Book of the Week: Selected by Brian Arnold

Book Review Viajes: Perú 1973-74 Photographs by Edward Grazda Reviewed by Brian Arnold "In such a commodity-driven world, I think we often forget that all art, at least in part, is a process. Don’t get me wrong, I adamantly believe in finely crafted objects, but also think the real art making is all the small things you do to learn how to make that finely crafted object..."

Viajes: Perú 1973-74. By Edward Grazda.

Viajes: Perú 1973-74
Photographs by Edward Grazda

Self Published, 2023. 40 pp., 17 photographs.

In such a commodity-driven world, I think we often forget that all art, at least in part, is a process. Don’t get me wrong, I adamantly believe in finely crafted objects, but also think the real art making is all the small things you do to learn how to make that finely crafted object. I felt that as a musician too, that the real art was in the rehearsal, not the performance. In such a commodity-driven world, we often judge an artist’s work by their Instagram profile more than we do their studio activity, a successful show as units sold, not in the pictures and time spent making them.

I personally love a look behind the curtain and seeing how an artist develops ideas, indeed I often find this more meaningful. One of my favorite parts of large residency programs is the chance to interact with artists fully engaged and immersed in their process. I once shared a studio with photographer Ed Grazda, Nef at the ever-wonderful MacDowell, and was excited to share this history with an artist I’d admired for so long.

I was delighted to get a copy of his newest book Viajes: Peru 1973-1974, a sort of published open studio of pictures Grazda made traveling the country. The book is small, roughly 18 x 12 cm, a humble and simple stitch binding, with a collection of black-and-white photographs made wandering around Peru. It opens with a lovely epigraph from Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas Altamirano, and then a basic presentation of the photographs. There are also text edits, printed on standard copy paper on a cheap inkjet printer, one of which iincludes a short description of the book’s genesis, which includes a reference to a photographer named Sergio Larrain, a Chilean photographer who worked for Magnum, and the other is a list pasted in at the end of the book, detailing the dates and regions of the pictures. The pictures reproduced are truly classic black-and-white travelogue, infused with humility, gratitude, and gentle poetry.

I don’t want to say too much more about this book, wanting instead to relish its simplicity. While not as prolific as peers like Danny Lyon or John Gossage, Grazda has authored some remarkable photo books — my favorite being Afghanistan: 1980-1989, when he traveled with mujahideen fighters from Pakistan fighting against the Soviet invaders. Since then, much of his published work looks at Islam and the evolving history of Afghanistan. Viajes: Peru 1973-1974 is an unlikely but important addition, an earlier body of photographs much like Robert Frank’s photographs of the same region, not yet The Americans but an essential stepping-stone. These photographs of Peru by Grazda feel like a similar stepping-stone, poetic and inquisitive, and an essential learning experience for the work he developed subsequently.

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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.