Book Review Hunting In Time Photographs by Ronit Porat Reviewed by Meggan Gould "It is useful to know what makes us let down, or put up, our guard, what makes us instantly melt or bristle. My own bright-copper-kettle pleasure points are as follows: clocks, owls, negatives, shadowy enigma, pointed anonymity, archival deep dives, dead birds, tools in deadpan still life, reworked narratives where truth is slippery, and fictions enticing..."

Hunting In Time. By Ronit Porat.

Hunting In Time
Photographs by Ronit Porat

Journal, 2023. In English. 106 pp., 95 color images, 6x8¼".

Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens… I asked my students this week to list their favorite photographed things, emphasis on photographed. (And, of course, the inverse: things that automatically raise eyebrows or make them cranky when in photographic form.) It is useful to know what makes us let down, or put up, our guard, what makes us instantly melt or bristle. My own bright-copper-kettle pleasure points are as follows: clocks, owls, negatives, shadowy enigma, pointed anonymity, archival deep dives, dead birds, tools in deadpan still life, reworked narratives where truth is slippery, and fictions enticing. This partial list was generated while in the thrall of Ronit Porat’s Hunting in Time — as if this book wrote this list for me, reminding me of each and then sequentially checking the boxes.

This is the tale of a murder. Almost a century ago, several teenagers attempted to rob a clockmaker in Weimar Berlin, and he wound up dead. No pun intended. A cacophony of midnight-clanging clocks interrupted the robbery, the perpetrators were spooked, the clockmaker was killed. He had a side gig, dabbling in producing pornographic photographic material in the back room, often starring… you guessed it, one of the future murder suspects. Lengthy — and internationally publicized — murder trials ensued, invoking sexual deviance and underage consent, as well as the ethical foundations of a society in flux.

I said this was a tale, but it is not exactly a narrative. This book is based in multiple exhibitions that the author put together based in and around the archival record of this murder. An essay by Ines Weizman provides a larger societal framework for the murder and its aftermath, helping to contextualize much of the photographic material that Porat was able to mine, as well as her methodological approach. Gender politics are invoked, as is encroaching Nazism, biological clocks, trauma, and the tale of a box of stereoscopic photographs that were supposed to be burned but were not.

Composed of an astonishing breadth of photographic source material, the images weave a complicated and haunting web of associative thought and non-linear pathways. The murdered clockmaker’s photographic record of an obsession with young women serves as a starting point, as do images sourced from contemporaneous publications supporting a then-burgeoning interest in studies of criminal psychology. Fashion magazines, supply catalogues and patent application sketches (handcuffs, corsets) all add to Porat’s repository of suggestive enigma. There are stern owl eyes, limp dangling rabbits, birds in flight and birds on hands, female bodies in motion and female bodies at rest, watchmaking and surgical implements, gloved hands, and cigarettes.

Meticulous documentation of the photographic source material lies enticingly at the back of the book. I spent a not-insignificant amount of time indulging in scratching the itch of the raison d’être of each photograph. Sources range from Ilse Bing to eBay and from Walker Evans to Etsy; photographer unknown was responsible for many. The artist absorbed and physically translated each gleaned photograph with equal-opportunity care; a photograph of a chastity belt in a Parisian museum was lifted from howstuffworks.com and rendered as a negative, followed two pages later by the swan half of Francesca Woodman’s interpretation of Leda and the Swan, similarly inverted and astonishingly arresting. Each image is absorbed into the visual logic of the whole. Singular photographs coexist with multiple exposures and spliced montages; the intermingling of whole and fragment, comfort and danger, predator and prey is allowed to mirror the murky confusion of the tale itself. A rich gamut of monochrome possibilities is represented, simultaneously luminous and shadowy, with tonal ranges in shades of gray, permutations of sepia, and purple-browns.

There is no true-crime-podcast resolution here, neither redemption nor indictment for any of the protagonists. Within this humble, linen-bound cover, I read an invitation to speculate on the power of the archive, and a simultaneous reminder of its inherent futility. Or, our own photographic gaze and its consequences (as maker or audience) is as unreliable, and influenced by cultural milieu, as that of the many photographs produced in and around the murder of a clockmaker-pornographer in Berlin, a century ago. And these photographic musings are a few of my favorite things.

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Meggan Gould is an artist living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,, the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and Speos (Paris Photographic Institute), where she finally began her studies in photography. She received an MFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts — Dartmouth. She recently wrote a book, Sorry, No Pictures, about her own relationship to photography.

photo-eye Gallery New Work by David H. Gibson PHOTO-EYE GALLERY photo-eye is thrilled to share new work by David H. Gibson

Sunrise Moments, August 27, 2022, 7:23:48 a.m, Eagle Nest Lake, NM
10x40 in. Archival Pigment Ink Print, Editon of 25, $1200

For David H. Gibson, making photographs is "a constant process of experiencing the unexpected…like listening to music with its structure of sound forming and unfolding during performance."

Sunrise Moments, August 27, 2022, 7:33:43 a.m, Eagle Nest Lake, NM
10x40 in. Archival Pigment Ink Print, Editon of 25, $1200

Every August, David H. Gibson packs his camera and heads to New Mexico to continue a project he has been working on for at least two decades — photographing Eagle Nest Lake in the early hours of the day. David seeks to capture the ever-changing lake in his photos, each representing a unique moment in time, recording nature's artistry...

Sunrise Moments, August 31, 2022, 6:59:01 a.m, Eagle Nest Lake, NM
5x40 in. Archival Pigment Ink Print, Editon of 25, $1200

While the location is fixed, each minute of every morning is a different experience. Sometimes the lake is shrouded in mist, creating a mysterious and ethereal atmosphere — other times bright and sparkling, dark and stormy, or calm and peaceful...but every experience is different and memorable.

>>View more work by David H. Gibson<<

>>Learn more about David H. Gibson<<

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PRINT COSTS ARE CURRENT UP TO THE TIME OF POSTING AND ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

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If you are in Santa Fe, please stop by we are open Tuesday– Saturday, from 10am- 5:30pm. 

PHOTO-EYE GALLERY
1300 Rufina Circle, Unit A3, Santa Fe, NM 87507

For more information, and to reserve one of these unique works, please contact 
Gallery Director Anne Kelly

You may also call us at (505) 988-5152 x202

Book Review Viajes: Perú 1973-74 Photographs by Edward Grazda Reviewed by Brian Arnold "In such a commodity-driven world, I think we often forget that all art, at least in part, is a process. Don’t get me wrong, I adamantly believe in finely crafted objects, but also think the real art making is all the small things you do to learn how to make that finely crafted object..."

Viajes: Perú 1973-74. By Edward Grazda.

Viajes: Perú 1973-74
Photographs by Edward Grazda

Self Published, 2023. 40 pp., 17 photographs.

In such a commodity-driven world, I think we often forget that all art, at least in part, is a process. Don’t get me wrong, I adamantly believe in finely crafted objects, but also think the real art making is all the small things you do to learn how to make that finely crafted object. I felt that as a musician too, that the real art was in the rehearsal, not the performance. In such a commodity-driven world, we often judge an artist’s work by their Instagram profile more than we do their studio activity, a successful show as units sold, not in the pictures and time spent making them.

I personally love a look behind the curtain and seeing how an artist develops ideas, indeed I often find this more meaningful. One of my favorite parts of large residency programs is the chance to interact with artists fully engaged and immersed in their process. I once shared a studio with photographer Ed Grazda, Nef at the ever-wonderful MacDowell, and was excited to share this history with an artist I’d admired for so long.

I was delighted to get a copy of his newest book Viajes: Peru 1973-1974, a sort of published open studio of pictures Grazda made traveling the country. The book is small, roughly 18 x 12 cm, a humble and simple stitch binding, with a collection of black-and-white photographs made wandering around Peru. It opens with a lovely epigraph from Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas Altamirano, and then a basic presentation of the photographs. There are also text edits, printed on standard copy paper on a cheap inkjet printer, one of which iincludes a short description of the book’s genesis, which includes a reference to a photographer named Sergio Larrain, a Chilean photographer who worked for Magnum, and the other is a list pasted in at the end of the book, detailing the dates and regions of the pictures. The pictures reproduced are truly classic black-and-white travelogue, infused with humility, gratitude, and gentle poetry.

I don’t want to say too much more about this book, wanting instead to relish its simplicity. While not as prolific as peers like Danny Lyon or John Gossage, Grazda has authored some remarkable photo books — my favorite being Afghanistan: 1980-1989, when he traveled with mujahideen fighters from Pakistan fighting against the Soviet invaders. Since then, much of his published work looks at Islam and the evolving history of Afghanistan. Viajes: Peru 1973-1974 is an unlikely but important addition, an earlier body of photographs much like Robert Frank’s photographs of the same region, not yet The Americans but an essential stepping-stone. These photographs of Peru by Grazda feel like a similar stepping-stone, poetic and inquisitive, and an essential learning experience for the work he developed subsequently.

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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 Loisaida Photographs by Tria Giovan Reviewed by Blake Andrews “As the coronavirus pandemic winds down, it’s an opportune moment to highlight the positive aftermath. What’s that you say? Positive? What?"

Loisaida. By Tria Giovan.

Loisaida
Photographs by Tria Giovan
Damiani, 2023. 96 pp., 77 illustrations, 8¼x11½x½".

As the coronavirus pandemic winds down, it’s an opportune moment to highlight the positive aftermath. What’s that you say? Positive? Wha…? Yes, I realize that the plague years have been horrible in many respects. But for housebound artists they offered a rare chance to hit pause, recalibrate, and pivot. Photographers of all stripes took advantage, and in the past year or so we’ve begun to see a viral explosion of pandemic-generated photobooks. These include recent photos of the disease’s impact, and also past work finally given time to resurface.

Tria Giovan’s Loisaida fits the latter category. For almost forty years after she made them, these remarkable photos were tucked away in storage. It’s a depressingly familiar scenario when it comes to film archives. Gary Stochl, Vivian Maier, and April Dawn Alison are merely a few examples. In Giovan’s case, the pandemic was the ticket to rediscovery. Stuck at home in 2020, she finally found time to dig into her old New York photos. A few years of editing, scanning, and sequencing later and voilà: Loisaida the hardback.

“Loisaida” is a Spanglish term for Manhattan’s Lower East Side (LES), an onomatopoeic nickname bequeathed by the local Puerto Rican community. Giovan moved to the neighborhood in 1984. She was 23, photography degree fresh in hand, ready to tackle the world. “The Lower East Side was as gritty, authentic, and humble as it was exotic, vibrant, and colorful,” she remembers. She settled at 29 Clinton, on the corner of Stanton Street, in a third-floor flat. Several photos in Loisaida show exterior views from her apartment. Aiming out the window she captured her fire escape, the urban fabric beyond, and multiple frames of the street corner below. Clinton/Stanton was an ever-revolving stage, and she had a bird’s eye view. One day the corner hosted a boxing ring, another day it was occupied by pushcart vendors. Another moment might reveal a glut of bad parking jobs or a shifting knot of pedestrians. Taken collectively these corner photos offer a snapshot of LES life in flux. The neighborhood was a traditional melting pot for immigrants. It was dynamic and bustling, the antithesis of future pandemic shutdowns. For a young and energetic photographer like Giovan, it was an inexhaustible cornucopia.

To her credit, Giovan was flexible photographically. As might be expected from a public documentarian in Manhattan, much of Loisaida can be loosely classified as street photography. A scene of a child sitting with toys on a bench must have been captured in a fleeting instant, yet Giovan positioned the postures and objects with care. This photo and several like it prove her deft touch in shifting situations. Bystanders and shoppers were typical subjects, often captured in passing against city backdrops. But Giovan didn’t require people. Sometimes a simple facade or shadow was enough. She was fascinated by signage, ironwork, doorframes, and the thousands of other small details that give the LES its vernacular charm.

Some corners she shot head-on, for example a gorgeous frame of melting snow fronting repeated shop window posters. This picture and several others have a stately, static quality. If they exude the formal contemplation of view camera photos, that’s a misconception. Loisaida was shot on foot with small and medium format cameras. “I didn’t overthink it, I just went out and responded instinctively to my environment,” she said in a recent interview. “The trick is to be completely present, to look in your peripheries, to not hesitate. It’s like a muscle or a reflex, you know, the more you use it, the more refined and defined it becomes.”

Since this is a book of older color work, the palette is naturally filmy. Pictures are imbued with undertones of amber and cyan, some venturing—sometimes too far?—into one or the other end of the spectrum. Secondary shades of orange and green provide mood lighting. The delicate tints are faithfully preserved in Damiani’s reproductions. Analog colors play off each other like Astaire and Rogers, with partners typically matched across the spread. For example, the benched boy mentioned above is paired with a photo of an old car in the same dark teal. Reds march with reds, magenta with magenta, and so on. All are buttressed by a grounding layer of grey/cyan concrete, while the book’s landscape format gently prods the viewer along the block.

Looking at Loisaida now with four decades of hindsight, the scenes seem exotic and remote. It’s not just the colors, but the fashions, car models, and demographics too. All have shifted radically since the 1980s. If the photos feel alien, Giovan was an outsider. She was a recent LES transplant when she made these photos, and she represented a cultural shift. She was a recent BFA graduate in a working-class neighborhood, a beacon of impending gentrification, and a fish out of water. “I wandered the streets photographing as if in a foreign land,” she recalls.

That wide-eyed curiosity is part of what makes these photographs special. It lends them an outside observer quality, as if peering in on an urban diorama. They could almost pass for New Topographics remove, but Giovan’s photos have a humanity and sensitivity which is missing from that scene. “A lot of what people associate with that era and that area is the punk rock and the graffiti,” she writes. “I feel like this book takes it somewhere else, somewhere softer.”

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

photo-eye Gallery Chaco Terada: New Work photo-eye Gallery photo-eye Gallery is thrilled to share new work by Chaco Terada.

Chaco Terada, I Am Home 4, 2022, Sumi & Pigment Ink on Silk, 10x7", Unique Print, $1,800

If you've been following Chaco Terada's work, you might be anticipating her annual visit to photo-eye.  I am pleased to report that we were able to catch up with Chaco recently and now have some fantastic new pieces in our inventory.  A selection of the new works can be viewed below, and you can find additional work on our website.  

In the case that you've recently discovered Terada's work, you might be curious about her unique process.  Terada's process involves printing photographic images onto multiple layers of silk, which are often embellished with brushwork using Sumi ink. Each layer of silk is delicately stretched between an 8-ply matboard, like a canvas, so that every semi-transparent layer of silk interacts with each other, much like a watercolor painting.   

Enjoy viewing — and please reach out if you would like to discuss a specific piece.  

 

Chaco Terada, To Pontoon 1, 2018, Sumi & Pigment Ink on Silk, 10x7", Unique Print, $1,800

Chaco Terada, A Fragment 2, 2023, Sumi & Pigment Ink on Silk, 10x7 in, Unique Print, $1800

Chaco Terada, Wind from East 2, 2023, Sumi & Pigment Ink on Silk, 10x7 in,  Unique Print, $1800

If you would like to know more about Chaco Terada and her process you can find more information HERE

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If you are in Santa Fe, please stop by we are open Tuesday– Saturday, from 10am- 5:30pm. 

PHOTO-EYE GALLERY

1300 Rufina Circle, Unit A3, Santa Fe, NM 87507




For more information, and to reserve one of these unique works, please contact 

Gallery Director Anne Kelly

You may also call us at (505) 988-5152 x202







photo-eye Gallery Chaco Terada: Gallery Musings photo-eye Gallery photo-eye Gallery's staff is pleased to share thoughs on one of their favorite images by Chaco Terada.

Since the 6th century, calligraphy has been a revered art form in Japan, following its introduction by Chinese masters. Today, it reflects the influence of Japanese Zen Buddist philosophy, where artists clear their minds to allow each character to arise spontaneously, committing it to paper in fluid motions. Yhohei Teradam, an esteemed calligraphy teacher at the University of Toyama, began teaching his daughter Chaco the art when she was only four years old. In her early twenties, Chaco would bring her passion for calligraphy to the United States and combine it with a new love: photography.

Chaco Terada has always been captivated by the way the lines of folded calligraphy paper showed through when held up to the light. Inspired by a poetry book that merged text and images, she developed a process that combines Sumi ink calligraphic mark-making with black-and-white photographic images printed on sheer silk, producing unique vignettes. Her subjects include landscapes, portraits, flowers and other imagery that is shrouded and obscured, their details blurred by layers of silk. Each layer of silk is then stretched between 8-ply matboards, like a canvas so that each semi-transparent layer of silk interacts with each other. The calligraphy is often painted on multiple layers, giving the impression of free-floating thoughts in the atmosphere. The spaced layers add depth to the images, and the silk adds an ethereal, atmospheric quality to the photos. 

Terada's brushstrokes derive from characters with multiple interpretations, creating impressionistic takes on mood and feeling. She says, "My calligraphy is influenced by life experiences. When I create a brushstroke, I think of the motion of water in a stream or the movement of a breeze. My lines do not create a word in the traditional sense; they interpret the meaning or mood that I feel the word represents."

>> To learn more about represented artist Chaco Terada, click here <<

>> To view more of Chaco Terada's work, click here <<

Gallery Director Anne Kelly and Gallery Assistant Jovi Esquivel share their thoughts on their favorite piece. To fully appreciate Terada's work and the interplay between the layers of silk, they should be experienced in person.

Chaco Terada, Little Fox, Sumi & Pigment Ink of Silk, 10 x 7½" Image, Unique Object, $1800

As the gallery director at photo-eye, I have the opportunity to form a relationship with the artists we represent, which includes hearing stories that are typically not included in general artist statements. These stories help provide a more complete comprehension of an artist's work, so I like to share them alongside experiences whenever possible.

Chaco Terada's relationship with photo-eye dates back about 15 years. Over this period I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Chaco, watching her career blossom and her art-making process evolve.

Chaco began producing art at age four when she began her studies in the ancient art of calligraphy. In her twenties, her calligraphy skills presented the opportunity to travel. Chaco eventually decided to settle in the United States, where she developed a passion for photography, which she began incorporating into her brushwork. In this new process, she moved away from traditional characters, which can be literally interpreted, into a new free-form version of calligraphy that she considers meditative mark-making. These marks benefit from a mastery of the ancient art of calligraphy but are not bound by traditional rules.

I would like to highlight Little Fox, for I see Chaco in all of her images but particularly this one. I perceive Little Fox, as a portrait of the artist, but not in the literal sense. Foxes, known as kitsune, often appear in Japanese folklore and are believed to have paranormal abilities such as shapeshifting. Chaco possesses many positive characteristics associated with foxes. Chaco is cunning, playful and resilient. 

This piece was made in 2020 when most of us were in quarantine. During this time Chaco revisited images from the past, looking for new inspiration. In this process, she came across a photograph that she had made of an Oragomi fox that was photographed on a trip to Japan the year prior and decided to work with that. The final image depicts the origami fox framed by silhouetted foliage. The origami fox appears to be looking out a window and dreaming of returning to the forest to play. 

Because Chaso's images are composed by stacking multiple layers of semi-opaque silk, the individual elements become one, they are capable of representing not just one moment in time but multiple places within the same frame. Her past, present and future are illustrated in a single image.

—Anne Kelly

Chaco Terada, Sounds of Silhouette, Sumi & Pigment Ink on Silk, 10 x 7½ Image, Unique Object, $1800

I feel a profound connection to the wind, which beckons me to dream and awakens all of my senses. Living in New Mexico, I cannot escape the dramatic interplay of light and sound shaped by the forceful will of the wind as it moves through the tall Cottonwood trees. The artwork titled Sounds of Silhouette amplifies this connection for me. The work appears to be a vignette of leaves and branches that have been printed on multiple layers of silk, creating a sense of depth and varying densities that mirror the way light moves through trees. Against this backdrop of light and shadow, Chaco's hand emerges with iridescent calligraphic strokes, capturing the essence of wind whispering through leaves.

Chaco's process of combining calligraphy with photography on silk produces an otherworldly quality that draws me into the artwork and makes me feel connected to the natural world. 

—Jovi Esquivel

If you are in Santa Fe, please stop by during gallery hours or schedule a Virtual Visit here.

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Print costs are current up to the time of posting and are subject to change.

For more information, and to reserve one of these unique, extraordinary new works,

please contact photo-eye Gallery Director Anne Kelly 




photo-eye Gallery

1300 Rufina Circle, Unit A3, Santa Fe, NM 87507

Tuesday– Saturday, from 10am– 5:30pm

You may also call us at (505) 988- 5152 x202

Book Review Who By Fire Photographs by Justin Kimball Reviewed by Brian Arnold "The first time I met photographer and printmaker Richard Benson was at Anderson Ranch in Colorado. He taught a 3-day seminar on the history of photography in print, so really a workshop about his MoMA retrospective The Printed Picture..."

Who By Fire. By Justin Kimball.

Who By Fire
Photographs by Justin Kimball

Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM, USA, 2022. 156 pp., 80 color illustrations, 13¼x10¾".

The first time I met photographer and printmaker Richard Benson was at Anderson Ranch in Colorado. He taught a 3-day seminar on the history of photography in print, so really a workshop about his MoMA retrospective The Printed Picture. Each day Chip gave a 6-hour lecture over boxes of prints, simply telling stories and anecdotes about each of them. Six hours a day, and everyone in the class was riveted, wanting more in fact. We’d leave the classroom and enter out into some of the most alluring vistas of the Rocky Mountains. All of us were there with view cameras, so we would leave class and photograph the landscapes before meeting again for beer and more conversation about photographs and printing. On one of these days, he spent an hour or two talking about Paul Strand, Benson walking us through the making of Time in New England and the Mexican Portfolio (really his best works).

When I look at the books by photographer Justin Kimball, it’s easy for me to see that he sat through these same lectures from Benson — Kimball was a student of his at Yale and is included in the lovely new Aperture book about Benson, Object Lessons. Chip convinced us that the most important schism advancing photography in the 20th century evolved from Paul Strand leaving Lewis Hine to team up with Alfred Stieglitz. Strand’s best work, Chip maintained, balanced the social realism he developed with Hine while also embracing the erudite pictorialism of Stieglitz. It’s been 30 years since I took this seminar with Chip, but these words are still with me, and I believe he was correct about Strand as a pioneering photographer who was able to aestheticize social realism in a way missing from the cold and clinical vision of a photographer like Walker Evans. In Kimball’s work, I see similar tendencies, balancing honest social realism with technical, heartfelt poetics.

My first reading of Who by Fire got me thinking about Time in New England, the body of photographs Paul Strand made in rural New England during World War II. Kimball’s book is a collection of photographs, landscapes, and environmental portraits, all classically rendered and made in the Northeastern United States during the height of the COVID-19. Throughout its pages, he pictures cities, towns, and hillsides with an eye towards some of the most pressing issues of our days — rural v. urban class divides, environmental and social erosion, poverty and race — all the while composing pictures with perfectly balanced frames, a sensitive understanding of light, and a playful use of color, rendered exquisitely in print like Strand’s gravures from Mexico. I want to say these were photographed with a view camera, but you do see his shadow a couple of times with something handheld; I can say with certainty that they feel like view camera pictures, made with the patience and precision required of such a tool that can help execute a deep painterly vision.

This kind of look at American identity, an artist’s documentary of America today, is a deeply populated genre but Kimball does it with a sophistication that makes it convincing. Page after page, Kimball shows richly composed and active photographs, every part of the frame utilizing color, light, or supporting the social content of the picture. Poet Eileen Myles provides a meditation on the pictures; in a sort of poem-essay hybrid, Myles writes about her most visceral response to the pictures. She claims to know nothing about Kimball or how, when, or where the pictures were made, and is reading the photographs simply as they are, descriptive and analytical data full of rich histories and metaphorical possibilities (or like Hines+Steiglitz). The essay is fun to read — charming, self-deprecating, playful, and insightful, just like the photographs she animates.

Whenever I write about books published by Radius, I like to address the design. David Chickey and his team are known for bold and innovative design and have made many richly produced books. Who by Fire keeps things simple, just as it should, using the most basic strategies to make sure the pictures speak for themselves, one after another, syncopating these with an occasional double spread or full bleed. The prints are of the highest standards, colorful and clear, and bountiful with important questions about who we are today as Americans.

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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 Bíilukaa Photographs by Wendy Red Star Reviewed by Marcella Ernest “If you listen closely to almost any human being who has recently acquired a dreamhouse, certain noises will emerge once the welcoming dog-and-pony show comes to a close and the cheese plates disappear..."

Bíilukaa by Wendy Red Star. 

Bíilukaa
Photographs by Wendy Red Star
Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM 2023. 224 pp., 140 color images, 9½x12½".

In conversations about contemporary Native American photographers, Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke multimedia artist, is often among the first referenced. I must admit that, until now, I have overlooked her practice and her layers of contribution to the fields of art history, oral history, archival studies, and remix studies, among others. Having spent time with her artist’s book Bíilukaa, I understand her to be an intellectual visual scholar with a commitment to visual sovereignty — to revitalizing the collective ability of Indigenous people to exercise creative tribal autonomy and self-determination. In Bíilukaa she demonstrates this in meaningful and productive ways using Native art, histories from the archive, and deeply personal family memories.

Every aspect of Bíilukaa (a reference to what the Apsáalooke call themselves: Our Side) feels intentional. Each page is created with thoughtfully selected paper. The subtly textured, off-white pages, bound with multicolored stitching visible in measured peeks, create a sensory dialogue between material culture and Apsáalooke history, taking place somewhere between a family photo album and archival enclosures. Vellum pages with text are rhythmically placed between visual art and sentiments related to family and history.

In what might be considered the equivalent of a foreword, Red Star situates two short paragraphs on the eleventh page. Opposite this text is the outline of a floral beadwork pattern, with a few long binding stitches between the pages. In contrast to the brightly colored, energetic spreads to follow, this one is, visually, almost silent. She writes: “To be bíilukaa implies not only common heritable ancestry but, more importantly, a community bound by language, spiritual beliefs, and social structures . . . [the book] reveals and gives new form to what I have found during my research in public collections and archives while also honoring and connecting those materials to my family and community.”

Bíilukaa presents five transcribed conversations between Red Star and her parents, her sister, and art curators alongside and within a colorful reimagining of an archival milieu. Using this general framework, the artist opens photographic and two-dimensional archives to new methods of place-based, land-centered, conceptual frameworks for art and its history. Through art making and archival re-imaginings, Red Star is examining forms of visual culture from specific periods in American history more broadly and within the Apsáalooke tribe more specifically. In many ways Bíilukaa is both private and public, a family memoir and a postcard from an archival vault. Its aesthetic and intellectual arrangement is intended to displace the narratives of Red Star’s community that have been shaped by U.S. history and popular American culture, and to assert Indigenous continuance and survival. There are no tropes of “traditional vs. modern,” anywhere in sight; they are brilliantly woven together throughout, as if existing all at once. The effect is a book that is expressive, complex, and creative. In this way, Bíilukaa is brilliant in its form, expressiveness, complexity, and creativity.

With this book, Wendy Red Star makes a critical and original contribution to the ways Indigenous visual arts are presented. Bíilukaa centers on relationships and personal family memories without depending on sentimentality. It is true to history without depending on empathy. Its conversations are a template for what oral histories can be when they are taken outside of established methodologies and reimagined as something altogether different. There is a complexity in Bíilukaa that leaves much of it unavailable to us. I am unable to fully embrace its meaning, yet I deeply valued the aesthetic experience. Bíilukaa is a treasure, a gift that will undoubtedly be cherished by Red Star’s daughter and appreciated by the rest of us for years to come.

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Marcella is Ojibwe. She is Gunflint Lake Chippewa and an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior and has heritage that includes Eastern European ancestry. Marcella is a Native feminist theorist of visual culture, sound studies and contemporary art. Her archival research and processes of historical interpretation has led to explorations of visual textures combined with audio experiments. Currently, her work draws from oral histories and family photos as sites of memory and open-ended reflections on politics of place, and the varying relationships between social art history, gender, and Indigenous land justice. Marcella holds a PhD in American Studies and is currently an Assistant Professor of Native Art History with the Department of Art Studio, History and Education at the University of New Mexico.