Book of the Week: Selected by Odette England

Book Review Primal Sight Curated by Efrem Zelony-Mindell Reviewed by Odette England "I remember the first photograph I made using black-and-white film. It was 1991. A colleague of my mother loaned me his Nikon F1 camera, gave a 10-minute lesson on aperture, shutter speed, and loading film — in this case, Ilford FP4 — and wished me luck. I hung the camera around my neck and walked downhill to the river. I was feeling blue; blue-black Blue, three-day-old bruise blue-black Blue. The river seemed the perfect place for me to practice seeing in black-and-white..."

Primal Sight by Efrem Zelony-Mindell.

Primal Sight
Curated by Efrem Zelony-Mindell

Gnomic Book, New York, NY, 2021. 188 pp., 176 black-and-white illustrations, 8½x11½".

I remember the first photograph I made using black-and-white film. It was 1991. A colleague of my mother loaned me his Nikon F1 camera, gave a 10-minute lesson on aperture, shutter speed, and loading film — in this case, Ilford FP4 — and wished me luck. I hung the camera around my neck and walked downhill to the river. I was feeling blue; blue-black Blue, three-day-old bruise blue-black Blue. The river seemed the perfect place for me to practice seeing in black-and-white.

The photograph I made of the setting sun is un-special. I remember looking across the yellow-black water, willing the sun to warm and heal my blue-black Blueness. The original mini-lab print is now yellow-black, six-day-old bruise yellow-black, but feels something else entirely. It was an early lesson that black-and-white photography isn’t black-and-white at all. There are no absolutes in black-and-white photography, nothing is solid or assured. It teems with obscurities and ghosts, fogs and figments. Efrem Zelony-Mindell’s Primal Sight is one proof of that.

The cover design, bold and dense, sets the stage. It says: don’t assume, dear viewer, that you can read black-and-white photographs in the same way you always have. Your view is about to stretch, contract, expand, tighten, and elongate in eye-popping new ways. Upon opening the book, you’ll see straight up that most of the Kerplunk straws have fallen, leaving a few shards and a dedication: I NEED MORE. Primal Sight about wanting, needing, demanding more from black-and-white photography, and from those who continue to feast on its bones. In this case, 146 photographers invited by Zelony-Mindell to contribute images, supported by texts from David Campany and Gregory Eddi Jones.

Left: Grant Willing, Untitled (Embers), 2008.   Right: Whitney Hubbs, Untitled, 2009.

Every photograph in this 186-page book is gifted its own page. But the images are not confined; they are nuzzled in an inky bath of blue-black like a mother or lover. This in part owes to the generosity of the page borders, which occupy almost as much space as the images. It also owes to a seepage or intrusion of many of the photographs into the blue-black void. Turn the pages and, even in a well-lit room, you’ll see what I mean. Good examples are the images of Patricia Voulgaris, Whitney Hubbs, Grant Willing, Patrick McNabb, Katherine Hubbard, Anastasia Samoylova, and Nat Ward, where the dusks and darks plunge into the cavernous, luscious cosmos. This effect changes the behavior of photographs. No longer are they mere squares or rectangles; instead, I notice their angularity and irregularity. They shapeshift, as if relishing the porosity of the page.

The lack of photographic containment also owes to the way the book is printed. “The paper itself is not black-black — that’s nearly impossible to do,” confirms Jason Koxvold, the book’s publisher. “It’s an extremely dark blue and the white ink on top of it has a slight coolness to it. Each layer of ink takes on a reflectivity”. Just like each photograph takes on the reflectivity of its maker.

Meryl Meisler, Kissing In Black Leather Jackets 
During Last Dead Boys Concert CBGB, NY, NY, March 1978.

There are lots of bodies in Primal Sight, literal and metaphorical. Still bodies, fluid bodies, bodies caressing and grasping things, bodies of things, and in things. Bodies that someone who is resolutely in favor of color photography might say are zapped of their spunkiness. To that person, I say: you are missing one of the many persuasions of all things monochrome. These images put forth a mighty challenge; that color isn’t necessary for us to communicate or feel. A gamut of color, or palette of color (or whatever the true collective noun is for color) is superfluous to what black-and-white can tell, teach, show, describe, and move within us. I don’t need color to feel the rush of blood to my head that I do in Alex Avgud’s Olivier (as on a crucifix). To know the quiet kiss in Meryl Meisler’s Kissing In Black Leather Jackets During Last Dead Boys Concert CBGB, NY, NY, March 1978. To sense the profound breath in Cara Phillips (Untitled) Ultraviolet #7; the skin prickles in Daniel Rampulla’s Even, or the antagonism in Chance DeVille’s Resilience; David’s Hand. Color may have otherwise drained me of these corporeal insights. Though I don’t like giving away the ending, I will share that the globular oozing of Eileen Quinlan’s Brooks Brother is the perfect antidote to the back cover.

Left: Daniel Rampulla Even.   Right: Cara Phillips (Untitled) Ultraviolet #7

There is another kind of blue-black Blue surrounding this substantial curatorial book project, one that anyone who has assembled an edited volume will know. Zelony-Mindell shared with me their sentiments:

“I know that people are sympathetic to how much work goes into something like this, but I'm curious why we're not really allowed to speak on it or ask about it. Truth be told, I'm exhausted, burned out, and I honestly don't feel well after this experience. I hear so many people talk about the dangers of burnout and to avoid it at all cost. I don't know how that's even possible. I'm grateful to work with people I love, admire, and respect, but there's a lot of uncertainty I'm feeling in this moment. The world moves forward and I think we're so trained to associate that moving forward with keeping up with progress and not healing with the release of the thing we've made. But what better time to take to oneself than during the course of, in this case, the book being printed, shipped, and sent out. Now is exactly the time to not feel pressured by what's next.”

What’s next is already held safely in the arms of Primal Sight. These images may be the start of a hollowing out and burning down some of the stereotypes and long-held assumptions about black-and-white photography. Certainly, they defy our attachment to color. Zelony-Mindell can walk downhill to the river, watch the sunset over the yellow-black water until the sky rolls over into a new kind of blue-black Blue, one that is arousing and tender. We all need more of that.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Odette England is an artist and writer; an Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence at Amherst College in Massachusetts; and a resident artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York. Her work has shown in more than 90 solo, two-person, and group exhibitions worldwide. England’s first edited volume Keeper of the Hearth was published by Schilt Publishing (2020), with a foreword by Charlotte Cotton. Radius Books will publish her second book Past Paper // Present Marks in collaboration with the artist Jennifer Garza-Cuen in spring 2021 including essays by Susan Bright, David Campany, and Nicholas Muellner.