Book Review Sons of the Living Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Reviewed by Brian Arnold "There are some things about this man that I feel that I know, but it’s hard to say since I’m not given much context for the photograph. There is no date, location or name. It shows a white(ish) man seated on a sidewalk, his sandaled feet spilling out into the gutter. He leans back against a shuttered building, plywood and corrugated tin covering the windows..."

Sons of the Living by Bryan Schutmaat.

Sons of the Living
Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat

Trespasser, Austin, TX, 2024. 188 pp., 90 tritone plates on uncoated paper, 11¾x14¾".

        But when I pass through the pearly gate
        Will my gown be gold instead?
        Or just a red clay robe with red clay wings
        And a red clay halo for my head?

                                                    — Gillian Welch

There are some things about this man that I feel that I know, but it’s hard to say since I’m not given much context for the photograph. There is no date, location or name. It shows a white(ish) man seated on a sidewalk, his sandaled feet spilling out into the gutter. He leans back against a shuttered building, plywood and corrugated tin covering the windows. His body sits effortlessly, looking both powerful and relaxed. He’s a hardworking man with rich golden skin, and it feels clear he’s earned his living in the desert landscape of the American Southwest — a deep, dark complexion cultivated under a relentless sun and layers of red sand. Despite his obvious strength, he also looks very awkward. His crown is a pale, Aryan complexion, kept white and clean by the Stetson he wore out in the field. He reminds me of John Grady Cole, the protagonist in the brilliant Cormac McCarthy novel All the Pretty Horses. To be clear, I remember American landscape painter Richard Thompson once telling me what the film adaptation got wrong; Richard was convinced that John Grady Cole, the handsome and romantic hero, would have a tan line from his hat around the circumference of his head on account of him riding the southwest deserts for weeks, always wearing his dirty and sweat-stained hat. It’s a little less picturesque than Matt Damon’s portrayal of the character, but it might also provide an important metaphor for understanding John Grady, crowned with a halo made from the unforgiving desert sands.

I found this photograph in Sons of the Living, the new, much adored book from Bryan Schutmaat and Trespasser Books. Sons of the Living is a richly visualized, harsh and romantic story about the people and landscapes found in the deserts of the American West. I’ve never really been to Texas — Schutmaat’s homeland and muse — but I have spent a lot of time in the backcountry of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, so think I have good feel for the people and places he photographed. The deserts of the American Southwest are as gorgeous as they are brutal, full of red hills, sage brush, ancient canyons, powerful oil and mineral industries, and an unlikely assortment of outsiders lost along its highways. Schutmaat continues to work in black-and-white, view camera photography, and does not shy away from portraying his deep love for traditional depictions of the region. Indeed, many of his photographs feel like deliberate references to masterpieces by Timothy O’Sullivan, Laura Gilpin, Georgia O’Keefe, and Robert Adams. I would describe Sons of the Living as a loving, tragic, and poetic rendition of the last American frontier, a harsh and broken landscape full gorgeous views and broken dreams.

Schutmaat builds his narrative by mixing photographs of desert vistas (many focusing on highways and trains — both essential for understanding westward expansion) with portraits of people he met during his travels. The landscape photographs are very classical — a train trestle spanning a river gap, the elegant curve of a highway traversing the rolling hills, and storms brewing along a distant horizon (beautifully reminiscent of some platinum pictures by Laura Gilpin) — and clearly articulate the place. The portraits offer an interesting cross-section of characters — workers, drifters, outlaws, and mystics — all revealed as desperate seekers on a lost highway, depicted with remarkable clarity and empathy. Together these pictures present a haunting perspective on the American frontier in the 21st century, Manifest Destiny when the oil wells are dying and the mines abandoned.

To better understand Schutmaat’s photos, I again want to circle back to Cormac McCarthy. I know it’s bad timing to evoke McCarthy, after the recent articles in Vanity Fair and the New York Times, but like Willa Cather and Robert Adams, I think of him as one of the great artists of the American West. This time I want to reference his character Billy Purnam, the protagonist of The Crossing, the brilliant sequel to All the Pretty Horses. The Crossing is ultimately a novel about living with trauma. Early in the story, Billy befriends a wild wolf by nursing her back to health. McCarthy creates the feeling that this is the most nurturing and loving relationship Billy has known, making it so incredibly devastating when he kills her himself, shooting her in the head after she loses a brutal dog fight. Soul beaten, Billy spends the rest of the novel riding horseback along the Texas-Mexico border, following a string of chance encounters with mystics and drifters who teach the wounded man how to live with trauma. When I page through the pictures in Sons of the Living, I feel a similar narrative to those found in McCarthy’s novels — a story about a poet, loner, and outlaw at home among the wanderers of the desert Southwest.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Book Review The Crisis Tapes Photographs by Charlie Simokaitis Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis has been sitting on the side table in my library for some months, first puzzling me, and then, speaking directly to my nervous system. After a personal loss left me bereft, my dearest friend began to check in with me regularly to ask 'how is your nervous system?' The answer for weeks was not well..."

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis.

The Crisis Tapes
Photographs by Charlie Simokaitis
TIS Books, 2024. 144 pp., 70 tri-tone images, 9½x11½".

“Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. 

More and more by each glistening minute, 

through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. 

I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.”

—Prayer, Jorie Graham

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis has been sitting on the side table in my library for some months, first puzzling me, and then, speaking directly to my nervous system. After a personal loss left me bereft, my dearest friend began to check in with me regularly to ask “how is your nervous system?” The answer for weeks was not well. During that tender time returning to The Crisis Tapes again and again helped me to reach stasis.

The book begins with a portrait. The portrait is the frontispiece, and one of very few figurative pictures of the book’s 70 tri-tone reproductions. It is the likeness of a girl we do not know. She wears glasses. Her eyes are closed. Then we are on a journey. One that is often quite dark, descriptive of industrial decay. The forest at night, geometric shapes, a dalmatian missing both of its eyes, a girl whose head we cannot see, swimming down into the depths we do not know.

This highly formal book gives its reader the gift of physical space to consider every photograph. The minimal design elevates each image, first on a profoundly individual level, and then felt as a cascading whole. Moving through the pages is like walking by a series of ruins, feeling confusion, and then slowly, figure-by-figure, or more aptly, image-by-image, moving ahead to feel a new awareness of spaciousness in one’s chest. It is a journey from the mundane toward the sacred. A doorway, or a portal, that creates the possibility of a different world. By the end of the pathway, transformation.

The narrative of the book is not easily known. I am not convinced we must know the story behind it all, yet humans are narrative seeking creatures. The publisher, TIS Books, describes that "The Crisis Tapes — the debut monograph of photographer Charlie Simokaitis — is an account of his daughter’s gradual loss of the ability to see. . .” With this fact now known, most all the symbols and geometric shapes point to the anatomy of the eye, the anatomy of the nervous system, and poignantly the presence of the dalmatian becomes symbolic of the fact that the breed can lose their sight due to a number of eye conditions.

By the end of the book I have forgotten the tension and tightness of my own nervous system. I find the experience of the book to be one that allows the length of mourning and the subsequent growth that mourning brings. It depicts the depth of a loss: when something is lost, something is gained. We can feel the echoes of transformation. A transformation that serves to remind us that emotional healing takes far longer than physical healing. But never again are we the same.

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.

Book Review Falkland Road Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Falkland Road is not an enjoyable book. That might be an odd statement to begin a book review, but it’s my frank opinion. Subtitled “Prostitutes of Bombay”, Mary Ellen Mark’s classic monograph assaults the reader with a series of brutal transactions..."

Falkland Road by Mary Ellen Mark.

Falkland Road
Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark
Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2024. 132 pp., 76 images, 11¼x12¾x¾".

Falkland Road is not an enjoyable book. That might be an odd statement to begin a book review, but it’s my frank opinion. Subtitled “Prostitutes of Bombay”, Mary Ellen Mark’s classic monograph assaults the reader with a series of brutal transactions. Young women practice the world’s oldest profession in dingy rooms, fending off an onslaught of horny men, disturbing power dynamics, and grimy conditions. Spend as long as you want putting lipstick on these scenes. It won’t soften the grubby squalor of Mumbai’s red-light district circa 1978.

If the book leaves you unsettled, Mary Ellen Mark is already one step ahead of you. She intended Falkland Road as an exposé to speak truth to power. Photographs can do that on occasion—especially true in the pre-Internet magazine heyday—but only if they’re not sugar coated. Mark applied this maxim to Falkland Road, which became an early foundation for a career built on raw documentary revelation. Most of her later work took the form of black-and-white photography. Falkland Road was a rare foray into color. On the occasion of its recent reprinting, its palette and clarity help distinguish the book as a landmark.

Falkland Road’s first inklings began during Mark’s first trip to India in 1968. She found herself a young stranger in a strange land. She was mesmerized by the titular streets many brothels, but her tentative attempts to photograph them were initially rebuffed. When she returned in 1978—fresh on the heels of her Magnum induction—she was better prepared. “I had no idea if I could do this, but I knew I had to try” she explains in the introduction. She hung around with local prostitutes day after day. “Some of the women thought I was crazy, but a few were surprised by my interest and acceptance of them. And slowly, very slowly, I began to make friends.” From these fitful beginnings, the project gradually extended for four months, from October 1978 to January 1979.

Mark sets the book’s resolute mood with an establishing shot of Falkland Road. It’s an evening exterior view of Bombay’s brothels, taking up most of a two-page spread. Women advertise their services to the street, safely ensconced in open-air rooms behind barred windows. Whether they are being protected or confined is open to interpretation. Mary Ellen Mark’s introduction follows—her essay and captions manifest a sharp writing talent able to match her photo chops—before she dives into the nitty gritty.

The book descends in force. We see photos of women primping and gathering for the upcoming work shift. They gather like school girls, some toting kids or wash buckets. Gradually they’re joined by customers. Anything goes here. Gender bending, domination, toys, and parlor tricks are gently hinted. Anticipation blurs into dusky hues. Couples gawk, cuddle, and get it on, all shot with perfunctory non-judgment. Some photos are quite explicit. Yet none feel especially salacious. These are closer to NatGeo than Penthouse. Whatever the scene or person, Mark is right in the mix, her camera hovering nearby, often with flash in hand. One wonders by what black magic she gained such intimate access, or how she managed to document exotic carnality with such cool remove.

In the wrong hands, sex scenes in a distant country might be easily exoticized. They could be cordoned and emotionally defused if not edited and sequenced with care. Mark maintains a full contact press—with both reader and photo subject—by interweaving portraiture with the more traditional documentary photos. She connects with subjects and receives vulnerable eye contact in return. Some gazes are snatched during nightly duties. Some are quiet poses. One by one, a series of working women take a moment to peer back into her camera. On occasion she catches Johns doing the same. The expressions are typically blank or bemused, not exactly innocent but still hard to pigeonhole. In any case, once they enter the reader’s mind, none of these portraits are easily displaced.

When Falkland Road was originally published in 1981 by Thames and Hudson, it was widely feted as a photographic classic. It was clear that Mark had laid down a marker, but it came with a few hiccups. Color photobooks were technically limited at the time, and the production was flawed with color casts and imperfect scans. Publishing technology has come a long ways since, not to mention place names. E.g. Bombay is now Mumbai.

In 2005 Steidl reprinted Falkland Road with added photographs and improved tonality. That was a step forward, but the 2023 version is even better. Mark’s original Kodachrome slides have been freshly rescanned and printed by Steidl. The colors are rich and contrasty, able at last to meet the raw power of Mark’s subject matter. I won’t say the combination is pleasant. Falkland Road will never be enjoyable to read, and it might sit some time between viewings. But even if it gathers dust on the shelf, it’s a essential component in any documentary photobook library.

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

Book Review Thirty-Six Views of the Moon Art by Ala Ebtekar Reviewed by Brian Arnold "Thinking about Zora Neale Hurston is a great entry for looking at the new work by photographer and academic Wendel A. White, Manifest: Thirteen Colonies. Like Hurston, Wendel developed his work with both the discipline and insight of an academic anthropologist and the skill and wisdom of an artist (some histories are better told in metaphors)..."

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon. By Ala Ebtekar.

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon
Art by Ala Ebtekar

Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2024. 131 pp., 48 images, 10¼x14".

“East of Krakatoa,” the third film in The Ring of Fire documentary, a study of Indonesia by Lorne and Lawrence Blair, describes a meeting between Balinese artist and mystic I Gusti Nyoman Lempad and American astronaut Ron Evans. It wasn’t too long after Evans 1972 mission to the moon that the astronaut visited Lempad at his home outside of Ubud. During his training, Evans discovered the Balinese artist and felt a strong attraction to the moon as depicted in Lempad’s drawings, believing that artist was successful in reaching the moon, whether with his imagination or something more mystical. Evans was influenced by Lempad’s understanding of the cosmos and traveled to Bali to trade pictures with him, offering a signed photograph documenting his NASA mission to the moon for one of Lempad’s drawings. I find this a lovely story, a bonding between science and art, East and West, and mysticism and physics.

Artist Ala Ebtekar does something similar with his pictures of the moon, mixing science and mysticism, in a new series of cyanotypes published by Radius Books, Thirty-six Views of the Moon. Ebtekar’s photographs of the moon are small, simple compositions — really just basic outlines and descriptions of the lunar surface — but rendered much more complex and profound by combining different strategies discovered by embracing both science and art. The pictures are printed on sensitized pages of books published over the last 10 centuries, each of them addressing the mysteries of the moon in their own unique way. Ebtekar’s negatives are all from the Lick Observatory, a research facility for the University of California located on the summit of Mount Hamilton just east of San Jose, CA. The book pages were sensitized with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate – the basic ingredients of any cyanotype — and then exposed from dusk to dawn, contact printed using UV light emanating from the moon. The results are complex, compelling, and poetic, using the tools of science to express more arcane and spiritual philosophies about an astral body that has captivated our imaginations and influenced the world’s civilizations throughout recorded history.

The mixing of East and West is an important part of Ebtekar’s vision. Paging through Thirty-six Views of the Moon, there are many familiar names — Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Robert Heinlein and Toni Morrison among them — as well as pages from books printed in Arabic, Sufi poetry by Rumi and Farid Ud-Din Attar. Thirty-six Views of the Moon also includes several essays, further clarifying this intention to mix the philosophies of East and West, with contributions by Alexander Nemerov, most well-known for his biography of Helen Frankenthaler, Fierce Poise; Kim Beil, a savvy art historian at Stanford University interested in vernacular and popular photography; and Ladan Akbarnia, curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at The San Diego Museum of art. Like many books published by Radius, Thirty-six Views of the Moon includes a bibliography, a surprising delight because with it you can see how the artist developed an approach to his work, making it a sustained investigation that involves much more than just the camera for understanding the subject. Here, Ebtekar references studies of Persian architecture, Sufi philosophers, Japanese haiku, Sun Ra, Malcolm X, and classic American science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin. Traces of all these things are in his pictures, simple cyanotypes that somewhat crudely describe the shape and surface of the moon (it can be a clumsy process, cyanotype).

The photographs in Thirty-six Views of the Moon were originally part of an installation, piecing together a larger image of the moon from the small contact prints, but are presented in the book one at a time. In seeing them this way, we can relish the lovely idiosyncrasies and characteristics unique to cyanotypes and other hand-coated processes; made with superlative production values — like all Radius books — at times you can see the light-sensitive salts mixing with the paper fibers (one of my favorite parts of alternative process photography is that image lies in the paper, not on it) as well as flaws from hand-coating and small stains from processing. This intimacy is essential for really understanding Ebtekar’s photographs, which create a story with nuanced layers of inquiry; using negatives of the moon produced at a 21st century astrophysics laboratory, printed on pages of rich poetry and fanciful prose, somehow evoking both physics and mysticism by exposing them to moonlight, Ebtekar still manages to make something autobiographical, perhaps seen in a subtle, careful sensibility I find inherit to well-crafted, handmade photographs.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

photo-eye Books The New Mexicans: Book Launch and Signing Kevin Bubriski, Guggenheim fellow and author of 7 books Saturday, December 7, 2024, 3:00-5:00 pm Join us for the launch of Kevin Bubriski's The New Mexicans: 1981-1983, just published by Museum of New Mexico Press

 

The New Mexicans: 1981-1983

Book Launch and Signing with Kevin Bubriski

Saturday, December 7, 2024, 3:00-5:00 pm

photo-eye Books

1300 Rufina Circle, Suite A3

Santa Fe, NM 87507

Join us this Saturday for the book launch and signing of photographer Kevin Bubriski's new book The New Mexicans: 1981-1983, just published by Museum of New Mexico Press. Gritty, authentic, and timeless, this follow-up to Bubriski’s best-selling, Look Into My Eyes: nuevo mexicanos por vida expands the lens to include portraits of Native Americans and Anglos in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and parts north, engaging in ceremonies, pilgrimages, and just living.

Can't make the event? Reserve a signed copy here!

“In only two years in the state—time spent mainly in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and parts north—Kevin Bubriski embraced New Mexico and its people. He photographed everything from tattooed manitos making pilgrimage to the Santuario de Chimayó to traditionally attired Pueblo dancers in ancient plazas, from carefully coiffed politicians courting voters to cowboys in full regalia readying to ride. Even photographs taken inside prison walls are alive with the feisty spirit of the people. For longtime New Mexicans, Bubriski’s photographs will brim with nostalgia and ring with a sense of innocence. But undercurrents of historical trauma, social inequity, poverty, and environmental degradation have always haunted the state, and Bubriski’s images reveal shadows here and there: young boys in a bleak concrete flood-control structure with ‘Free Us’ scrawled in graffiti behind them; a heavily burdened man hitchhiking beside the highway on a freezing day; men scavenging through dumpsters; weed-strewn, overgrazed landscapes.

The New Mexicans, 1981–83 will also captivate those not acquainted with the state, providing insight into the eccentricities and cultural richness of northern New Mexico and the diverse characters who call it home.” 

— Don J. Usner

Book Review Dogbreath Photographs by Matthew Genitempo Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Matthew Genitempo’s method has always relied on intuition. He approaches photo projects with no clear finish line in mind. Instead he settles in somewhere and pokes around, secure in the faith that his gut will lead him to photographs..."

Dogbreath by Matthew Genitempo.

Dogbreath
Photographs by Matthew Genitempo
Trespasser, Austin, 2024. 108 pp., 55 tritone plates, 11½x15".

Matthew Genitempo’s method has always relied on intuition. He approaches photo projects with no clear finish line in mind. Instead he settles in somewhere and pokes around, secure in the faith that his gut will lead him to photographs. Gradually he learns the lay of the land and meets a few locals. One thing leads to another. Acquaintances string together, rhythms flex, and passing moments deepen into portrait sessions. After a while he’s got a book.

This process served Genitempo well for his 2019 debut monograph Jasper, set in the Ozark Mountains, and the 2022 follow-up Mother of Dogs, based in Marfa, Texas. So it’s not surprising he would use the same method for the successor. His third book, Dogbreath, finds him wandering the nether regions of Tucson, Arizona. The project actually predates Mother of Dogs, but its production timeline was scrambled by Covid and some personal moves. Still, he never lost the thread. Somewhere along the way his Tucson photos became entwined with a series of old television screenshots. The resulting hybrid feels both contemporary and wistful.

One more thing: Dogbreath is huge. At 15 inches in height, it sprawls like Tucson. The oversized tome comes in a random selection of three cover tints. It may not be suited for conventional bookshelves, but its wide pages provide a nice laboratory for varied layouts. Monochrome photos come in mixed sizes. Placements bounce around the pages, generally hewing to center. They’re sequenced one or two per spread, like saguaros across the mesa.

Dogbreath describes a sun scorched, forlorn place. It is by turns spacious, chain linked, rocky, and guarded by dogs. On occasion Genitempo’s camera alights on a bored looking adolescent boy. These bedraggled characters offer animated relief from the bleak landscape, but just barely. Many look parched and put upon themselves, as if they might melt back into a nearby gravel wash or rock wall. Their mood is blank, almost reptilian, and not entirely different than the characters in Jasper. Did Genitempo catch Tucson during the mid-summer doldrums? Or else in the deep sloth of winter? Or perhaps this is just his natural portrait voice? With no captions or supporting information, the precise ingredients aren’t clear. But it’s certain you won’t find Dogbreath hyped at the local travel bureau.

Like his search process, Genitempo’s compositional style is also rooted in intuition. Unlike his Trespasser stable mate Bryan Schutmaat — whose photos tend toward classical motifs — Genitempo comes at the reader from unlikely angles. He typically captures subjects from the side or obscured by foreground, and he crops with dissonant zeal. In one photo, a stop sign octagon is chopped off at the legs. In another, the edge of a boy’s portrait runs right through his eyeball. The gap behind a small house runs awkwardly through some unfocused foreground, perhaps spider webs or branches? In a shot of a convenience store, the bottom quarter of the frame is devoted to a misplaced boulder.

What exactly is going on here? Considered on their own, any of these examples might seem like careless mistakes. But after seeing Genitempo doing it time and again, they take on voice and currency. If his vision is slightly skewed, that’s fine. He’s just trespassing to a different drummer. Not so easy to do in a world swimming in photographs.

The photos are occasionally interspersed with typewritten texts. They refer to a boy named Dove, to whom the book is dedicated. He is interested in guns, copper, and turning a quick buck. Each passage offers a brief peek into his world, but the messages are cryptic and it’s unclear if Dove is a subject in the book, or how exactly he relates to the photographs. He might be a Tucson local, an invented character, or a figure from Genitempo’s screenshots. As with Jasper and Mother of Dogs, the narrative is murky — maybe even disjointed? — but it somehow holds together. Dove propels the reader through the Tucson underbelly. Depending on the day or mood, it might be rock hard, or warm and fuzzy like a TV screen.

As with all Trespasser books, Dogbreath is beautifully printed and bound. The text passages are a perfect facsimile of an old manual typewriter. The photo reproductions are richly layered on matte paper, with tones clustered in the middle ranges. Heck, even the glitchy old screenshots look lush and attractive. The whole thing almost belongs on a book-making pedestal. It’s the latest testament to this young publisher’s acumen, whose production chops seem to grow with each title. If Trespasser’s finery operates in inverse relation to its prosaic subjects, well, intuition makes for strange bedfellows.

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