Book Review Some Lights Are From Fires Photographs by Barbara Bosworth Reviewed by George Slade "Bosworth’s book is simply exquisite. That is, both simple in execution and profoundly emotive. Six bound signatures, fits within the span of my hand. Shades of gray, sprinkled with tests of light from fire, moon light, and stars. Suggested listening: Ry Cooder. .."

Some Lights Are From Fires 

By Barbara Bosworth.

Some Lights Are From Fires
Photographs by Barbara Bosworth
Dust Collective, 2024. 19 images, 6x8½".

Bosworth’s book is simply exquisite. That is, both simple in execution and profoundly emotive. Six bound signatures, fits within the span of my hand. Shades of gray, sprinkled with tests of light from fire, moon light, and stars. Suggested listening: Ry Cooder.

The dedication is spine-tingling. “For Ron, my brother, who lived in the shadows. He taught me to look for the light. 1955-2022.” One sees an angular figure disappearing into the distance, moving in three zoom out steps from a medium shot to an expansive beach scene. Sky, ground, shadow, water, clouds, all merge as the crepuscular context. Two hands insistently point skyward, the barest touches of human presence. We are so small in this space.

Edition of 100. A threnody, moving to tears, that arrives in a modest package. You might expect a volume like this to be mere field notes from a photographer known for large-format captures. Instead, this is a fully articulated, self-contained artists book. The content arrives in waves, swoops, and showers of sparks.

Night vision doesn’t see colors, just forms. And we are graced with form herein.

My words gild this lily.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/

Image c/o Randall Slavin

Book Review Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía Photographs by Louis Carlos Bernal Reviewed by Blake Andrews “How is it that Louis Carlos Bernal has never had a proper monograph before now? The late master was revered as “the father of Chicano art photography.” But his influence extended beyond his Mexican/American heritage. He was a major figure in the 70s and 80s, first in his native Arizona and then nationally..."

Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía.

Louis Carlos Bernal
Monografía
Aperture, New York, NY, 2024. 232 pp., 166 images, 8½x10½".

How is it that Louis Carlos Bernal has never had a proper monograph before now? The late master was revered as “the father of Chicano art photography.” But his influence extended beyond his Mexican/American heritage. He was a major figure in the 70s and 80s, first in his native Arizona and then nationally. He founded the photography program at Pima Community College in Tucson, where he supervised and taught. Over a career spanning roughly two decades, he received numerous awards, commissions, articles, and collaborations, earning his archive eventual placement at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.

All fine. But for those seeking his work in printed form, the trail is thin. His photos have only appeared to date in scattered publications, tucked away in journals or magazines. For various reasons he did not publish any monographs during his lifetime. And no one has taken up the mantle since his death in 1993.

Better late than never. Aperture’s eponymous tome Louis Carlos Bernal makes up for lost time in one fell swoop. This career survey finally confers full retrospective treatment on Bernal, with hundreds of photographs, multiple essays, press clippings, a biographical timeline, and snapshots from his life. In the spirit of Bernal’s bilingual heritage, the texts are in English and Spanish. The book is published in conjunction with a major retrospective at CCP in Tucson, on display from September 14th, 2024, through January 25th, 2025.

For those who can’t visit CCP in person, Aperture’s book is a fair substitute. After a small flurry of introductory photographs, exhibition curator Elizabeth Ferrer dives in with a lengthy overview of Bernal’s life and work. If you don’t yet know much about Bernal, Ferrer’s essay is a good starting point. She weaves a history from his birth in Douglas, Arizona to his military service, grad school, and early mentorships. From this point his career ascended inexorably, blending teaching, documentary studies, and regular stabs into the insular world of museums, galleries, and recognition.

As with many photographers working in the art trenches, Bernal’s spent much of his career plagued by a sense of under appreciation. He came from a minority culture, documented neglected barrios, and lived far from any major art capitals. If he developed a chip on his shoulder against the gallery set, that was understandable. Bernal’s delicate dance with respect, accomplishment, and financial livelihood is one of the main through lines in Ferrer’s bio. In response to those inquiries, this belated monograph might finally offer a sense of closure.

The other through line is of course Bernal’s photographs. The book plucks representative groupings from various projects, tracing a rough chronology from 1972 to 1989. All are faithfully reprinted, even if they preserve occasional film-era imperfections such as C-print color casts or heavy-handed shadows. They trace a timeline of Bernal’s styles from abstract to conceptual to formal records and street photography, initially in monochrome and later in warm color. The selection spotlights this sequence of interests, making increasingly assured probes into environmental portraiture. It’s here that Bernal’s primary focus would settle for the bulk of his career. As evidenced by the cover photograph — the iconic image Dos Mujeres, Douglas, Arizona, 1978 — he developed into a master of the genre.

Many of Bernal’s in situ portraits were shot close to home in Arizona, in the barrios of Tucson, Douglas, or Phoenix. Speaking fluent Spanish, he made easy connections with potential subjects. He liked to position people in or near their homes, where their gardens, furniture, wall hangings, framed pictures (a particular fascination), TVs, curtains, tools, and Christmas lights could help him tell their backstories. Bernal’s wide-angle lens captured tracts of raw information, weaving tales of memory, salvage, ritual, and routine. In several cases the settings alone sufficed, and he dispatched with humans to shoot empty domestic interiors. In a couple of photographs, a simple collection of mascara on a dresser is enough to describe a person. Regardless of subject, he was a wiz with technique. His photographs apply mixed lighting, color, compositional layering, and framing easily, and in distinctive style.

With over a hundred photographs, Aperture’s tome is a great introduction to Bernal’s oeuvre. This book will be a treat for any fans of portraiture or Southwest photography. But Bernal’s pictures may not even be the main highlight. For me, the photographs of Bernal himself are perhaps even more magnetic. Several old snapshots are reproduced throughout the book. A photo of the Bernal family in 1940s Arizona has a quiet majesty. He is later shown in high school posing with his camera. Another picture shows him mustached by a mural, and there he is with Manual Alvarez Bravo, both being photographed by Graciela Iturbide. Sifting these old prints is a pleasure. It turns out Bernal was photographed plenty by others, and even rubbed shoulders with photo royalty. If he felt under-appreciated, that was never quite true. Louis Carlos Bernal should be the final nail in that misconception.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

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

Book Review How We Hold the Sun Photographs by Anna Rotty Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “How do we get to really know a place? How does a place hold a fixed impression on our memory? Do we place it by the qualities of its smell, the qualities of its soil, the qualities of its light, the qualities of its water?"

How We Hold the Sun By Anna Rotty.

How We Hold the Sun
Photographs by Anna Rotty
Self-published, 2024. English, 54 pp., 9x10".

How do we get to really know a place? How does a place hold a fixed impression on our memory? Do we place it by the qualities of its smell, the qualities of its soil, the qualities of its light, the qualities of its water?

Part catalog and part monograph, How We Hold the Sun is a softback, perfect-bound book, nearly square, at 9x10 inches, and self-published by Anna Rotty on the occasion of her achievement of an MFA from the University of New Mexico.

I feel the presence of manipulation in the images in both a playful and fastidious sense: as an exploration of the flattening of space and depth that is most integral to photography’s grammar, as well as the sophisticated approach to pacing the images, text, and cut out windows that are a part of the book’s pages.

Rotty’s photographs included in this book were made around the landscape of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The images instigate many questions: How does light travel? How can it bend? And what can it reveal about the natural world, and its wonders, that we don’t already understand?

I keep coming back to the word diffraction. Diffraction is defined by Merriam Webster as a modification which light undergoes especially in passing by the edges of opaque bodies–like water–or through narrow openings and in which the rays appear to be deflected.

“Part of what is owed is not to look away. Although I see mourning underneath the surface of these photos, somewhere there between all the layers of water and time’s relentlessness that she has stacked together within the frame, what strikes you from the surface is the light. The light is achingly beautiful. If Anna points something out to you, I suggest you follow her gaze and try to see what it is that she’s seeing. Knowing that it takes some time for your eyes to adjust to the sunlight, please be patient. Sit and watch all day long with her. Do it again the next day, and a week later. Keep coming back, and looking, and looking.”

– Excerpt from Please look closely, this is important, 

an essay by Robin Babb included in the book

Much like Rotty’s photographs, How We Hold the Sun exhibits modifications, interventions, and layers: isosceles triangle cut-outs that have been slightly burned near the corners, mimic the shape of geometric light diffractions in a photograph on the subsequent pages, echoed later in an aerial photograph of the Rio Grande. The shapes repeat. The colors shift. The difference between the earth’s matter and what might be human flesh isn’t clear. Visual interplay is abundant. Rotty wishes to remind us, or confuse us, over and over again, that these transformational entities — light, water, sediment — are not impervious to manipulation. And that, like the sun, they can be seared into our mind’s eye.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

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 All the Colors I Am Inside Photographs by Deb Achak Reviewed by George Slade "Seattle-based photographer Deb Achak’s “debut monograph” (says her bio) feels like the first chapter of a longer story. It’s a work in progress. All the Colors I Am Inside is a tantalizing set of photographs implying various tactile experiences to be had..."

All the Colors I Am Inside By Deb Achak.

All the Colors I Am Inside
Photographs by Deb Achak
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2023. 112 pp., 9½x11¼x¾".

Seattle-based photographer Deb Achak’s “debut monograph” (says her bio) feels like the first chapter of a longer story. It’s a work in progress. All the Colors I Am Inside is a tantalizing set of photographs implying various tactile experiences to be had. Inhale a verdant pine forest. Feel the cool stone by the creek, or the sun as it drapes over your shoulder. Enjoy the surprise of a bird’s nest grounded under a canopy of dandelions. Then, as the book ends, fireworks, watery submersion, a cloud of mist, and an ampersand moon (you must see it to understand) all hinting, like an ellipsis, of more to come. And, and, and, what? Book number two, I suppose.

Threads will advance in the second volume. We may learn more about the hazy, occluded figures who float through this book. There’s kinetic potential, which is currently, curiously, bound up, restrained somehow. Achak is keeping something at bay here — the fireworks are unseemly in their raucousness; the picture detonates like a classical catharsis, a bloody Shakespearean climax amidst a forest idyll.

Occlusion takes several forms. Where things have been, like a rectangular snow shadow (“Grass Carpet”). Something removed. A sense of yearning. Lots of darkness, occasional splashes and flashes of color. People partially seen. A world half realized. Hints of “culture” in the form of a light tracking through the woods and sprinklers at night owing their visibility to long exposures and human interventions.

How do we know when things are ripe? What does ripe mean, really? Ready to consume. Having reached fulfillment, fullness.

Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Green Striped Melons,” used as an epigraph in this book, offers an exquisite key to unlocking Deb Achak’s photographs. “An unexpected weight,” Hirshfield offers, “the sign of their ripeness.” So good! Everyone knows that sensation. Pick up an orange, cantaloupe, tomato, a handful of grapes, and recognize that it is heavier than you expected. That’s density, a fruity liquid fullness that will spill forth with bite or slice.

Achak’s photographs seek ripeness. There’s a quality of imminence in her images, a sense of things approaching peak but stopping just short of revelation. Hirshfield’s metaphor of weight is central. Achak is not afraid of darkness, the shadowy zones from which illumination rises. There must be darkness to appreciate light, right?

A while back on this blog (Thursday, July 1, 2021) I wrote about Cig Harvey’s ravishing colors in her monograph Blue Violet. Achak may be imagining such a full-blown spectacle. Wisps of color float about, suggesting chromatic conflagrations to come. (Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.)

Feel the weight. Stay tuned.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/

Image c/o Randall Slavin

Book Review För Photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska Reviewed by Brian Arnold "One of my favorites in Robert Adams’s first book of essays, Beauty in Photography, is a piece called “Making Art New.” It’s a funny and playful essay written after paging through the latest copy of Artforum delivered to his front door in rural Colorado..."

För. By Agnieszka Sosnowska.

För
Photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska

Trespasser, Austin, TX, 2024. 88 pp., 47 tritone plates, 11x13½".

“There is no progress in art, any more than there is in making love.”

— Man Ray

One of my favorites in Robert Adams’s first book of essays, Beauty in Photography, is a piece called “Making Art New.” It’s a funny and playful essay written after paging through the latest copy of Artforum delivered to his front door in rural Colorado. Adams ultimately feels that what defines new, at least by the magazine’s standards, feels a bit like a Sears Roebuck catalog selling the latest washer and dryer set. Contemporary art, Artforum tries to persuade him, is just like the newest mechanical technologies offering experience and luxury unlike anything before it; the latest trends in post-performancism are no different than the magic of this year’s wrinkle guard¹. This way of thinking leads Adams to some important questions. What does new mean in art? What is the distinction between new and novel? Shouldn’t art aspire to a truth greater than novelty? Answering these questions, he concludes something different, and that the only “contemporary” that matters in art is whether it speaks to the current situation. Would anybody question that Shakespeare’s insights don’t still reflect on our societies and behaviors today? I do fundamentally agree with Adams; quality in art is not a metric based on technology or appearances but is really about the creator’s ability to reflect on the essential joys and struggles of life, to render truths that seem essential to our being and in a way that evokes empathy from its audience. Perhaps it is easiest to think of it this way: anyone falling in love for the first time is experiencing love as if it has never been experienced before, and thus it is a tale that never grows old.

When I spend time with För, the lovely new publication of photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska published by Trespasser Books, it is easy for me to imagine the photographer taking similar inspiration from Adams’s essay. För is a laconic book, mostly pictures with very minimal text and presented in a clear and concise manner. The photographs are made with Graflex 4x5 (there are a couple of exceptions), and all in a classical, documentary style. The pictures in För, however, tell a rich story about love and pain, joy and loss, and are executed with emotional clarity and technical precision, rooted in a deeply personal connection to photography. Simply designed photographs made with traditional black-and-white values, Sosnowska demonstrates, can still convey the most essential attributes of being human today, which is ultimately what led me back to Adams. Her approach couldn’t be simpler — photograph the people and places she calls home with an equal affection for her subjects as she has for making photographs. Through the course of För, we see a small selection of people (presumedly family) leading a humble, pastoral life in the stark, harsh tundra of East Iceland. The pictures are simply developed but rigorously seen, and presented with a rich, open, and inviting black-and-white palette. The place she describes is harsh — I can almost feel the biting winds — but also full of warmth and love, days occupied by the beauty of vast landscapes, horses, imaginative children, and warm baths.

Given the minimal information offered in För, I did some inquiry into Sosnowska and learned she was born in Poland and lived most of her early life in Boston before settling in Iceland. The pictures in För are from her current home, or at least as what I understand as such, an unnamed place in East Iceland photographed between 2001-2021. I find this significant because when I look at Sosnowska’s photographs, it’s not only easy for me to see her tattered and highlighted copy of Beauty in Photography somewhere close by, but I can also imagine her as something of an exile, a stranger in a strange land where no place feels totally like home. Herein, I think, is the real impact of Sosnowska’s pictures — clear, affectionate photographs driven by a profound personal emptiness. Throughout För, there is an incredible tension between connection and isolation, a balancing act between loneliness and love.

Implied, I think, in Adams’s conclusions in “Making Art New” is patience. Anybody reading Shakespeare for the first time knows it’s not easy, and you must take the time to really understand his complex understanding of language and storytelling. Thinking of this photographically, I remember Frank Gohlke once telling me that if you make 7 good pictures in a year you should consider it a success. In the age of social media, we’ve totally lost sight of this, but composed over 20-years, För is a brilliant example of what can happen when you think of photographs this meticulously. Towards the end of “Making Art New,” Adams quotes both Man Ray — that idea that making love can only evolve so much — but also shares a lovely idea from American poet Robert Frost: “Poetry is like love. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Any lasting love requires rigor and patience, and in my mind these ideas lead quickly to wisdom and empathy.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

1. Beauty in Photography was first published in 1981; the cover story in Artforum in October 1981 was “Post-Performancism” by Douglas Davis.

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 Bury Me in the Back Forty Photographs by Kyler Zeleny Reviewed by Blake Andrews “When we last checked in on Kyler Zeleny, in November 2020, he had just published Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle. The product of 10,000 miles and 4 years of road tripping, this sharply observed monograph revealed the rural Canadian heartland through a colorful blend of portraits, social landscapes, and prairie vistas..."

Bury Me in the Back Forty By Kyler Zeleny.

Bury Me in the Back Forty
Photographs by Kyler Zeleny
The Velvet Cell, Berlin, Germany, 2024. 168 pp.

When we last checked in on Kyler Zeleny, in November 2020, he had just published Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle. The product of 10,000 miles and 4 years of road tripping, this sharply observed monograph revealed the rural Canadian heartland through a colorful blend of portraits, social landscapes, and prairie vistas.

Crown Ditch was the second volume in a planned trilogy of photobooks, following on the heels of Zeleny’s debut Out West (The Velvet Cell, 2014). That title had staked out similar territory (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in methodical style: square format pictures of rural outposts captioned simply by census counts, e.g. 633, 504, 394, 108, and so on. You didn’t need the place names to get the general gist of either book. These were tiny burgs to begin with, and their populations seemed to shrink before Zeleny’s lens.

For the final book of his trilogy, Bury Me In The Back Forty, Zeleny has turned his attention to the Canadian prairie once again. This time he has zeroed in on a single location: Mundare, population ~700. This is a small town in central Alberta, first settled by Ukrainian immigrants in 1907. It proudly claims to host the world’s largest garlic sausage statue. It is also the original hometown of Kyler Zeleny. Never mind Thomas Wolfe’s warning. Zeleny can indeed go home again. He toted along his camera gear, plus an old yearbook for good measure. The resulting monograph documents some of the people and places of modern day Mundare. Better yet, it offers a window into Zeleny’s shifting curatorial style.

What do I mean by stylistic shift? Well, design-wise Bury Me In the Back Forty is markedly different than either of its predecessors. For starters, the raw physical framework is lifted directly from an earlier book, a decidedly non-artistic community history from 1980 called “Memories of Mundare”. As best I can tell, this was something like a town almanac or annual register. Its bygone happenings are reproduced as facsimile pages, renumbered and repurposed into the new tome. Zeleny provides all of this material without much explanation or context, at least initially, and it’s up to the reader to sort through the mundane Mundare minutae. A table of contents lays out the local nuts and bolts, listing such subjects as the Mundare Choir, the Mundare Fire Brigade, the school system, and various civic stalwarts and events. Taken altogether, “Memories of Mundare” is a sort of book length encyclopedia entry. It’s comprised of dense two-column text, spiced regularly with half-tone monochrome pictures, all faithfully replicated.

The old tome is well produced and squeaky clean, and it glows with civic pride. It’s a pleasant enough read. But for Zeleny’s purposes, “Memories of Mundare” is merely the first layer. Its fawning accounts become a sort of visual wallpaper, the foundation for a mélange of added photos, notes, and mementos. A color print of a friend in a bar is nice enough on its own. But it takes on new meaning when montaged atop past social gatherings. A studio shot of glazed donuts makes an intriguing contrast with posed photos of group calisthenics. Zeleny’s photos of utility poles, campers, and obscured ladders veer into experimental territory in their own right, and they’re given an absurdist jolt when juxtaposed with old news accounts.

The old pages are generally subservient, sometimes buried completely, other times lost in the experimental frenzy. After all, who needs an archival counterpoint when contemporary playthings are right at hand? Zeleny bobs and weaves between various media, interjecting cutouts (a symbol for declining rural populations?), sewn collage, crayon markings, cropping notations, and typewritten correspondence. “The result,” at least according to Velvet Cell, “is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events.”

The range of specs, styles, and approaches is impressive. Zeleny probably had a lot of fun putting this book together. But it’s hard to get a good fix on his intentions. Is Bury Me In The Back Forty meant to be a trip down memory lane (he was born in 1988, several years after “Memories Of Mundare”), a post-modern assemblage, a slice of prairie living, or avant-garde monograph? Hmmm. I’m afraid I can’t answer that question with much certainty. But rest assured, his book is entertaining. And readers will likely learn some Mundare trivia while browsing. After all the visual fireworks have closed, Zeleny’s lengthy afterword sheds some light on the subject. His essay ties together Mundare’s history with some of his own connections there. Zeleny himself has decamped for Edmonton (roughly 40 miles west of Mundare) and the rest of the town is on a similar trajectory. The story is the same throughout Canada’s rural west. Most towns face declining prospects. “The prairie party is over,” Zeleny writes. “Today the town is full of solitary drinkers, drinking from bottles that empty them.”

Although Zeleny’s essay is interesting, the tone is somewhat impersonal and academic, closer to reportage than diary. Perhaps that’s just his inner photographer speaking, hewing to straight facts? Or maybe some of the old almanac’s expository style has rubbed off? Or it could be those many years living away from Mundare, tucked in a cohort of urbane photo theorists. In any case Bury Me In The Back Forty leans smartly into the contemporary photobook zeitgeist, which has come to favor curation, editing, and design over the straight style of his debut. This is probably why it succeeds as the final volume of the trilogy. He’s come a long way from Out West, in both years and method. Bury Me In The Back Forty feels like a mark in the sand. Here I am, it announces, the third and final book. This is the impossible spot where Mundare meets photoland.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

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