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2022 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation

PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—a celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. The award recognizes excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.

A final jury will gather at Paris Photo this November to select and announce the winners for all three prizes. From there, shortlisted and winning titles will be profiled in a printed catalogue, to be released and distributed for free during Paris Photo fair, along with the Winter 2022 issue of Aperture magazine. The shortlisted books will be exhibited at the Grand Palais Éphémère during Paris Photo, and will tour internationally thereafter.

The following selected nominees are available for purchase through photo-eye.

First PhotoBook

Isivumelwano
Sabelo Mlangeni

South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni’s documentary work reflects his conscious choice of themes, subcultures, and minority groups that usually remain invisible. The title of this collection of images, ‘Isivumelwano’, comes from Nguni, a Southern African language group. The word means “contract”, “agreement”, or “alliance”, and here it is synonymous with the marriage ceremonies in Black communities that Mlangeni has documented over nearly 30 years.

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Last Day in Lagos
Marilyn Nance

From January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC’77. Taking place in the heyday of Nigeria’s oil wealth and following the African continent’s potent decade of decolonization, FESTAC’77 was the peak of Pan-Africanist expression. Among the musicians, writers, artists and cultural leaders in attendance were Ellsworth Ausby, Milford Graves, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Samella Lewis, Audre Lorde, Winnie Owens, Miriam Makeba, Valerie Maynard, Queen Mother Moore and Sun Ra.

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Dark Room
San Francisco Sex And Protest 1988-2003
Phyllis Christopher

Dark Room is a rare collection of lesbian erotic and protest photographs taken by Phyllis Christopher during the period of her life spent living in San Francisco. This explosive and tender body of work connects struggles for lesbian visibility, sex positivity, and bodily autonomy to expressions of gender subversion and queer community. At the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States, amid mainstream censorship and misinformation about sex, Christopher captured a countercultural insistence on the politics of pleasure – a community fighting for sexual and artistic freedoms in both public and intimate settings.

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BANK TOP
Craig Easton

BANK TOP by photographer Craig Easton examines the representation and misrepresentation of northern communities. The work focuses on a small, tight-knit community in Blackburn, England, which has become synonymous with the use of words like segregation and integration — BBC’s Panorama describing it as ‘the most segregated town in Britain’.

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Play
Philippe Jarrigeon

Filled with colours and tactile moments, Philippe Jarrigeon’s first monograph celebrates fifteen years of a portfolio that is full of expression and deliciously deviant. Published under the artistic direction of Beda Achermann, the book gathers a collection of personal and editorial shots of mixed genres, from portraits to still lifes and landscapes. The title, Play, hints at the imaginative forces at work; a world saturated in pop fantasy and inhabited by humour, with a keen eye for detail and a cheeky wink towards the offbeat and irreverent. Glam goes hand in hand with art house consumer takes, the exceptional with the trivial, the beautiful with the ugly, the too serious with the too funny.

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As It Was Give(n) To Me
Stacy Kranitz

For the past twelve years, Stacy Kranitz has been making photographs in the Appalachian region of the United States in order to explore how photography can solidify or demystify stereotypes, and interpret memory and history in a region where the medium has failed to provide an equitable depiction of its people. Rather than reinforcing conventional views of Appalachia as a poverty-ridden region, or by selectively dwelling on positive aspects of the place and its people to offset problematic stereotypes, this work insists that each of these options are equally problematic ways of looking at place.

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Contact High
D’Angelo Lovell Williams

Both an artist’s book and comprehensive inquisition of D’Angelo Lovell Williams’ work to date, Contact High offers an expansive engagement with the visualisation of desire and depiction of the Black body. Throughout Williams’ narrative images, Black, gay men appear as sitters, lovers, caregivers, or shadows, reflecting the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed historically within each other’s lives. Williams’ work is guided by their life experience and an interrogation of their own perspective, as well as wider questions around the representation of race, class, sexuality, gender, and intimacy.

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Good Hope
Carla Liesching

In Good Hope, Carla Liesching constructs a fragmented visual and textual assemblage that orbits around the gardens and grounds at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa — a historic location at the height of Empire, now an epicenter for anti-colonial resistance movements, and also the place of the artist’s birth. Named by the Portuguese in their ‘Age of Discovery’, the Cape’s position at the mid-point along the ‘Spice Route’ was viewed with great optimism for its potential to open up a valuable maritime passageway.

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The Land of Promises
Youqine Lefèvre

The Land of Promises tells the intimate and personal stories of people living under the restrictions of China’s one-child policy. The policy has had huge and far-reaching consequences, particularly for hundreds of thousands of Chinese girls who have been separated from their families and registered for adoption. Photographer Youqine Lefèvre sets out to portray the journey of her own adoption through the story of six Belgian families. In doing so, she relates it to a broader context of international and transracial adoptions and other stories told by those she has met in the course of her travels. The changes in their lives resonate to this day and will continue in the future.

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PhotoBook of the Year

SCUMB Manifesto
Justine Kurland

Inspired by Valerie Solanas’ iconoclastic feminist tract SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, SCUMB introduces us to photographer Justine Kurland’s own uncompromising initiative: the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books. This volume presents a collection of collages Kurland created by cutting up and reconfiguring photobooks by male artists, as she went through the process of purging her own library of roughly 150 books by straight white men that have monopolized the photographic canon.

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Baldwin Lee

In 1983, Baldwin Lee (born 1951) left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his 4 × 5 view camera and set out on the first of a series of road trips to photograph the American South. The subjects of his pictures were Black Americans: at home, at work and at play, in the street and in nature. This project would consume Lee—a first-generation Chinese American—for the remainder of that decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people and himself.

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Périphérique
Mohamed Bourouissa

In this breakthrough series of photographs, Deutsche Börse award-winner Mohamed Bourouissa chose to appropriate the codes of history painting by staging scenes with his friends and acquaintances in the Paris banlieues where they used to hang out. Confrontations, gatherings, incidents, looks, and frozen gestures all suggest a palpable tension. Invoking Delacroix as much as Jeff Wall, Bourouissa’s high drama in the outskirts of Paris attempts to give a place in French history to individuals usually neglected and overlooked in contemporary society.

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My Husband
Tokuko Ushioda

The joyful days with her husband, Shinzo Shimao, and daughter, Maho in a one-room unit of a Western-style house and her solitude she faced alone in the quiet night; Dormant for 40 years, the story of these photographs is finally uncovered. A set of two books with Book 1 and Book 2 each showcasing the 6×6 and 35mm photographs respectively.

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Look at me like you love me
Jess T. Dugan

In Look at me like you love me, Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, companionship, and the ways our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic writings reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a life.

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Flint Is Family In Three Acts
LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family in Three Acts chronicles the ongoing manmade water crisis in Flint, Michigan, from the perspective of those who live and fight for their right to access free, clean water. Featuring photographs, texts, poems and interviews made in collaboration with Flint’s residents, this five-year body of work, begun in 2016, serves as an intervention and alternative to mass media accounts of this political, economic and racial injustice.

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River's Dream
Curran Hatleberg

Building on the concerns of Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016) he continues his focus on the stories of American people, familIes and communities. River's Dream brilliantly demonstrates the artist's command over the contemporary photo book medium.

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Arrangements
Carmen Winant

This book of multivalent narratives began with a simple premise: the collection of sheets of paper—ripped from books—featuring multiple photographs and inlaid narratives. Across a decade of working on other projects involving pulling images apart from one another, excising them from the page and recontextualizing them as new sets, American artist Carmen Winant diligently collected disparate sheets, skimming them off the top of her other ongoing collections.

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Photography Catalogue of the Year

Another Country
British Documentary Photography Since 1945
Gerry Badger

Another Country offers a lively, vital rethinking of British documentary photography over the last seven decades. This collection includes a diverse range of photographers working in an exciting array of photographic and artistic modes, encompassing images from iconic reportage to photo-text pieces, from self-portraits to political photo-collages.

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James Barnor - Stories
Pictures from the Archive

RRB is pleased to present our second title with Ghanaian photographer James Barnor. Published in parallel with the exhibition James Barnor, the Portfolio: 100 photographs (1949-1983), presented in 2022 at the LUMA Foundation as part of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, the book offers a kaleidoscopic overview of the Ghanaian photographer’s oeuvre.

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Devour the Land
War and American Landscape Photography since 1970

Devour the Land considers how contemporary photographers have responded to the US military’s impact on the domestic environment since the 1970s, a dynamic period for environmental activism as well as for photography. This catalogue presents a lively range of voices at the intersection of art, environmentalism, militarism, photography, and politics.

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To look without fear
Wolfgang Tillmans

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer’s experience.

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Diane Arbus Documents

Best known for her penetrating images exploring what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singular figure in American postwar photography. Arbus’s black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach.

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The Golden City by Mimi Plumb.

The Golden City
Photographs by Mimi Plumb

STANLEY/BARKER, London, UK, 2021.

Despite the surplus of ‘Golden Cities’ around the world — India, Australia, and Czechia all claim one — Mimi Plumb’s new book opens with numerous spreads of demolition sites and piles of dirt spreading in all directions, taking its time to situate us in the outskirts of the Golden State’s crown jewel, San Francisco. My favorite of these initial images, presumably from the early ’80s, is of an old console television abandoned in open land with an ominous processing plant in the background. The two main elements signal the end of an era, with heavy industry giving way to urbanizations that will become the home of media and technology industries, the last nail in the coffin of a West Coast utopia. We move into the city as the image sequence progresses. An aerial view showing the complex transportation infrastructure and the rejection of horizontal planning implies an immeasurable sprawl that commodifies every aspect of life, with people spending their lives from one store to the next, buying things rather than seeking meaningful social interactions.

The Golden City combines cityscapes with portraits, including a few featuring a dark-haired man. We first encounter him giving his back to us atop a gabled roof close to a billboard with a giant protruding hand. We return to the rooftop a few pages later, this time from a higher vantage point that reveals the giant hand holding a stack of bills, punching through a bank advertisement. Across the avenue, a Nissan ad induces us to “Think Fast,” leaving the dark-haired man wedged between commercial promises of a better life. The recurring character next appears alongside a blonde couple in a scene with the air of a lazy Sunday. The three of them sit on a couch in a back garden, looking like the predecessors of contemporary hipsters, but without the belabored effort of today’s legion. The young trio might not be as carefree as their attitude suggests, given the baby walker near the edge of the frame. Their attention is occupied by something in the sky, although I would like to think they’re contemplating their future, sensing that the market forces will soon snatch their places of creativity and self-organization. In his last appearance, again on a roof, we finally see the face of the dark-haired man tenderly embracing a young woman from behind. Both wear altered T-shirts and punk hairstyles, the sun harsh on their faces, commanding our attention as if they were celebrities letting their guard down for a candid picture.

The other images of people in the book, shown mostly partying or otherwise having fun, are similarly deployed with a sense of nostalgia for a time when a bohemian lifestyle was more easily attainable. The colophon informs us the photographs were made between 1984 and 2020, but The Golden City seems to concentrate on the years when the Bay Area transitioned from a haven for intellectuals and free spirits to a corporate one where money and technology command the agenda. From this perspective, the book seems to correlate the destruction, development, or renewal of places with the diminishment of seminal communities that consequently altered the city’s social composition.

As with her previous publications, Plumb uses images from her vast archives to shape a poetic sequence with an ambiguous narrative. The open relationship between pictures in The Golden City makes it hard to define unequivocally what the book is about. Plumb does not facilitate the interpretive process by giving us essays, titles, or statements, so we must rely on close attention and repeated viewings. While it would be tempting to say it is about how socioeconomic changes have transformed San Francisco, such an explanation would leave out the charged biographical dimension of the work. I can’t offer a satisfactory reason for this — I know neither Plumb nor San Francisco — but I believe the author’s presence is closely felt in many of these pictures, regardless of whether they are of people or places.

With The Golden City, Plumb has once again crafted an abstract narrative that comes across as sincere, serving to interrogate whom the city is for. Since the primary purpose of cities is function, with the daily grind allowing little room for the kind of romantic notions that attract tourists, it is curious to find an idealized skyline of San Francisco in the most unexpected of places, such as a painting on a window ledge above dirty sheets, pillows, and food containers. The scene has been captured with a flash, making it look like police evidence, although it’s even more evident that someone’s taken comfort in that view, perhaps because it glosses over the difficult living conditions that overwhelm so many, giving him or her a sense of hope instead. The book, overall, achieves something similar.

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Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer and writer. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018) and A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021). Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, and postgraduate degrees in photography and art history from the School of Visual Arts in New York and University College London.

Clockwise: David Trautrimas, We Had All The Time In The World; Amanda Marchand, Henslow's Sparrow; David Trautrimas, Don't Stand On Ceremony; Amanda Marchand, Northern Goshhawk (Child - 1st Generation)

Throughout history, people have suffered physically, emotionally, and spiritually during pandemic and quarantine, and through these shifts, many great works of art have been made. Recently, Gallery Director Anne Kelly asked a few photo-eye Gallery artists their thoughts on the belief that having a little turmoil can be used as fuel in the artistic process.

>> Creativity and Turmoil, Part One <<

In part two of this series, we hear from artists Amanda Marchand and David Trautrimas.

Amanda Marchand

“Death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.”

— Louise Gluck

We’ve grown to accept the myth of the “suffering artist,” Van Gogh who cuts off an ear, the young Francesca Woodman who jumps from a window at 22, and Kurt Kobain, as a trade-off for “great” works of art. This question of having “a little turmoil” as fuel is universally accepted. While there are many examples of artists past and present who suffer for art’s sake, I think this idea does a disservice to creatives today. The artists I know are all wearers of many hats — and emotions. They are generally incredibly hard workers who have their act together and create from a place of pain as well as contemplation, curiosity, passion, joy, humor, intelligence, compassion, and intuition. If creatives feel life’s intensity to a greater degree and work from that place, I think it’s likely that they’ve simply given themselves the space and time to feel.

Right now, 2.5 years into a global Pandemic, with massive inflation, various democracies on the brink, women’s universal rights denied now even in the U.S., and glaring racial inequity, we are at a pretty intense point in history. For me, making art is utterly personal, intuitive, experimental, and from the heart, but taps into societal undercurrents. My work has always come out of an emotional register first, before anything, compelling me to create (photograph, edit, write, tape, cut, sew…). Sometimes I am working from a place of deep calm and contentment. I have been exploring breath and meditation as a creative path for the past few years. But the path of creation contains galaxies. So yes, drawing on a range of sources and emotions, “a little turmoil’ also fuels my practice, though I would never seek it out.

An upheaval or shock, a difficult truth, can be a galvanizing force: My mother’s terminal cancer, for instance, propelled me to make a body of work in her garden at night. The harrowing fact that we are losing 150 species a day on the earth, set in motion a project I am working on, a contemporary Field Guide to endangered birds, ferns, and flowers. Similarly, Trump’s inauguration, causing such radical divisiveness and upheaval, revealing a new world, gave way to a new way of working photographically for me — abandoning the camera to work camera-less. And again, the sudden pandemic generated 2 pandemic projects (still in progress), and then a third isolation-born long-distance collaboration, all a response to the heightened urgency and alarm we’ve been collectively experiencing.

As I spend more time making art, I see the importance of balance, nurture, self-care, and slowing down, as being simple but radical acts. I use art/photography and its many processes as a tool to —counter turmoil— in its various forms. What is so important and incredible about art, and throughout history, the way humans are drawn to it, is that it can be a register through which we synthesize, understand, or emote, pain, longing, beauty, loss, fear, and love. It’s a channel. Turmoil may go into the funnel or it may not, but something entirely different and often extraordinary will come out on the other side.

Amanda Marchand, Henslow's Sparrow, Unique archival pigment print, 2020, 18x15", Edition of 3.

As part of our video series photo-eye Conversations, Gallery Director Anne Kelly interviewed Marchand. They discussed her photographic practice, the process of creating The World is Astonishing With You In It, and other bodies of work, like The Lumen Circle Project. Watch this enlightening conversation in the link below.

>> Amanda Marchand | Photographer's Showcase + photo-eye Conversation <<

Portrait of artist Amanda Marchand

Amanda Marchand is an award-winning, Canadian, New York-based photographer. Her work explores the natural world with an experimental approach to photography. Recently, Marchand has been working with an unpredictable, camera-less process also known as sun-prints or photograms. Each particular paper brand, photo finish, and paper type, combined with different exposures, produces a spectrum of colors. Because the lumen colors are fugitive, the exposed papers act as negatives which are fixed by scanning, although they also continue to change color/darken due to the light of the scanner.

Marchand began this work by using objects and ephemera from her studio as the tools to block light— starting with utilitarian photo boxes and envelopes; then moving to reference books and artist monographs -- as visual cues. She approached each exposure as a measure of time, a meditation; in turn, the exposed papers are then cut and re-assembled into collages of multiple panels. The fundamentals of this fugitive process are an important point of departure from the documentary qualities of camera-based photography and mark an embrace of a materials-based approach that combines early photographic methods with new technologies.

David Trautrimas

If I was asked this question a few years ago I’d find myself on the side of disbelief, convinced that turmoil was a wet blanket tossed onto the fires of creativity. But as they say, the only constant is— change, and like solving for ’X’ in a math equation, context is everything for calculating meaning.

That’s not to say I haven’t endured turmoil prior to the last few years, but to get through those challenges I did everything I could to put a wall between those experiences and my creative pursuits, leaving the latter as a place of escape. That trajectory continued relatively unabated until late 2019…

At the time I was working on a series of new works titled The Fun Never Spoils. The plan was to exhibit these works at the ‘No Name Biennale’, a group exhibition in Hamilton, Canada that playfully undermines high-value art culture by taking its name from a popular Canadian discount food brand. The idea for my contribution to the show was fairly direct: create a still-life of plastic, laser-cut discount foods.

But not long after I began work on this series, Covid-19 started its troubling sweep around the world and everything shifted. In relation to the sourcing and collection of food, grocery store panic shopping took hold. Regular food items became scarce, people started buying in massive quantities and any sense of food security was shaken. Within this context, social isolation became the norm with many aspects of our lives grinding to a halt, and my thinking around my playful 'foodstuff, still-life' completely changed.

Striving to keep a sense of normalcy I found myself still working in the studio on a daily basis, fabricating more and more laser-cut foods. The continued creation of these objects was no longer just about making a playful still-life. They become an anchor point amidst this capricious Covid landscape; an emotional self-portrait that represented my desire for certainty in that time of intense precarity.

That body of work opened the floodgates to embracing turmoil as an engine of creativity. My most recent and ongoing series, Rest Onwards, is a meditation on the traumas I’ve experienced: life-threatening injuries, loss of loved ones, and mental health challenges. In these works I use distorted objects and spaces as stand-ins that carry these injuries, providing a place for these wounds outside of my consuming thoughts. Demonstrating their burden, these stand-ins have been extended, bonded, confined, made redundant, or dangerous. And although the subjects carry a personal meaning they are nearly universally recognizable, providing room for the viewer to relate to the work without requiring the exact narrative of my own experiences.

Going forward I don’t think everything I do creatively will be connected to turmoil, personal or otherwise. But what I’ve learned in the past few years is how to open myself up to its creative potential, allowing space for all manner of plants in the walled garden of my creative space: the weeds with the roses.

David Trautrimas, Night Sweats, 2022, Archival Pigment Print, 9x13", Edition of 5, $900

A few months ago, Gallery Director Anne Kelly sat down with Trautrimas for a conversation! In this episode of photo-eye conversations, they talk about modernist architecture, materiality, and conceptual flexibility. View the video and learn more about David Trautrimas below!

>> David Trautrimas | photo-eye Conversation <<

Portrait of artist David Trautrimas

David Trautrimas is an artist/photographer/all-around maker hailing from Toronto, Canada. Here at photo-eye, we know David for his series Habitat Machines, wherein the artist dissembled and photographed household items before using these components to digitally create architectural spaces. The importance of space continues to be important in Trautrimas' newest series, which turns the focus inward. Using Cinema 4D and the digital toolbox that comes with it, Trautrimas has spent the pandemic crafting uncanny, entrancing images of his own interior life that resonate across Western culture.

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

To learn more about these and other works by Amanda Marchand or David Trautrimas,

or to acquire specific prints,

please contact photo-eye Gallery Director Anne Kelly or Gallery Associate Jovi Esquivel.

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

Al Rio / To the River. By Zoe Leonard.

Al Rio / To the River
Photographs by Zoe Leonard

Hatje Cantz/MUDAM, Luxembourg, Belgium, Luxembough, 2021. 592 pp., 350 color illustrations, 9x11".

Zoe Leonard’s two-volume project, To the River, opens with a sequence of color photographs of the turbulent surface of the Río Bravo/Rio Grande. Air bubbles mark its current, yet the river impersonates flesh with its corpulent folds. The close-range framing of its waters, eliminating all contextual information of place, feels both intimate and immense. Waters that can carry a body and consume one. The book catalogs a selection of the project’s approximately 500 gelatin silver prints and fifty C-prints. Produced over four years, Leonard followed and recorded the river’s course with attention to the tributaries of geological, historical, and imperial time. To The River’s second volume, edited by Tim Johnson, assembles writings from artists, poets, and scholars on the river’s history, borderland culture and environmental issues — companion texts that flow alongside and through Leonard’s archive.

The river is designated the Rio Grande in the U.S., meaning ‘big river’ while in Mexico, it’s known as Río Bravo, ‘wild river,’ a name evoking its temperament. This ancient, unruly waterway was taken as a border during the U.S.’s geopolitical expansion in the 19th century and remains a weaponized site of the political debates around immigration policy. Leonard’s photographs quietly trace the river’s approximate 1,900-mile length through an array of terrains. She zooms in on foliage then pulls back — landscapes and horizon lines materialize. Highways line the river and bridges cross it. The river fills the frame then is dwarfed by mountains. Its entropic force is corralled by engineering, narrowed and redirected through concrete beds that transform it into a trickle. Floods. Along its banks, I see farms, development, homeless encampments. On the ground, she gazes up at birds in the sky. And helicopters. Surveying topography and traffic from above, she inhabits the perspective of the drone.

Everywhere: the architecture of the border. Chain link fences give way to monumental walls and their on-going construction. Leonard soberly documents these violent barricades. In a suite of three images, its vertical pylons are echoed in a white picket fence in the foreground. A sign strung up on its façade, WE BUILD THE WALL, announcing the organization that solicited millions of dollars to build private sections of the Trump Wall. (Its founder, Brian Kolfage, was convicted of fraud. Steve Bannon, its Advisory Board Chair, was pardoned by Trump.)

These landscapes yield evidence of its human history, although figures are rarely depicted. There are tangles of barbed wire torn down like bodies lying prostrate on the ground, lines of tire tracks in the dust, the remnants of the border patrol. Humble memorials to the people who died crossing the border. When bodies do appear, they are typically at a distance. There’s an understanding of their place in the environment and formal reserve decisively refuses the racist idioms of immigration reporting. A family swimming in the river is a reminder that the river is also a site of play and community. This is a living document — paradoxically, a voluminous snapshot of faceted time. Often, Leonard works in sequences to track the movements of water, humans, and the state. I see an affection for 19th century photography in these sequences — the desire to see clearly, born of a belief in photography’s power of witness.

Leonard attends to her subject with care — all that the river touches is a detail to behold. There’s cumulative precision in this lyrical atlas, slow knowledge that takes the river’s history as a guide. To The River’s politics are as much felt as declared. Leonard subverts the single lens reflex camera’s association with the iconic to produce an expansive and embodied space of witness. There’s urgency and humility in the work, eschewing the deadlock of Democratic-Republican debate, that invites the reader to consider geologic time alongside the human impact of the border crisis.

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Laura Larson is a photographer, writer, and teacher based in Columbus, OH. She's exhibited her work extensively, at such venues as Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SFCamerawork, and Wexner Center for the Arts and is held in the collections of Allen Memorial Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, Margulies Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Microsoft, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New York Public Library, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), her first book, was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photo Book Prize. Larson is currently at work on a new book, City of Incurable Women (forthcoming from Saint Lucy Books) and a collaborative book with writer Christine Hume, All the Women I Know.

Martín Chambi: Photography.

Martín Chambi: Photography
Photographs by Martín Chambi

Editorial RM, 2022. 194 pp., 170 illustrations, 9½x11¼x¾".

This publication of the photographs by Martín Chambi in the Jan Mulder collection, Lima, is a welcome addition to books dedicated to this Cuzco photographer, who lived from 1891 until 1973. This nicely printed collection of over one hundred photographs is organized in three sections: The first thirty photographs are devoted to Inca archaeological sites, with some twenty focused on Machu Picchu. A second group, also of thirty pictures, is predominately focused on well-selected views of Cuzco. The third sequence is then dedicated to mostly portrait work, with fifteen of these pictures being self-portraits.

Particular attention has been given in the book’s production. Numerous vintage prints are reproduced with the warm tonalities associated with materials used in the early twentieth-century, when most of Chambi’s images were made. This strategy is particularly successful in rendering his large plate views of Machu Picchu and Cuzco. It is to Mr. Mulder’s credit that he has chosen to emphasize these well-chosen vintage works, and to the publisher, Editorial RM, for committing the resources to give readers the pleasure of seeing these early prints in convincingly appropriate tonalities.

Chambi is quoted as being especially concerned with making the legacy of the Inca remains known to the general public through his photographs. This book goes a long way to emphasize his personal, even spiritual, identification with the legacy of Inca culture. But an equally strong case should be made for his commitment to documenting the Quechua culture of which he was a part. He began serious documentation of indigenous life in the early 1920s, supported in part by his role as graphic correspondent for Lima publications la Crónica and Variedades. Over the next thirty years, he continued to photograph native Quechua people, their villages and festivals throughout the Cuzco region. These pictures comprise a unique and irreplaceable archive of Peru’s Quechua culture, and much work still remains to be done in organizing and publishing them. Unfortunately, only a handful of ethnographic views appear in this book, causing a very important aspect of Chambi’s work and personal life to be only passingly referenced.

One unusual aspect of Chambi’s archive featured in this book, however, is a selection of self-portraits that he made throughout his life. It has been known for some time that he took great interest and pride in recording not only his expeditions, exhibitions, studio work and gatherings, but also in portraying his own personality and personal activities. In the book’s final essay, Horacio Fernandez examines Chambi’s self-portraiture within the context of an engaging and well-informed discussion of his life and work. He explains how many of Chambi’s self-portraits were precisely staged and executed, how some required a collaborator, and how some emphasized important aspects of his personality. Fernandez writes, “As we have seen, he synthesized his life story as a pilgrimage in search of Quechua culture in contemporary life, colonial fusions, and Inca ruins. In addition to these themes, there were also the characters, the roles — traveler, explorer, Indian — he played for the camera in other self-portraits.”

Juxtaposed against some telling examples of Chambi’s commercial studio work and some ethnographic pictures, these self-portraits give us a vibrant sense of Chambi himself and his relationship with the world in which he lived and worked. Fernandez also addresses important issues, such as our contemporary impulse to define an artist’s agenda based on only a few selected images. He has picked up on the need to distinguish Chambi’s work from that of his contemporaries, particularly of his colleague Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, with whom he worked at Machu Picchu in 1928. Almost all of their pictures published in the 1934 book Cuzco Histórico, for instance, were reproduced without author attribution, resulting in a confusing scenario for understanding each photographer’s work. He also does not shy away from discussing the cultural complexities associated with the now well-known pictures of Cuzco Indigenous subjects by the celebrated New York portraitist and fashion photographer Irving Penn, who worked briefly in a rented Cuzco studio in 1948.

Other texts in this book provide additional, informative back matter, but nearly every text page is marred by a design strategy where a number of the words ending a paragraph are not aligned with the left text margin. The appearance of these words, centered and floating below blocks of text, is both confusing and unattractive. Mulder’s introductory text outlines his growing fascination as a collector with preserving and understanding Chambi’s work and Peru’s photographic legacy. Andres Garay’s assessment of Chambi as “A Photographer Made to the Measure of Cuzco” gives us an authoritative summary of the beginnings of Chambi’s career in Arequipa and his successful early work upon settling in Cuzco. As one of Peru’s leading photo-historians, Garay’s commitment to investigating Chambi’s work and early 20th-century Peruvian photography exemplifies the kind of serious research into the country’s photographic history that has been sorely needed. The contribution by the Ecuadorian writer Francois Laso, “The Silent Progress of Martín Chambi’s Photography”, does not match the qualities of the two other essays, but does provide an appreciative eye regarding different aspects of Chambi’s work as seen from a neighboring Andean country.

The pictures, of course, are the enduring reason for this publication, and the layout and tonal quality of the prints will hold attention over many viewings. In particular, the four-page fold-out of Chambi’s stunning panorama of Machu Picchu, made circa 1940 with two joined 18 x 24 cm glass plates, is especially impressive, and even though cropped slightly at the top of the image, is a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in the publication of Chambi’s work.

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©Krista Elrick

Edward Ranney visited Peru in 1961 and returned on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1964-65 to study literature and anthropology. Entranced by the landscapes and archaeological sites he saw, he exchanged his academic studies for photography and has returned to photograph in Peru for over 60 years. His exquisite large format photographs of both famous and little-known Inca sites, earlier Chimú architecture, and the mysterious Nazca Lines evoke a sense of beauty and fresh awareness of time.

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