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Anonymous Objects
Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown
By Kim Beil

SPBH Editions, 2023. 175 pp., 4x6".

"It’s easier to ignore things we do
not understand than it is to try to
capture and comprehend them.
This perceptual strategy may even
be an evolutionary necessity."

— Kim Beil, Anonymous Objects

inscrutable /in-skru-tə -bəl/: not readily investigated, interpreted or understood: mysterious

Photography is an extremely deceptive medium, but given its ubiquity, I think we are blind to most of what it offers. I am not sure how to calculate the number of photographs I see every day, but I reckon it’s in the thousands. For most people, I am afraid, the constant barrage of pictures we all experience allows us to think we understand what we see in photographs. Because of its accessibility, we’ve become complacent (or perhaps numb?), and too infrequently question our relationship to photography, readily assuming what we see is what we get. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated. Every picture is full of ideas, intentions, circumstances, and objects we know nothing about. Part of the draw of photography is its ability to offer clear depictions of time and space, but I'm of the belief that the unknowable parts of a photograph are its most interesting and essential attributes. I think those of us weaned on darkroom photography can speak to that first, magical experience when we watched an image emerge in a tray of developer. Every day, despite how inundated I am with photographic information, I try to remember the fundamental mysteriousness that first drew me to the medium.

The new book by Kim Beil, Anonymous Objects, asks the reader to embrace and relish the mysteries of photography by taking note of the little, often unknowable, items that appear within its frames. The book is the fifth installment in the SPBH Essays series and is seemingly about the small objects that appear in photographs that we know nothing about, often just little things that fall outside the scope of our own experience. What do these objects represent if we don’t know what they are? Does that change how we understand a photograph? If we can’t identify an object depicted in a picture, what does it represent? Can we really know a picture if we can’t understand all that is held within it? When I got into photography, the first artist I really studied was Frederick Sommer, and as a result, I remain committed to the belief that the best photographs represent ideas beyond what is described in their frames (Sommer’s doll head is more Enochian than documentary). This is important, I think, when reading Anonymous Objects, because on the surface Beil is writing about specific attributes — those tiny things stacked out of the way on the top left shelf in Walker Evan’s photograph of a general store in the American South — but digging deeper between the lines, Beil is really creating an incredible labyrinth of ideas about what photographs can and cannot represent, like Sommer giving something well beyond a literal reading.

As many before her, Beil’s argument pays homage to Roland Barthes, his name and ideas appearing throughout her text:

“Photographs of unrecognizable
things produce a curious analog
to this ‘temporal hallucination’
that Barthes finds in portraits.
Studying inscrutable photographs,
we come face to face with our
own limits, just as Barthes faces
his own mortality when studying
a picture of a person.”

It had been a while since I read Camera Lucida, Barthes’s groundbreaking book on photography that questioned the very nature of the medium, and I found that revisiting it can shed some light on Anonymous Objects. First published in 1980, Camera Lucida is a personal narrative in which Barthes developed a free-form, stream-of-conscious text divided into small, discrete parts, each section its own meditation on photography. Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes negotiates sophisticated ideas about pictures, language, symbolism, and representation, ultimately offering new conclusions about photographic images, and their infinite capacity to evoke personal experiences and cultural representations.

Beil’s Anonymous Objects offers something similar, a free-flowing text that breaks down the personal and cultural significance of photographs. Using the small, unknowable attributes of different pictures, Beil negotiates much more complex ideas about representation, time, and both personal and cultural symbolism. Part of what I love about Anonymous Objects is quite simple: how the text appears on the page; the design of the book dictates its meaning. Throughout the book, Beil dissects several different photographs, some iconic — like Alexander Gardner’s portraits of Lewis Payne before his execution and early souvenir photographs of George Washington’s home — as well as pictures collected from flea markets. As she deciphers these pictures, Beil knits together a larger narrative about the objects that appear in the photographs and how they impact our understandings. The design of the book, however, facilitates more poetic possibilities. Printed in a big, bold font that allows single sentences to fill an entire page, her phrases and ideas breakdown in an evocative manner, each encapsulating a distinct and succinctly described idea of its own (in sharing quotes from the book, I’ve transcribed them like they appear on the page, as though poetry not prose). You can read the book cover to cover to follow that larger train, but you can also open the book at random and find brief but mysterious ideas about photography. This approach replicates something I love about the medium itself — full of short, sharp, and clear ideas that somehow remain elusive and mysterious, presenting clear and wonderful ideas but also an unending array of ambiguity and questions.

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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.

Haiti. By Bruce Gilden.

Haiti
Photographs by Bruce Gilden
Atelier EXB, 2023. 144 pp., 75 illustrations, 8½x11½".

At first blush, Bruce Gilden photographing Haiti does not seem like a fair fight. With a confrontational style honed on the gritty sidewalks of New York City, Gilden has a reputation as an aggressive and in-your-face street shooter. "I'm known for taking pictures very close,” he boasts, “and the older I get, the closer I get." His proximity is often exacerbated by surprise attacks and off-camera flash, with provocative results.

Haiti, meanwhile, has been a geopolitical punching bag for centuries. It has suffered under the clumsy mismanagement of various governments, strongmen, and paramilitary organizations, plagued by US meddling, resource depletion, corruption, and poverty. Its poor citizens would seem to have enough on their plate already without a Magnum photographer poking around their affairs. Throw in the fact that he’s a white interloper from the most powerful country on earth, and Haitian photo subjects are lambs to the slaughter.

That might be the expectation. But the actual results are more nuanced. It turns out that Haitians can hold their own with Gilden’s camera. In photo after photo they stand their ground, glare back, and claim dignified self-possession. They’re a force for his lens to reckon with, even more so than New Yorkers.

But you needn’t take my word for it. For the first time in a generation, average photobook readers can judge for themselves. A new edition of Gilden’s titular classic Haiti has been co-published by Atelier EXB and Gost. It updates the original monograph which was published by Dewi Lewis in 1996 and then republished in 2002. Both editions are long out of print. With a newly designed bold red cover and thirty added photographs, this latest version should tide demand for a while.

Gilden’s monochrome photos are culled from numerous visits to Haiti conducted over the course of decades. They began in 1984, when he made his first trip to photograph Mardi Gras in Port au Prince. A picture of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier on a campaign poster reminds readers of the prevailing conditions then, and the cycle of pretenders to the throne. Captivated by initial impressions, Gilden returned for more. In photographs of a man with a pistol hustling a captive through city streets, a woman in open-mouthed despair, and an oblique dog trying to hide behind its shadow (a minor classic in the Gilden ouevre), he struck an uneasy tone. “Life isn’t always about smiley faces,” he says, the point driven home by his imagery.

But not all was downcast in Haiti. Gilden captured good times too, with photos of revelers engaging in celebrations and rituals. Firepits, ashen mascara, funeral rites, and Voodoo ceremonies add layers of mystery. These are spiced with more mundane frames. Some show average folks enjoying downtime or socializing along passageways. On occasion Gilden dispensed with people entirely, homing in on ramshackle domestic dwellings. “I’m not interested in corporate types. I’m interested in the common man,” he says. That comment extends to buildings, fashion, and government. But his primary concern, in this book as throughout his career, is human beings. Several portraits isolate individuals captured in their own thoughts, with penetrating power. In other shots, the hordes are so numerous they threaten to spill from the frame. As with any destination, people are the beating heart of Haiti.

With no captions in the book, the reader is left to piece together timelines and circumstances. The sequence seems to bounce between trips, dates, and locations. It begins with casual passing candids, shot in available light. The photos gradually reach a sustained climax in the second half, with a series of bangers, one incredible shot following another. The frames begin to mix murky lighting with off-camera flash to cast a Voodoo-like spell over communal gatherings. Gilden fans will recognize several classics in this latter section. Indeed, a handful of photos in the book have become iconic, for example a vertical of sweaty revelers in slow-synch blur, a split frame triptych of shadowed figures, and a trafficked corner with triangles of gesture and shadow.

These last two pictures lose some oomph amid the book’s double-spread gutters. But that’s a minor quibble. The photos are familiar enough already in the general photo consciousness. We know them inside and out already, and the book serves as affirmation rather than revelation. But even if you know the work, the new Haiti is worth stocking in your library. It has not been widely available since 2002, and who knows if/when another edition might occur. And for those lucky readers who are not yet familiar with these photos, Haiti will be a special treat indeed.

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

Cross Road Blues by Oli Kellett.

Cross Road Blues
Oli Kellett

Nazraeli Press, 2024. 68 pp., 28 four-color plates, 14x11½".

Oli Kellett’s Cross Road Blues is a meticulously crafted series of photographs shot over four years in major American cities (Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, etc.) with a few additions from around the world thrown in the mix (Mexico City, Madrid, London, and Rio de Janeiro). Kellett’s version of street photography is crisp and dramatically lit, albeit produced with a high-end digital camera on a tripod. About half of the pictures present a view from a high vantage point, highlighting Kellett’s aim to convey how urban environments often create a sense of oppression.

The project, titled after the famous blues song by Robert Johnson, aspires to intertwine philosophy and visuality, positing the action of crossing the road as a metaphor. This line of thinking is effectively unpacked in the introduction by the philosopher Nigel Warburton in terms of Sartrean freedom, determinism, libertarianism, and contingency, although he also considers the gestures people make before crossing the road as indicative of their relationship with the environment. For instance, the book concludes with a person pointing his finger to the sky, echoing the famous gesture by Plato in Raphael’s The School of Athens.

The exhibition prints of this series are up to 60 x 75 inches in size, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in their details. Following the same logic, the size of the book encourages a close and prolonged look at the pictures. In this sense, Cross Road Blues, comprised of only twenty-eight photographs, can be described as a portfolio photobook, which is a way to describe bodies of work conceived for the wall rather than for a print publication. In terms of trim and design, the book adheres to Nazraeli’s trademark style, keeping everything as simple and elegant as possible.

Still, the images are interesting beyond the gestures they show and their high resolution. I find the work to be at its most provocative as a representation of a particular kind of American city (the fact that not every metropolis in the country has a dwarfing scale might sound obvious, but it’s not a distinction Kellett or Warburton make). In many of these scenes, concrete, steel, and glass come across as silent subjugators that people don’t notice anymore. I see Kellett’s selection of cities as being intrinsically related to his preconceptions about the US. Figuring out Kellett’s relation to American mythology (using the term in the broadest sense) is a legitimate area of inquiry, and, at least to me, the most emblematic aspect of the series.

Precisely because of his interest in the cultural specificities of American cities, it is a surprise that Kellett included pictures of other places, which interferes with reading the work as a political reflection of the country. Kellett states that “it scarcely matters where or when the images were made. The step each person is about to take seems far more momentous than simply crossing a street.” His only criterion for choosing the locations was that they showed “a nondescript urban space” (he felt places like New Orleans had too much personality for his purposes). While geographical specificity may not matter as much when looking at individual pictures, it is essential when analyzing a series as a book, where relations amongst images are not only encouraged but inevitable.

Then, there is the fact that the concept of non-descript urban spaces is an illusion. The pictures in Cross Road Blues represent Kellett’s subjective vision of the US, even if the pictures give the appearance of neutrality. It’s telling how Kellett remarks the passage of time as an important theme, which is an aspect of the work we cannot see (he spent “a thousand hours” waiting for the right moment to photograph) but dedicates little attention to the sociopolitical specificities of the urban environment that fascinate him, which is an aspect that we can see.

In this sense, and given the prominence of the pictures’ formal qualities, one of the book’s main propositions is how the scenes reveal a photographic way of looking at the world. This distinct perception is manifested in Kellett’s use of underexposure. Our eyes would have perceived these scenes differently if we had stood next to him when he made the pictures. As such, the project’s cinematic flair is the opposite of naturalistic documentary photography that strives to underline its veracity. Watching Kellett’s promotional video for the book, where we see him make one of the series’ trademark images, can help us understand how different and unspectacular the scene looked to the naked eye.

While Cross Road Blues is visually stunning, some might find the book too brief, contrived, or monotonous. Yet I kept returning to its images, not because they were weighty metaphors about personal destiny and freedom, but because of the details that envelop those people about to cross the street. The book may not aspire to be a systematic reflection on the politics of urban design or urban policies, but it can be taken as a point of departure to think about how our uses of space produce social relations (think, for example, of those people coming together for a brief moment and what that says about city life, national culture, fashion, etc.). This is not a minor point. The more critical our seeing becomes, the clearer we can be about the kind of cities we want — and at least according to theorists like Henri Lefebvre — deserve.

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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.

My Mother, My Son. By Mary Frey.

My Mother, My Son
Photographs by Mary Frey

TBW Books, Oakland, CA 2024. 72 pp., 12 color / 21 duotone plates, 12x10".

"I was becoming alive to certain essential qualities in family photographs. Above all I admired what the camera made. The whole person was presented to the camera. There was no interference, or so it seemed. And sometimes the frame cut through the world with a surprise. There could be no doubt that the picture belonged more to the world of things and facts than to the photographer."

— Emmet Gowin

I am of the belief that Emmet Gowin deserves credit for bringing the family album to discussions of fine art photography. He certainly wasn’t the first artist to photograph his family — many of the Pictorialist photographers like Clarence White worked almost solely with their families, and Emmet’s mentor Harry Callahan made remarkable photographs of his wife and daughter — but somehow Emmet changed things. His photographs are often arcane and layered with thick metaphysical questions, but he also photographed Christmas morning, family camping trips, and his children at play in the backyard. These pictures in turn influenced generations of new photographers, including Sally Mann, Tina Barney, and Doug Dubois.

Enter Mary Frey, an artist who again challenges distinctions between fine art and family albums. Frey is an incredibly interesting photographer whose work has come to light late in her career. After completing an MFA at Yale University in 1979 (just missing Walker Evans), Frey spent the next decades teaching at the Hartford Art School and making pictures of her family. Her first book, Reading Raymond Carver in 2017, was an immediate favorite in photobook publishing. Since then, Frey has published two more monographs, Real Life Dramas (with an essay by Tim Carpenter) and now My Mother, My Son. Like her contemporary Peggy Nolan, Frey brilliantly demonstrates that a relentless, unflinching look at our most banal selves — little league games, high school dances, garden snakes and pet rabbits, a first bb gun, Bruce Lee movies, and a flat tire on a blinged up Schwinn 5-speed — can show complex ideas about being a middle-class American during the Reagan and Clinton years.

Published by TBW, My Mother, My Son is presented as nothing more than an album. The front cover has a classic photo of Americana tipped-in by its corners; it’s a young man wearing a ¾ sleeved t-shirt and Adidas Stan Smiths, taking aim with his new rifle, as the photographer’s shadow is cast across the bottom left corner. It reminds me of pictures I saw in family albums when I worked at the Colorado History Museum in the 1990s, no different than Brownie photographs of hunters trying out their new goods in the backyards of Beuna Vista, CO, the same shadow of the photographer cast in the lower corner of the frame. Inside Frey’s album, however, we see something much more sophisticated; the intimacies of an ordinary New England family, played out against the backdrop of the repressive years of Reagan pitted against the scandals of Bill Clinton, striving to find themselves.

The book is composed of 33 photographs — both color and black-and-white — with just one image per page spread. Most of the pictures feature boys or young men, presumedly her children, with some photographs of other family members, neighbors, and friends. Frey’s photographs are beautifully executed and superbly reproduced in the book. I grew up in the 1980s-90s, and there are many signifiers in the book that seem familiar, be it the home décor or clothing found throughout the pictures. Just as importantly, the life she documents is true to many of us, a simple middle-class American existence.

I do have one minor criticism of Frey’s photographs in this book — her use of flash feels a little stale at times. I’ll offer the guess that when she uses strobe, it’s a small-ish camera mounted flash, she isn’t experimenting with the more even illumination of ring flash or connecting the lights off the camera body for my elusive effects. I do feel this approach to strobe lighting can appear brutal and clinical, not ideas that I feel best support or characterize Frey’s pictures.

Regardless, My Mother, My Son is worth the time (like most TBW publications). It is a meditation on motherhood, illustrating Frey’s investigation of what it means to raise boys. Through her lens, we watch her sons negotiate puberty, play, masculinity, learning to define themselves. As far as I can tell, we only see Frey’s mother one time, and it is the last photograph in the book. She appears frail and vulnerable, unable to take care of herself; Frey’s son carries her across the threshold into her own bedroom, and her death feels imminent. It’s a poignant image, and helps the reader situate Frey in the narrative; the pictures of her children really chronicle her own passage of time, surmised as we see the photographer’s mother on the verge of passing away, carried gently by the changing lineage of family.

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Phosphor. By Viviane Sassen.

Phosphor
Photographs by Viviane Sassen
Prestel, Munich, Germany, 2024. 528 pp.

If the name Viviane Sassen immediately conjures up images of haute couture, that’s understandable. The 51-year-old Dutch photographer has worked both sides of the fashion lens, as both model and image-maker, gradually gaining stature in the exclusive world of luxury brand photography. At this point her Rolodex reads like a Paris runway checklist. She’s been commissioned by Miu Miu, Stella McCartney, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Dior, Lancel, and more.

After appearing initially in advertisements and magazines around the globe, her photographs have made their way increasingly into monographs. Sassen is a prolific creator, and she has authored or contributed to more than twenty photobooks since 2008. Her latest, Phosphor, may be the most comprehensive to date. It is certainly the largest, weighing in at 500+ pages, 1.5” thick, and several pounds. The weighty softcover tome is published in conjunction with a large traveling mid-career retrospective. It is prefaced with 5 critical essays (translated into French and English), and the main body is comprised of hundreds of photographs stretching from the late 1980s through 2023.

Most of Phosphor’s images have appeared before elsewhere, either in advertisements, previous monographs, or both. In terms of pictures, Sassen fans will be on familiar ground. But the book’s bifurcated design casts them here in a novel format. The book is comprised of two inverted halves, each sequenced chronologically toward a midpoint, where the format flips 180 degrees. One half features personal work. The other half is magazine assignments. The reader can begin at either end. Regardless of starting point, the process will be roughly the same: Behind a bright painted cover — one side green, the obverse blue — comes a deluge of photographs leading steadily from Sassen’s origins to the present.

Phosphor’s format divides Sassen’s oeuvre into two separate piles, fine art and hired gigs. But the reality is somewhat messier. Like some colleagues — most notably Roe Ethridge and his comparably sized mid-career retrospective Polychronic — Sassen has long blurred the lines of art and commerce. Many of the same motifs run through both halves of the book: self-portraiture, human forms, bold color, ragged physicality, jarring compositions, a recurring fascination with Africa, where she spent part of her childhood. She’s a master of wry composition, unexpected cropping, and look-twice layering. Many photos could slip easily into either half. If Phosphor’s imposed dichotomy feels artificial, that may be exactly the point. It takes a winking stance against silly labels. High end commissions be damned. You get the sense she’d create them herself, even in an unpaid vacuum.

In any case, Sassen’s career trajectory seems clear: Her work has moved inexorably over time toward abstraction and surrealism. These strains have been evident for a while, but in her early photos they were confined to simple collage, complementary hues, and formal alignment. Since roughly 2017 Sassen’s creative tool kit has broadened considerably. Phosphor’s burgeoning middle section — and its expressive core — features recent work from the past half dozen years. Commercial gigs and personal work meet here in dazzling rush of techniques, invention, experiments, and flat out fun. As always, models create a visual baseline. But Sassen then blasts off into the artistic stratosphere. She paints directly onto prints, rephotographs elements, montages with scissors and/or Photoshop, slices, dices, saturates, colors outside the lines, and generally has a ball. The overall impression is of a mature artist with numerous skills at her disposal, and a thirst to mix and match them freely.

“Maybe I call myself a surrealist,” Sassen is quoted in the opening essay. “I also think of myself as a sculptor.” Whatever the label, she’s found a real groove at mid-career. I won’t say she’s settled into it, or into anything that might be called static. Her process feels fluid, and it’s hard to know what she’ll be doing ten years from now. For the time being, Phosphor lays down a marker. This is a selective survey of where she began, her artistic evolution over time, and a healthy sampling of current or recent work. If the name Viviane Sassen conjured up images of haute couture before, it’s time to think again.

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

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