Best Books 2014: Sara Skorgan Teigen

Best Books 2014 Best Books 2014 Sara Skorgan Teigen Best Books picks from photographer Sara Skorgan Teigen.

Proliferation By Geert Goiris Roma Publications A moving book in a delicate wrapping, with details that offer stillness and time to let your thoughts run and take in these quiet images. They don’t need to be big concepts. The images seem almost made in a snapshot manner, but at the same time I sense a lot of thought behind these images. Or maybe it’s because they are the kind of images you recognize without knowing why. I find myself accepting all of these moments, sculptures and the emotions they give me. The whole experience reminds me of the walk you would take after experiencing something strong: then you see and experience everything differently. Geert saw for us and I feel both lost and found.	Intergalàtico By Guilherme Gerais Avalanche The aliveness and eagerness makes me love this book. I sense a man with hundreds of ideas and he uses photography in a way I love: as a tool to understand and create. He makes his photographs by using the camera as the genius machine it can be. He lies and tells the truth with collages, drawings, sculptures and his own thoughts. A wonderful book I am sure seems different every time you open it.	Everything will be ok By Alberto Lizaralde Self-Published A book so strong it takes your breath away for a moment. Between portraits of people being traumatized, crying or lost you get some of the most beautiful images of everyday life. The images get under your skin and you can feel the anxiety yourself: in the abandoned bread-crumbs of an empty seat, in the broken branches of the trees or since your hair seems to not stop making knots. Alberto offers you to feel what he experiences. The real strength of this book is the editing and sequencing, which collects these images and gives them logic. The sequence all ends up in fireworks, and then you actually want to go through it again.
Les Enfantillages Pittoresques By Laurent Millet Musèes d’Angers This is a catalogue, but it absolutely deserves a place in a nominee for 2014 books. It is in fact one of the most beautiful book I have seen this year, as it wakes up something in me that wants to go out and play, create or just be calm. Since this book is a collection of his different works, it gives a very fulfilling picture of the artist: a curious, poetic and playful human in contact with something pure in himself. “The logic of the daydreamer who only uses mental constructs and rational approaches to better remember the essence of his own work: being there, preoccupied by a singular composition of the universe.” It is pure joy to go back and forth in this magic, poetic and well-printed catalogue. His sculptures wouldn’t exist without photography and his way of seeing the world is much more like that of a child who doesn’t need explanations or a reason to understand. There are also very good texts by Christine Besson, Arthur Kopel and Michel Poivert.	Southbound By Knut Egil Wang Journal “Syden” is a collective name Scandinavians use for the Canary Islands and some other islands south in Europe, where many Scandinavians immigrate to in the cold and dark winters of the north. This book portrays a strange and unfamiliar side of people of the north in the most humorous and sarcastic way. When traveling to “Syden” they feel exempt the normal rules of behavior: there you can drink until you fall, and you are free to wear or do stuff you wouldn’t dare do at home. Knut Egil Wang has made very sharp observations of these odd winter-pilgrimages.	Does Yellow Run Forever? By Paul Graham MACK Does Yellow Run Forever is a small treasure. Just holding it makes you eager: the soft velvet cover in screaming yellow and the shiny, gold edges, and inside we find a big collection of photographed shiny rainbows. I like the clean edit of sleeping people dreaming, messy neighborhoods and clean rainbows. It is all dreams and illusions. But then again you are in fact holding this shiny, golden book, so in a way the illusion stops right there. I am very much attracted to this book because it could only be made in the form of a book.

Sara Skorgan Teigen (1984, Oslo, Norway) studied at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography (Cph, DK) and at ICP, International Center of Photography (NYC, USA). She has exhibited internationally at galleries in USA, Italy, Sweden, France, Denmark and Norway. Her book Fractal State of Being (Journal) was shortlisted for 1st photobook at the Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Prize 2014. She is co-founder and editor at Studio Studio in Oslo, Norway.