Book Review Berlin on a Dog’s Night Photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy Reviewed by Blake Andrews “It’s been over thirty years since the reunification of East and West Germany. But some major GDR photographers are still woefully under-recognized in the West. Gundula Schulze Eldowy is a prime example..."

Berlin on a Dog’s Night by Gundula Schulze Eldowy.

Berlin on a Dog’s Night
Photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy
Spector Books, 2024. 340 pp., 320 illustrations, 8½x10¾x1¼".

It’s been over thirty years since the reunification of East and West Germany. But some major GDR photographers are still woefully under-recognized in the West. Gundula Schulze Eldowy is a prime example. Born in Erfurt in 1954, her career roughly straddled the forty-year lifespan of East Germany, before continuing into the present via Japan, Moscow, Turkey, New York, Bolivia, and other destinations. Even today as a septuagenarian, she remains a globetrotting whirlwind who has never stopped moving. Wiki lists her current residence as “Berlin and Peru”. Did I mention she once discovered an unknown shaft in the Great Pyramid of Egypt? Or that she is an accomplished poet? Or befriended Robert Frank in the 1980s?

Schulze Eldowy’s restless spirit manifested from an early age. After settling in East Berlin in 1972, she traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain during the seventies, a camera always at her side. Gradually her energies galvanized around her adopted home city, where she probed the local alleys, evenings, and residents. Her gritty b/w photographs of Berlin’s underbelly were eventually compiled into the multi-year project Berlin in einer Hundenacht, which translates to English as Berlin on a Dog’s Night.

Published as a book in 2011 by Lehmstedt Verlag, Berlin on a Dog’s Night made a minor splash in America and Europe. It remains her signature work, and if you know her photos at all, it is likely through this monograph. Unfortunately, as happens too often with first edition photobooks, it has fallen out of print and become relatively hard to find. Meanwhile, a belated wave of interest in GDR photographers has been gaining steam, cresting at Rencontres d'Arles with the group exhibition Restless Bodies: East German Photography 1980-1989, curated by Sonia Voss in 2019. Gundula Schulze Eldowy was one of several legendary elders included, along with Ulrich Wüst, Gabriele Stötzer, Ute Mahler, and many more.

The timing feels ripe for rediscovery, and Spector has jumped on the moment with a new edition of Berlin on a Dog’s Night. It’s a handsome grey hardback, dense with more than 300 pages of b/w photos. The fusty original cover image has been replaced with bold yellow lettering, and the original contents supplemented with dozens of extra photos. In addition to Berlin on a Dog’s Night, there are short selections from other projects. We’ll get to those in a moment, but first the title series, which occupies the first 2/3 of the book.

Berlin on a Dog’s Night was a wide ranging series of photos shot between 1977-1990. As sequenced in the book, the dates are jumbled into a timeless trail of broken scenes. Like a stray hound, Schulze Eldowy poked her nose just about everywhere. One photo captures anguished kids huddled on a sidewalk. Another shows a messy domestic interior. Street portraits in passing capture pedestrians looking back at Schulze Eldowy with befuddled stares, hair mussed, shirts untucked. Photos of coke-bottle glasses, clotheslines, and litter blend with brick facades and overgrown lots for layers of squalor. It’s a dog’s eye view of Berlin indeed, and a grimy feral mutt at that.

During the Cold War, the GDR was proudly keen to show its good side to the world. Schulze Eldowy did not fit the state’s aims, and the German Stasi sometimes put roadblocks in her way. But Schulze Eldowy persisted. In fact she may have gone a step overboard in subverting the GDR’s self mythology. Did East Berlin actually look this shabby in real life? Perhaps not. But if she took artistic license, the ends justified the means. Every picture supported her singular and poetic vision. Add a filter of grainy monochrome on flat matte pages, and this book encapsulates the dull routine of life in the former Iron Curtain better than any other photobook.

I’ve mentioned Schulze Eldowy’s restless spirit, and it seems she was usually juggling a few things at once. Overlapping with the 70s-80s timeline of Berlin on a Dog’s Night were various other photo projects including The Wind Fills Itself With Water, Nude Portraits, Work, and Tamerlan. Samplings of each one are included here, with 10 or 20 photos per series. From this limited selection it’s hard to discern how extensive these projects were, if they deserved their own books (none were published as monographs), or if they were mere side projects. My guess is the former. If there isn’t quite enough material for a proper analysis, there’s certainly enough to spark curiosity. Each of the extra chapters tantalizes with strong photography. They include wonderfully strange nudes, industrial labor scenes, and an intimate view of an aging friend. They may range in subject, but their honest vulnerability jibes perfectly with the title project’s unsettling overtones. The book’s design helps integrate everything into a whole, dispensing with chapter headings so that one series bleeds into the next. (Captions and series titles are reserved for a double spread near the beginning.)

Schulze Eldowy’s photos are descriptive and powerful. They’d be enough on their own for a dynamite book. The good news is they’re packaged here with an added bonus. A delightful introductory essay by Schulze Eldowy recounts some of her life story, with anecdotes about photography, friends, and adventures in blunt language. It’s a fantastic piece of first-person prose, informative, intimate, and memoiristic, a proper match for the pictures. Together they make the new Berlin on a Dog’s Night a treat. Hopefully this book will introduce Schulze Eldowy’s work to new audiences and a new generation. I’m happy to count myself among the freshly converted.

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

Book Review The Sleepers Photographs by Sophie Calle Reviewed by Britland Tracy “It’s 5:00pm on Monday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race..."

The Sleepers 

by Sophie Calle. 

The Sleepers
Photographs by Sophie Calle
Siglio Press, 2024. 304 pp., 6x8".

It’s 5:00pm on Sunday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race. Logistically, she has prepared a menu to offer upon arrival or departure, fresh sheets if desired, a voice recorder, a camera, and a questionnaire through which these volunteers will divulge everything from their dreams to their occupations to their histories of bed-wetting. Symbolically, she has purchased a goldfish which will stand watch in her bedroom to demarcate this week of…art? labor? slumber exchange? espionage? That is for the “sleepers” to define.

But, but, but: Bob the Trumpeter needs to take a bath. Graziella and Françoise insist on airing out the room first. Maxine will only settle into a nap if his coworker joins him. X the Babysitter’s jealous fiancé would prefer she take the sofa. Jean-Yves Le Gavre is day-drunk and running three hours behind, Marino is four hours late, and Maggie has altogether disregarded the appointment. Henri-Alexis doesn’t like the magnetic aura of the sheets. Once in bed, their needs lengthen, and nothing short of Valium, sex, silk pajamas, a book, a beer, a gust of fresh air, the radio, a phone call, a cigarette, silence, closed doors, open windows, a wall-and-pillow fortress, and/or their dog will suffice as a tranquilizer. Sophie’s Sleepers are in fact human beings, still very much awake, with eccentricities and predilections and some apprehensions about why exactly they have agreed to crawl into her bed in the first place. And so her game begins.

A Sophie Calle Project is at its best when its initial scheme grows legs and runs circles around itself, persuading happenstance and human error to disrupt the rulebook, and that is precisely what unfolds throughout this week. Her subjects push back. They answer her questions with meandering diatribes or not at all. They’re annoyed or hungry or lusty or not yet tired. They’re laid bare in their idiosyncrasies yet remain impenetrable; they know they’re being watched. Voyeurism is a reciprocal mirror, and the specimens placed under glass have some observations about their examiner: “She’s mad.” / “This needs to stop, this acting like a social lunatic who asks questions and says nothing about herself.” / “Sophie, really, I find this a bit excessive. You’re spying on the most intimate moments. It’s unacceptable. If this is how it’s going to be, we’ll go to sleep.”

To follow the rules and fall asleep in her bed is, ironically, the eject button out of her game. Sleep is the least interesting thing that can happen here.

Les Dormeurs was Calle’s first major project and a harbinger of what was to become of her now half-century career as an artist-writer-investigator of the human condition, and it has at long last arrived stateside as The Sleepers by way of Siglio Press and translator Emma Ramadan. The book itself is an intimate object whose tactility falls somewhere between a pillow and a sacred text, with its cushioned navy cover and three hundred silver gilded pages. It is meant to be read and regarded in equal measure, as images follow the lead of their textual counterparts, cataloging one sleeper after the next and confirming in black-and-white evidence what Calle has recorded in words. Look, there really were people in her bed. This man was a mouth-breather; this woman was nude. A tangle of limbs here; a snuggling cat there. Here they laid awake, smoking cigarettes before breakfast, sipping champagne, reading a newspaper, buttoning a shirt, staring back at the camera, greeting the next in line. The photographs of these gestures are grainy and monotone and satisfying in the way that crime scene photographs are satisfying – not for their technical craftsmanship but rather for the matter-of-fact secrets they reveal for our visual consumption.

It could go without saying that The Sleepers is not about sleeping, but rather those vulnerable, banal threshold moments usually shrouded by the curtain of night and solitude. If there is a narrative to be found in this game, it resides in the very peculiarities that render these participants insubordinate to its “stay in bed” rule – much in the same way a lover’s scrupulous nail clipping routine delivers more intrigue than whether or not they happen to snore. If one dies as one lives, then perhaps sleeping is the next best parallel lens we have onto the precarious business of living.

In the wake of this experiment, Calle would go on to, among other things, excavate occupied hotel rooms under the auspices of a chamber maid; hire a private detective to shadow her; follow a man to Venice for a whisper of a reason; publicly dissect a breakup letter, an abandoned address book, and her own mother’s death with the surgical aloofness that has become her signature affect and greatest tool. But first, she asked people to sleep in her bed, that unruly horizontal stage on which we spend a third of our lives, and documented their prostrate improvisations.

Now it is 10:00am on Monday, April 9th, 1979, and Sophie Calle has made a heap of concessions, inserted herself and her family members as bed doubles for some absentees, and gradually neglected her questionnaire. She has absorbed the trepidations of her sleepers and acquiesced to their chaos. They have run circles around her, and taking their cue, the goldfish has leapt from its bowl to its demise. Her gaze slackens; there is no one left to watch. She strips the sheets. The unraveling becomes this book.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Book Review Sons of the Living Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Reviewed by Brian Arnold "There are some things about this man that I feel that I know, but it’s hard to say since I’m not given much context for the photograph. There is no date, location or name. It shows a white(ish) man seated on a sidewalk, his sandaled feet spilling out into the gutter. He leans back against a shuttered building, plywood and corrugated tin covering the windows..."

Sons of the Living by Bryan Schutmaat.

Sons of the Living
Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat

Trespasser, Austin, TX, 2024. 188 pp., 90 tritone plates on uncoated paper, 11¾x14¾".

        But when I pass through the pearly gate
        Will my gown be gold instead?
        Or just a red clay robe with red clay wings
        And a red clay halo for my head?

                                                    — Gillian Welch

There are some things about this man that I feel that I know, but it’s hard to say since I’m not given much context for the photograph. There is no date, location or name. It shows a white(ish) man seated on a sidewalk, his sandaled feet spilling out into the gutter. He leans back against a shuttered building, plywood and corrugated tin covering the windows. His body sits effortlessly, looking both powerful and relaxed. He’s a hardworking man with rich golden skin, and it feels clear he’s earned his living in the desert landscape of the American Southwest — a deep, dark complexion cultivated under a relentless sun and layers of red sand. Despite his obvious strength, he also looks very awkward. His crown is a pale, Aryan complexion, kept white and clean by the Stetson he wore out in the field. He reminds me of John Grady Cole, the protagonist in the brilliant Cormac McCarthy novel All the Pretty Horses. To be clear, I remember American landscape painter Richard Thompson once telling me what the film adaptation got wrong; Richard was convinced that John Grady Cole, the handsome and romantic hero, would have a tan line from his hat around the circumference of his head on account of him riding the southwest deserts for weeks, always wearing his dirty and sweat-stained hat. It’s a little less picturesque than Matt Damon’s portrayal of the character, but it might also provide an important metaphor for understanding John Grady, crowned with a halo made from the unforgiving desert sands.

I found this photograph in Sons of the Living, the new, much adored book from Bryan Schutmaat and Trespasser Books. Sons of the Living is a richly visualized, harsh and romantic story about the people and landscapes found in the deserts of the American West. I’ve never really been to Texas — Schutmaat’s homeland and muse — but I have spent a lot of time in the backcountry of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, so think I have good feel for the people and places he photographed. The deserts of the American Southwest are as gorgeous as they are brutal, full of red hills, sage brush, ancient canyons, powerful oil and mineral industries, and an unlikely assortment of outsiders lost along its highways. Schutmaat continues to work in black-and-white, view camera photography, and does not shy away from portraying his deep love for traditional depictions of the region. Indeed, many of his photographs feel like deliberate references to masterpieces by Timothy O’Sullivan, Laura Gilpin, Georgia O’Keefe, and Robert Adams. I would describe Sons of the Living as a loving, tragic, and poetic rendition of the last American frontier, a harsh and broken landscape full gorgeous views and broken dreams.

Schutmaat builds his narrative by mixing photographs of desert vistas (many focusing on highways and trains — both essential for understanding westward expansion) with portraits of people he met during his travels. The landscape photographs are very classical — a train trestle spanning a river gap, the elegant curve of a highway traversing the rolling hills, and storms brewing along a distant horizon (beautifully reminiscent of some platinum pictures by Laura Gilpin) — and clearly articulate the place. The portraits offer an interesting cross-section of characters — workers, drifters, outlaws, and mystics — all revealed as desperate seekers on a lost highway, depicted with remarkable clarity and empathy. Together these pictures present a haunting perspective on the American frontier in the 21st century, Manifest Destiny when the oil wells are dying and the mines abandoned.

To better understand Schutmaat’s photos, I again want to circle back to Cormac McCarthy. I know it’s bad timing to evoke McCarthy, after the recent articles in Vanity Fair and the New York Times, but like Willa Cather and Robert Adams, I think of him as one of the great artists of the American West. This time I want to reference his character Billy Purnam, the protagonist of The Crossing, the brilliant sequel to All the Pretty Horses. The Crossing is ultimately a novel about living with trauma. Early in the story, Billy befriends a wild wolf by nursing her back to health. McCarthy creates the feeling that this is the most nurturing and loving relationship Billy has known, making it so incredibly devastating when he kills her himself, shooting her in the head after she loses a brutal dog fight. Soul beaten, Billy spends the rest of the novel riding horseback along the Texas-Mexico border, following a string of chance encounters with mystics and drifters who teach the wounded man how to live with trauma. When I page through the pictures in Sons of the Living, I feel a similar narrative to those found in McCarthy’s novels — a story about a poet, loner, and outlaw at home among the wanderers of the desert Southwest.

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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.

Book Review The Crisis Tapes Photographs by Charlie Simokaitis Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis has been sitting on the side table in my library for some months, first puzzling me, and then, speaking directly to my nervous system. After a personal loss left me bereft, my dearest friend began to check in with me regularly to ask 'how is your nervous system?' The answer for weeks was not well..."

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis.

The Crisis Tapes
Photographs by Charlie Simokaitis
TIS Books, 2024. 144 pp., 70 tri-tone images, 9½x11½".

“Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. 

More and more by each glistening minute, 

through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. 

I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.”

—Prayer, Jorie Graham

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis has been sitting on the side table in my library for some months, first puzzling me, and then, speaking directly to my nervous system. After a personal loss left me bereft, my dearest friend began to check in with me regularly to ask “how is your nervous system?” The answer for weeks was not well. During that tender time returning to The Crisis Tapes again and again helped me to reach stasis.

The book begins with a portrait. The portrait is the frontispiece, and one of very few figurative pictures of the book’s 70 tri-tone reproductions. It is the likeness of a girl we do not know. She wears glasses. Her eyes are closed. Then we are on a journey. One that is often quite dark, descriptive of industrial decay. The forest at night, geometric shapes, a dalmatian missing both of its eyes, a girl whose head we cannot see, swimming down into the depths we do not know.

This highly formal book gives its reader the gift of physical space to consider every photograph. The minimal design elevates each image, first on a profoundly individual level, and then felt as a cascading whole. Moving through the pages is like walking by a series of ruins, feeling confusion, and then slowly, figure-by-figure, or more aptly, image-by-image, moving ahead to feel a new awareness of spaciousness in one’s chest. It is a journey from the mundane toward the sacred. A doorway, or a portal, that creates the possibility of a different world. By the end of the pathway, transformation.

The narrative of the book is not easily known. I am not convinced we must know the story behind it all, yet humans are narrative seeking creatures. The publisher, TIS Books, describes that "The Crisis Tapes — the debut monograph of photographer Charlie Simokaitis — is an account of his daughter’s gradual loss of the ability to see. . .” With this fact now known, most all the symbols and geometric shapes point to the anatomy of the eye, the anatomy of the nervous system, and poignantly the presence of the dalmatian becomes symbolic of the fact that the breed can lose their sight due to a number of eye conditions.

By the end of the book I have forgotten the tension and tightness of my own nervous system. I find the experience of the book to be one that allows the length of mourning and the subsequent growth that mourning brings. It depicts the depth of a loss: when something is lost, something is gained. We can feel the echoes of transformation. A transformation that serves to remind us that emotional healing takes far longer than physical healing. But never again are we the same.

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.