to come. Where the girls join hands, a faint fingerprint impression also comes to light. This story has been handled, but it can still offer truth.

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Karen Jenkins earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.

Book Of The Week Perfect Places, Perfect Company Photographs by Robert Adams Reviewed by Karen Jenkins Perfect Places, Perfect Company is a two-volume reworking of a series of photographs that Robert Adams (born 1937) made in the mid-1980s at Colorado’s Pawnee National Grassland. First published in 1988 under the title Perfect Times, Perfect Places, these photographs powerfully convey the deep sensory pleasure of walking in vast, open spaces.

Perfect Places, Perfect Company. By Robert Adams.

Perfect Places, Perfect Company

Photographs by Robert Adams

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2016.
104 pp., 55 black-and-white illustrations, 10¼x12½".

In 1952, teenaged Robert Adams moved from Wisconsin to Wheatridge, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. There he quickly resumed his routine of walking in nature. Despite not being immediately captivated by the expansive grasslands, Adams was committed to their exploration. With time came an abiding habit and deep love for these seemingly quiet and empty spaces, and a lifetime of art that championed their worth.

Inevitably, not all walks took Adams through pristine natural expanses, unperturbed by suburban sprawl. In the mid-1970s, his solitary nighttime strolls near Longmont, Colorado yielded quiet views of neighborhood constructions illuminated by streetlight or moonlight (published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights). Even his iconic The New West was born of pedestrian encounters; a new iteration depicting an invasive landscape through a high sun and troubled mind. Yet, Adams chose to return his attention to one of his most personal and intimate bodies of work—one devoid of such overt markers of human incursion—as he recalibrates his decades-long commitment to preserving the environment.

Perfect Places, Perfect Company expands upon a single volume called Perfect Times, Perfect Places originally published by Aperture in 1988. The new Steidl publication offers an expanded selection of photographs made during the Adams’ frequent walks through Colorado’s Pawnee National Grasslands. Its two slim volumes are now titled Perfect Places and Perfect Company. Substituting the word “times” for “company” is an apt nod to the enduring companionship of Adams’ wife, Kerstin, and their dog, Sally, during his days on the plains.

As Perfect Places unfolds, the subtle swaths of grasses, in low-contrast bands of grays, at first appear
static, suggestive of silence. Yet within a few pages, you begin to hear the movement of the wind; its waves animate these blades and tufts with their own majestic score and soundscape. Modulations in light, from sunshine to dark storm, manifest in slivers of dark shadow beneath bands of clouds, changing the temperature from cool to warm.

Nature rules Perfect Places. Property markers are rare: the occasional fence line, routed earth, or train tracks appear, but seem destined to become overgrown. The presence of Adams, Kerstin, and Sally, is also minimal in that collection, but each appears more prominently in Perfect Company. Adams pictures Kerstin leading the way, wandering afield, or dappled in a tree’s leafy shadows. We are invited into the Adams’ footsteps. We feel their love for this place they have visited time and time again, with the certainty that they have yet to discover its full wonder.

The Adamses left Colorado decades ago, so what do these images mean to them now? How can Adams label as perfect a place once ravaged by the dust bowl? As always, he offers a way out of defeatism and despair.

Friends tell us that the Pawnee National Grassland, to which we have not returned for over twenty years, has been lost to fracking and wind turbines. This would be an unbearable sadness were it not for all the people who loved it and remember it. As Wendell Berry has observed, “everything worthy is fragile and under threat, is prey to time and invisible to power, and yet affection keeps the accounting in the black. Worthy things, invested with affection, pass into ‘the now / which is eternal.’ I don’t know how this can be…and yet I believe that it is so.”

Coming from a less principled source, such sentiments may seem naïve or even useless in the face of
irreversible loss. Instead, it strengthens the status of Adams’ life’s work as an ever-richer compendium of mindfulness and a treatise on art’s persuasive powers. Each image and essay is a meditation on the now, the perfect time to care for everything that matters.

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Karen Jenkins earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.

Book Review Forever By Anthony Hernandez Reviewed by Karen Jenkins “Forever comprises color photographs from 2007-2012, made during so many walks through downtown L.A., Compton, Watts and South Central, in which Hernandez assumed the borrowed vantage point of fellow Angelinos who are homeless. These images continue his work, which began over twenty years ago with Landscapes for the Homeless, while taking a somewhat different tack."

Forever. By Anthony Hernandez. Mack, 2017.

 

Forever
Reviewed by Karen Jenkins

Forever.
Photographs by Anthony Hernandez.
Mack, London, England, 2017. 108 pp., 68 color illustrations, 9¾x9¾".

Los Angeles may be a city of drivers, but Anthony Hernandez’s vision doesn’t take shape from a moving car. During fifty years of photographing, he has determinedly pulled over, parked and struck out as a native observer on foot. Forever comprises color photographs from 2007-2012, made during so many walks through downtown L.A., Compton, Watts and South Central, in which Hernandez assumed the borrowed vantage point of fellow Angelinos who are homeless. These images continue his work, which began over twenty years ago with Landscapes for the Homeless, while taking a somewhat different tack. While the earlier images created a sense of fragility of experience through precarious shelters and scant possessions, Forever is more about the grinding permanence of circumstance; homelessness and the systematic failures behind it, seemingly here to stay – forever.

Forever. By Anthony Hernandez. Mack, 2017.

Forever. By Anthony Hernandez. Mack, 2017.

The photographer’s movements, as he walks in another’s shoes – in alternative paths and inevitable obstacles, workarounds and dead ends – are felt in Hernandez’s images. His wife Judith Freeman wrote the companion essay to Forever, in which she weaves his own words into a precise description of his various Los Angeles routes – identifying street names and businesses, named sets of railroad tracks and freeway entrances. Yet for all his insider knowledge, gleaned from a lifetime of traveling the city, Hernandez’s photographs include few tangible markers of the city itself. Instead, he selects for view the kind of cinder block walls, chain link fences, and spray-painted imagery that could be in any urban environment. By depicting a certain “Unland” as Freeman’s essay title suggests, Hernandez’s message reaches beyond his home city. The issue is not only forever, it is everywhere. His creation of meaning in nondescript, not to mention empty, abandoned and unpeopled spaces can also be seen in Discarded (2012-2015). In this series, Hernandez explored the fallout from the 2008 recession for Californians, in so many abandoned house projects, held up by little more than their absent owners’ left-behind dreams and looming debt. His roving approach may well recall his start in a conventional street photography vein, but his photographs now belie a practice so fundamentally dependent on the overt depiction of people.

Forever. By Anthony Hernandez. Mack, 2017.

Forever. By Anthony Hernandez. Mack, 2017.

The photographs of Forever also echo a central aspect of Hernandez’s earlier series, Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and Some Automobiles: Los Angeles. These photographs of Angelinos waiting for the bus or on a break from work summon those liminal spaces that are not this, but also not that. Similarly, the images in Forever suggest that the homeless must forever negotiate the more portentous thresholds of in/out; sheltered/exposed; seen/unseen. The fringe areas (literally and metaphorically) of liquor stores, tobacco shops and strip clubs described in Freeman’s text are themselves understood as potential thresholds of no return. Certain photographs in Forever further occupy the cusp between living and the dead, in a dangling crucifix, a dead girl’s photograph and a defunct funeral tag. Page after page of fences and walls, and objects strung up and weighed down, conjures the explosive politics of the U.S. southern border and the practical impotency and indecency of these markers of other, of lesser. Hernandez’s work has been seen more widely in the last several years; may it continue to serve as a visible refutation of the landscape of homelessness as a zero-sum game and purgatory with no end. — Karen Jenkins

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KAREN JENKINS earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.


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Book Review Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays By Robert Adams Reviewed by Karen Jenkins “Robert Adams’ timely new book, Art Can Help is an invigorating response to a waxing cultural despair over the state of the world and our dubious agency in it. Offered not as a mere balm, this collection of just over two dozen short essays is a quietly powerful argument for what art can and should mean in our lives."

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays.  
By Robert Adams. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

 

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays
Reviewed by Karen Jenkins

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays.
Text by Robert Adams.
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, United States, 2017. In English. 92 pp., 34 color illustrations, 5½x8¼x½".

Robert Adams’ timely new book, Art Can Help is an invigorating response to a waxing cultural despair over the state of the world and our dubious agency in it. Offered not as a mere balm, this collection of just over two dozen short essays is a quietly powerful argument for what art can and should mean in our lives. Two opening passages unpack the formative influence of Edward Hopper on Adams’ way of looking at and making art. The texts that follow delve into favorite and affecting photographs around which Adams champions a deeply personal experience with art, one which demands accountability and an intrinsic connection between art and life. The Introduction and Afterword bookend Adams’ lyrical unraveling of art that ‘helps’ with a bald critique of the failings of that art practice that he sees as facile or empty. He writes: “This atrophying away of the genuine article is a misfortune because, in an age of nuclear weapons and overpopulation and global warming, we need more than ever what art used to provide. Somehow we have to recommit to picture making that is serious.”

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays. By Robert Adams. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays. By Robert Adams. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

A weighty directive to be sure, but these essays not only deliver; they elucidate and delight. I happily read all 88 pages in one sitting, my shared love of photography and belief in art’s centrality to life burnished anew. With graceful brevity, Adams offers narratives that are at once sharply focused on the contents within each frame and that send the reader off on trails of expansive analogy to literature, poetry and music. Many reflect his abiding commitment to the landscape and how art can challenge our incursions and insults, as well as sustain our experience of beauty and the sublime. The “wonderful gloom” of Wayne Gudmundson’s photograph of abandoned grain elevators is balanced for Adams by a flight of birds and a tree’s wing-like boughs, together “a melodic answer to the bass line of the deserted buildings with their static darkness.” In discussing Eric Paddock’s photograph of a distant railroad crossing in a vast Colorado plain, Adams speaks to emptiness and solitude, conjuring both the views once commemorated in “quietly local postcards” as well as poet William Stafford’s take on such landscapes conjuring “space, and the hurt of space after the others are gone.”

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays. By Robert Adams. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Art Can Help: New and Selected Essays. By Robert Adams. Yale University Art Gallery, 2017.

Most stirring for me were those passages that foreground art’s capacity to re-engage us in life, as active and accountable participants, as well as those that lauded a life devoted to its creation. He sees the empathy and culpability in Garry Winogrand’s photograph, shot through a windshield, of a calf stumbling between two opposing cars on a western road, arguing that his “photograph keeps us alive, overruling all assurances from behaviorists that we are never guilty.” In ten short paragraphs illustrated by two photographs from Judith Joy Ross’s Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools, Adams folds us into his unforgettable relationship with these works, from the notion of a shared experience of pain to a hope for the future, crafted on both aesthetic rigor and visual and narrative delights. When he writes, “This is the sort of thing that is worth a life,” we are powerless to disagree. It is one of Adams’ many gifts that a lifetime of serious attention to looking at art and making photographs has yielded these captivating, important takes on what 35 odd pictures mean to him. Whether we share his wonder with these views, or have our own sacred fold, he wins the day not with heavy-handed insistence, but with an understated authority encompassing intelligence, wonderment and a devotion to looking carefully and owning what he sees. — Karen Jenkins

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KAREN JENKINS earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.


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Book Review Nothing's in Vain By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy Reviewed by Karen Jenkins “The opening sequence of Nothing’s in Vain reflects that feeling of a tentative, catch-as-catch-can initial approach, while also laying out the collection’s overarching themes. The cover photograph of a wall of rock rising from the ocean, solid and impenetrable, yields to blurry first impressions of Dakar’s natural forms, architecture and inhabitants."

Nothing's in Vain.  
By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

 

Nothing's in Vain
Reviewed by Karen Jenkins

Nothing's in Vain.
Photographs by Emmanuelle Andrianjafy.
Mack, London, United Kingdom, 2017. 112 pp., 54 four-color and 20 duotone illustrations, 8¼x11".  

Much lamentation has been offered on the kind of tourist photography driven by a checklist of “must sees” and a tunnel vision approach that so often negates the in-the-moment experience and opportunity for discovery. But this impulse to hone in on the recognizable is also an understandable reaction to “newness” and can help to establish a starting point or guiding parameters for exploration. When it’s not just about grabbing the visual souvenir, the camera can offer a way to cope with the vast unfamiliarity that can mark travel or relocation. By providing a literal framework and for some a certain remove, the act of photographing can be both reassuring and transformative. In 2011, Emmanuelle Andrianjafy made a new home in Dakar, Senegal, a move prompted by her husband’s work. She expected that her upbringing in Madagascar and years spent living in France would have eased the transition to this coastal capital (once part of the French colonial empire); instead, she found it jarring and disorienting. Within two years, Andrianjafy took up photography as a way of finding her way clear.

Nothing's in Vain. By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

Nothing's in Vain. By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

In a companion essay for Andrianjafy’s entrancing debut publication, Nothing’s in Vain, Emilie Øyen, an American writer living in Dakar, describes her own unfolding experience of the city, beginning with her approach by taxi. “I pushed through a daily, alien landscape that was not my life, but a constant theater to observe,” she writes. Many of Andrianjafy’s first photographs were also shot from the window of a moving car. In words and images, both women offer a reminder that for those keen on catching the moving spectacle from a safe distance, such forms of transportation can serve as a buffer, while also framing the view. The opening sequence of Nothing’s in Vain reflects that feeling of a tentative, catch-as-catch-can initial approach, while also laying out the collection’s overarching themes. The cover photograph of a wall of rock rising from the ocean, solid and impenetrable, yields to blurry first impressions of Dakar’s natural forms, architecture and inhabitants. One shot depicts a seated man awash in an amber stain of heat and suspended animation. The bloody gash of a fish’s gut is both close-up details and scarred landscape. The natural world of trees and grass sandwich an expanse of bland white wall; a splintered crack the only blemish to its solid surface.

Nothing's in Vain. By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

Nothing's in Vain. By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

Andrianjafy’s first images of Dakar were in black and white, but as color joins the mix, her approach becomes less mediated. Her street scenes, portraits and views of architecture, and nature form a rich mélange of color, texture, and shifts in scale and perspective. A changing urban environment is marked in ways both subtle and discordant, as she notes the turnover from old to new, building up and tearing down. Some structures feel organic to the environment in their worn surfaces and layered steadfastness, while others stand out in their soulless artifice. Recurring images of litter and debris underscore what is being discarded on a grander scale. The intersection of natural and man-made environments manifests where Astroturf heaps on top of growing grass and weeds force their way through concrete as nature finds a way and holds its ground. Where her gaze turns to people, Andrianjafy has created portraits of fellow residents that are unforced and direct, as well as idiosyncratic alternatives to her photographs of the region’s opaque leaders and figureheads, broadcast in posters and TV screens.

Nothing's in Vain. By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

Nothing's in Vain. By Emmanuelle Andrianjafy. Mack, 2017.

As a keepsake of Andrianjafy’s quest to find her way in a dazzlingly new place, Nothing’s in Vain powerfully conjures her emotional, sensual and intellectual experiences, without ever completing a sentence or closing the book on what Dakar is or will be for her. Andrianjafy’s photographs have become her own deeply personal touchstones of recognition and deeper acquaintance that will resonate with those of us already in thrall to the medium’s powers. So much of her imagery will continue to draw me in. — Karen Jenkins

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KAREN JENKINS earned a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the History of Photography from the University of Arizona. She has held curatorial positions at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA. Most recently she helped to debut a new arts project, Art in the Open Philadelphia, that challenges contemporary artists to reimagine the tradition of creating works of art en plein air for the 21st century.


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