photo-eye | BLOG: June 2010

We here at photo-eye were saddened to hear of the recent passing of photographer Joe Deal. Mr. Deal was extraordinarily influential to the concept of the contemporary landscape and we wanted to invite our readers to share their thoughts and memories of Mr. Deal. photo-eye Magazine writer Larissa Leclair had written a review of Joe Deal’s book West and West that we had intended to publish several months ago, however, the publication was delayed due to a problem with acquiring images for the review. Leclair’s review has now been published on photo-eye Magazine. We hope you enjoy the review and find Mr. Deal’s photographs as inspiring as we do.

Read about Joe Deal's life here.

Read Larissa Leclair’s review here.

Rose-Lynn Fisher's book Bee

Having a six-year-old son who is an aspiring entomologist (paleontologist also tops the list), Rose-Lynn Fisher's book Bee naturally caught my attention. I hope to do a full-length review of this book for the photo-eye Magazine so I will keep the descriptions to a minimum. The book is segmented into chapters relating to the anatomy of the insect and within each chapter the images are arranged from lesser to greater magnification of said body part. Its simple, but well-conceived design published by Princeton Architectural Press, a company well known books of such quality, makes Bee appealing for the photobook collector and those interested in apiological studies.

Rose-Lynn Fisher's book Bee

Japanese Publisher Toshei-Sha has recently published several fantastic books. One book of particular note is Manabu Someya’s Nirai, which explores the photographer’s personal perspective on the folklore of the otherworldly island Nirai Kanai. Nirai Kanai is a world that exists beyond the ocean, part of the local legend from the Japanese islands of Ryukyu. Some believe Nirai Kanai is the island where the gods exist and is the origin of happiness and fertility.

Someya explains, “Folklorist and poet Shinobu Orikuchi once wrote that Nirai Kanai is a place where the spirits of the dead head toward. I prefer this way of thinking. Whenever I gaze at the sea, I also tend to visually hallucinate Nirai Kanai as the world where my spirit will go one day.”

Nirai is Someya’s attempt to communicate that as living beings death does not exist at the end of life, but coexists with life. The photographs in this book show Nirai Kanai as more than ancient folklore, but as a real place we all are a part of and coincide with as we go about our daily life. And while the concept of Someya’s book may seem far out there for the limitations of photography, the photographs themselves are successful in that they are simply great photographs. Landscapes, still-life, and portraiture mix appropriately - telling a fascinating story of personal exploration.

As mentioned above, Toshei-Sha has a few other excellent books out as well. Yasuwo Tsuji’s The Dancing Night displays a lucid journey of street photography and poetry.

Aki Tanaka’s Sunshine Pulse is also a simplistic and beautiful book consisting of soft focus and cherry blossoms.

Be sure to read Nicholas Chiarella’s upcoming review of Sunshine Pulse in photo-eye Magazine.

Koudelka is well known for his austere panoramas of often bleak scenes, only heightened in their melancholy by his heavy use of the medium of black and white (particularly the blacks). While the images often create a sense of foreboding or even worse a apocalyptic doom -- a kind of "what happened here" feeling -- they frequently effect a sense of calm, a quiet after the storm.

Back cover of Piemonte published by Édition Xavier Barral

This newest publication by Édition Xavier Barral, Piemonte, is no different in aesthetic. It features work from the area of Piemonte, a region in Italy that borders France and Switzerland. Turin is its capital. The book opens with an essay by Giuseppe Culicchia that speaks not just of Koudelka's work there, but mentions both historical and cultural references associated with this region -- Giovanni Verga's story La Malora, the actress Silvana Mangano, and Hannibal's trek with his war elephants en route to defeat the Roman army.

All images above shown from Édition Xavier Barral, Piemonte

The design is similar to a couple of earlier Koudelka books, Reconnaissance Wales and Camargue,in that it has bare boards with a black stamped front and back cover. Unlike these earlier titles, it is bound in a landscape format which opens to the top so that the panoramas can be viewed without interruption from the gutter. It features images of cairn markings high in the mountains, sites of construction and industrial decay, grand and closely-cropped landscapes, and ancient and modern architecture of this region. Each image page has a white border and is faced by a black page with small white titles stating the area in which the photo was taken. This chromatic design only heightens Koudelka's use of black and white.

Front cover of Contrasto printing of Piedmont

The essay for the Édition Xavier Barral printing is in French so I had to translate much of the text to get the full meaning. If the essay is very important to you, I would suggest that non-French literates wait on the Contrasto printing which will be out later this year. For photo bibliophile's library, both versions will likely become collector's items.

As an artist who has worked with the New Mexico History Museum's Photographic Archives, and has spent countless hours handling precious photographic objects from some of the first salt prints depicting the American West to hand colored platinum prints of South America, I can easily say I have an affinity for the process of image making.

While I personally feel process can obstruct content and the meaning of an image, I think Korean photographer Jungjin Lee's photographs are only elevated by the use of her own photographic process. Lee's textural photographs are hand coated with liquid emulsion on the surface of handmade rice paper, adding an ethereal dimension to the landscapes Lee photographs.

This quality translates beautifully in Lee's book Wind published by Aperture and Sepia International. The images in Wind are often simple depictions of everyday objects found in the landscape, but the simplicity of the content and quality of the process merge naturally, often allowing for deep contemplation of a simple subject.

Lee's use of grainy texture and lack of detail remind me of Swedish photographer Anders Petersen's photographic aesthetic (lacking of course the brutal sense of reality Petersen often displays). And while Lee's photographs often depict a surreal quality, there is a certain aspect of documentation found within the landscape in almost all of Lee's images. Wind demonstrates Lee's ability to explore the land in a unique way, and more often than not Lee's process adds to the singular simplicity of her subject.

Jake Mendel, Finite Foto's David Ondrik,

Fraction Magazine's David Bram, Sam Portera and

photo-eye's Antone Dolezal outside the bookstore

Thanks to the great organizers at Center, Santa Fe is pleased to host one of the foremost portfolio reviews in the US. photo-eye has two of our group in the list of reviewers and we are excited to offer advice and look for new gallery artists at this year's event. We are also excited to have many out-of-town visitors to the store during this time. Here are a few of the faces who stopped by the bookstore and gallery today.

Rixon Reed with Mary Goodwin of LightWork

From left to right: photographer and photo-eye Magazine writer Tom Leininger; photo-eye Director, Rixon Reed; photographer Edmund Clark; publisher, Dewi Lewis;

and photographer Rubi Shedrin

For more info on the reviewers, reviewees or events, visit Center's Review Santa Fe page. They also have the print auction online if you are interested in bidding. We hope to offer more on the festivities in the next few days.

The concept, storyline and interviews in Stanley Greene's Black Passport are the product of the work of Teun van der Heijden. His firm, Hejiden Karwei, also conceived of the innovative design, both biography and travelogue that all neatly fits into one book, but much like a passport tells only a very minor part of the larger story. van der Heijden selects excerpts from over two years of interviews which he conducted with the photographer and uses Greene's images to illustrate the words (or maybe it is the other way around). In the introduction, Greene uses the multi-layered allusion of human beings as beautiful Lepidoptera who, after experiencing the life of a photojournalist, metamorphosize into moths who continually get too close to the flame. Black Passport allows a glimpse into his engrossing life. Greene tells personal tales relating to his time in Paris, Moscow, Rwanda, Iraq, Lebanon, and San Francisco, among many other physical locations. The brief sampling of words and images -- in both grainy B&W and color -- leaves me wanting more, but questioning whether I can take it.

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