Animals Are Outside Today, Photographs by Colleen Plumb.
Published by Radius Books, 2011.

Animals Are Outside Today

Reviewed by Ellen Rennard
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Colleen Plumb Animals Are Outside Today
Photographs by Colleen Plumb
Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2011. Hardcover. 128 pp., 65 color illustrations, 9x10".

My great-grandfather wrote two books titled Our Great Outdoors -- one volume on reptiles, another on mammals. Thus it is in the spirit of family tradition that I feel I could, on occasion, as Whitman wrote, "turn and live with the animals." Given this fantasy of becoming a modern day St. Francis, it isn't surprising that I was immediately drawn to Colleen Plumb's monograph, Animals Are Outside Today, published by Radius Books. For the past fourteen years Plumb has turned her lens not only on living animals but also on those which are (among other things) dead, stuffed, painted, drawn, plucked, slaughtered, roasted, euthanized, and caged, all of which appear in this book.

Whether behind fences, in a bag or a box, a frame or a jar, many of these animals are separated from humans by a literal divide. On a symbolic level, this separation between humans and nature runs contrary to animism -- the notion that animals (among other things) contain spirits or souls -- but is consistent with the disassociation from nature prevalent in Western culture. At the same time, however, many of the animals in Plumb's photographs are not separated from the viewer; in some cases, they are (or seem) very near, as in Mouse with Fly, in which a fly perches on a dead mouse, seen in close but with soft focus. In exactly what ways are these animals outside today? And outside of what?

Animals Are Outside Today, by Colleen Plumb. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

There is no one answer here. In Plumb's photographs there are variations in perspective, sharpness, depth of field, emotional tone, and distance from the subject; if there is a common thread it is that the view is often unexpected, as is the way she crops the images. For example, Field Museum Sue shows only part of the tail of the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex in the world. Photographed from below, these bones are dwarfed by the light shining through the checkerboard of windows in the ceiling above the enormous room in which Sue is displayed. That pattern is echoed on the facing page in what is apparently the roof of a cage holding a baby alligator. Not only do we connect the two creatures because of the similarity of the shapes of their tails, but we also see them both as specimens, something collected and preserved in order to be observed. (Interestingly, the word "specimens" comes from the Latin word specere, meaning to look at.) More generally, the sequencing of the images creates the kind of conversation between photographs that happens best in book form; the trim size, paper, layout, and text likewise work well together.

Animals Are Outside Today, by Colleen Plumb. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

Perhaps the most important question here has to do with death. We cannot possibly escape death in the pages of this book which opens with a Gary Snyder poem titled, Two Fawns That Didn't See the Light of Spring and contains numerous photographs of dead animals. But Burying Jack and Euthanized take us to the heart of the matter. In the former, a little girl stands next to a plain wooden box that is clearly the coffin for a dog named Jack; in the latter, a man and dog (Jack, perhaps?), viewed from far above (from heaven?), lie side by side on a red blanket under a shade tree. From this perspective, it is impossible to know (except conceptually) whether it is the man who is dead or the dog, or both. In this way – in that we humans, like animals, are subject to death – there is no separation between us; we all eventually turn to dust.

Animals Are Outside Today, by Colleen Plumb. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

Plumb's work is not (thank goodness) merely a polemic against cruelty to animals (although I suspect animal rights' activists may see it this way). Although we can infer some of Plumb's ideas about the way animals exist in today's world, these photographs are less about ideas than about her personal way of seeing animals and of seeing us seeing and depicting animals. Rarely, her idiosyncratic perspective becomes simply obscure, as in Procyon Lotor, in which the reflection of a raccoon is almost as indecipherable as its Latinate name. More often, I find her photographs refreshingly original, well composed, and intelligent. Most of all, I enjoy the way Plumb's work challenges us to consider our relationship with the animal world.—ELLEN RENNARD

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see Colleen Plumb's work on the Photographer's Showcase

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ELLEN RENNARD is a writer, photographer, and teacher of writing and literature at Groton School in Groton, MA. She graduated from Princeton, where she wrote her thesis on images of Native Americans; she also holds an MA in English from Middlebury. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Fraction Magazine and Photovision; her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Black and White and Orion. Images from Rennard’s book project on The Downs at Albuquerque were nominated for a New York Photo Festival Book Award in 2009 and won first place in the 2010 Px3 People’s Choice Awards for Book Proposal and Documentary Photography. www.ellenrennard.com

Pangnirtung, Photographs by Robert Frank.
Published by Steidl, 2011.

Pangnirtung
Reviewed by Ellen Rennard
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Robert Frank Pangnirtung
Photographs by Robert Frank
Steidl, 2011. Hardbound. 40 pp., 27 black & white illustrations, 9x12".

I agreed to review Robert Frank's Pangnirtung with not a little trepidation. Where is Pangnirtung, anyway? The last page of the book has a map. One way of knowing. Northwest Territories. Cold. Isolated. Gray, like the photographs. Unrelenting gray on perfect, heavy, matte paper with plenty of white space. Overcast. The cover: "stones - maybe the balance of a big sky above..." The texture of the boards, rough. Simple, but not. Frank's text: sparse. The land: sparser.

Frank tells us he flew in from Iqaluit, formerly Frobisher Bay, in a four-passenger plane. Stayed with friends. A quiet time. Five days in 1992, 27 images in a book published by Steidl almost 20 years later. A book that sounds like silence, a journey that feels like stillness.

Pangnirtung, by Robert Frank. Published by Steidl, 2011.

 "The people's language is INUKTITUT," Frank writes. "One Man is INUK. More - the people INUIT." Okay. But there are no human beings in these black-and-white Polaroid photographs. 1,325 people in Pangnirtung in 2006, the book says. But none visible. Wait. There is one. A tiny figure in the distance on the right in the book's opening image of Pangnirtung Harbor. I get out my loupe to make sure. It appears to be a man. All but lost in the vastness, a figure dwarfed by the stark landscape that could be from the nineteenth century if not for a small motorboat floating in the calm water.

Pangnirtung, by Robert Frank. Published by Steidl, 2011.

Maybe the Inuit don't want to be photographed. They've lived here for thousands of years. Now in prefabricated houses photographed by Robert Frank. The windows are mostly covered: a Canadian flag, a tiger, curtains. Who's home? The same facade repeated on two facing pages with just a slight variation. For emphasis, but emphasis of what? A moment and then another moment. The compositions in this section vaguely reminiscent of Frank's "Trolley," the cover of Steidl's 2008 publication of Frank's seminal work, The Americans, but with no people, no movement. Being nobody, going nowhere.

Sad? Maybe. Or just hermetic. So what can I tell you to think about this book? You'll feel as you feel. It's a little journey. It starts in the harbor. The airplane lands at the community airport. A pile of rocks behind a chain link fence: "way in, way out," the caption reads.

Pangnirtung, by Robert Frank. Published by Steidl, 2011.

 You can feel the coldness of the air. You can smell winter. Another caption: "telephone post above perma-frost." Perma-frost: soil below freezing for two or more years. The last four pages are of graves marked by white wooden crosses. A cemetery by the bay. The final frame: "End of Pangnirtung Road System."

I keep returning to this book. Then to The Americans. I see Frank's early work differently now, all those cars, the motorcycles, and Jack Kerouac's introductory description of "the mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space . . ." And continuing, here, in Pangnirtung: the main road, desolate, leading past the small village into the end of something.—Ellen Rennard

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Ellen Rennard is a writer, photographer, and teacher of writing and literature at Groton School in Groton, MA. She graduated from Princeton, where she wrote her thesis on images of Native Americans; she also holds an MA in English from Middlebury. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Fraction Magazine and Photovision; her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Black and White and Orion. Images from Rennard’s book project on The Downs at Albuquerque were nominated for a New York Photo Festival Book Award in 2009 and won first place in the 2010 Px3 People’s Choice Awards for Book Proposal and Documentary Photography. www.ellenrennard.com 

One Block, Photographs by Dave Anderson.
Published by Aperture, 2010.

One Block
Reviewed by Ellen Rennard
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Dave Anderson One Block
Photographs by Dave Anderson. Text by Chris Rose.
Aperture, 2010. Hardbound. 144 pp., 100 color illustrations, 8-3/4x9".

One Block is Dave Anderson's homage to a block in New Orleans located in the Lower Ninth Ward, an area where the floodwaters of Katrina dealt an especially hard blow. In documenting the rebuilding that went on there between 2006 and 2010, Anderson includes numerous portraits of the residents of this block, some at work -- painting, leveling, measuring, planting, sanding, and so forth -- others caught in the still moments between. Some of the portraits are more formal, others less so. Although the captions speak to the various concerns of these people, the photographic narrative centers around the evolution of homes; we see the before and after pictures, from sheets of plastic to fresh coats of paint, from dumpsters filled with rubble to new windows, walls, and roofs, all observed over the years Anderson returned to document the process of recovery. My favorite image shows the stripped interior of a house, shafts of light falling through a window on bare beams. In this photograph Anderson's skillful composition and use of light emphasize what is not there, and it is this absence above all that makes us feel the losses of Katrina, even as the photographs of renovation convey hope.

One Block, by Dave Anderson. Published by Aperture, 2010.

 Anderson also includes the words of the people themselves, as well as descriptions that hint at the failures of FEMA, struggles with building codes, and the myriad problems encountered in the long recovery from Katrina's devastation. These captions are quite helpful in understanding the back-stories that are only hinted at in some of the photographs. For example, a black lab appears in several images, but then we also read that this dog died of cancer, the cause of which the dog's owner attributed to the FEMA trailer they lived in for two years after the hurricane hit. (A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proved that FEMA trailers contained unsafe levels of toxic formaldehyde that caused numerous health problems.) In addition, Anderson turns his eye toward salient details like empty paint buckets, a blooming rose, a waterlogged photo album, a light fixture covered by a protective layer of plastic, chickens running in the grass, a stripped wall, and a boy standing under a red, white and blue basketball hoop. In many of these photographs, local color is literal: an orange wrench, a red rose, a yellow house, a blue wall - bright spots that enliven the pages and the mood.

One Block, by Dave Anderson. Published by Aperture, 2010.

One Block, by Dave Anderson. Published by Aperture, 2010.

 Anderson's previous book, Rough Beauty, contains black and white photographs of people living in the town of Vidor, Texas, a place made infamous by its history of KKK involvement. As with Vidor, Anderson is an outsider to the Lower Ninth Ward, but whereas he seems to have been a stranger with a camera in the case of the latter, it is clear that he was welcomed back by many of the people he photographed for One Block and that he is, as he writes, "proud to now call many of them friends." While these relationships plainly allowed Anderson access over a period of years, the portraits are not particularly intimate. In the best of them, the people are looking away from the camera, either in inward contemplation or in communion with someone other than the photographer. In general, I didn't feel like I really got to know these folks through the photographs as much as through their own words in the captions. I did notice people of various ages and races, some of them chatting and working together. (Was that diversity part of the reason Anderson chose this particular block, I wondered?) But, most importantly, what unfolds is how these people rebuilt their neighborhood; Anderson's photographs tell that story well, and the book's elegant sequencing shapes the narrative flow very effectively. Thus One Block shows us a different kind of aftermath of Katrina: not just the rubble, but the reconstruction.—Ellen Rennard

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Ellen Rennard is a writer, photographer, and teacher of writing and literature at Groton School in Groton, MA. She graduated from Princeton, where she wrote her thesis on images of Native Americans; she also holds an MA in English from Middlebury. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Fraction Magazine and Photovision; her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Black and White and Orion. Images from Rennard’s book project on The Downs at Albuquerque were nominated for a New York Photo Festival Book Award in 2009 and won first place in the 2010 Px3 People’s Choice Awards for Book Proposal and Documentary Photography. www.ellenrennard.com

Infidel, Photographs by Tim Hetherington. 
Published by Chris Boot, 2010.

Infidel

Reviewed by Ellen Rennard

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Tim Hetherington - Infidel

Photographs by Tim Hetherington. Introduction by Sebastian Junger.
Chris Boot, 2010. Softcover. 240 pp., 200 color illustrations 6x8".


Infidel, with photographs by Tim Hetherington and introductory text by Sebastian Junger, is as nearly perfect as I can imagine a book to be. Let me provide a bit of context for the way I see it. First, I came of age during the Vietnam War and was profoundly influenced by the powerful, iconic photographs of that conflict. However, my general impression of post-Vietnam photographs of Americans in combat has been that there is always something hidden or unseen; I always feel removed from the situation, peering out a tank window either literally or figuratively. I keep looking for the real thing, images that resonate as powerfully as, for example, Eddie Adams' photograph of the execution of a prisoner of war, and while I've seen some good work, I have not found what I was searching for. Until Infidel.

Infidel, by Tim Hetherington. Published by Chris Boot, 2010.

 The intimacy of Hetherington's portraits of a single US platoon stationed in the Korengal Valley, a dangerous and remote outpost in Afghanistan, cannot help but elicit an emotional response from the viewer, but beyond that, these photographs are just so damn well made, so heartfelt, so intelligent. The book looks like a journal, bound in black, a soft cover that sits in the hands like the personal story that it is. No surprise that Hetherington and Junger were there for five months - this is no fly by night project. One of the things that struck me is the maleness of what is here: it is, writes Junger, a brotherhood that is the true topic of this book. Women are entirely absent except in pictures of pin-up girls that Hetherington has shown just as they appeared: next to fly-strips and a lot of ammunition. I remember as a younger woman wondering what, exactly, went on in men's locker rooms, what they said to one another, how they behaved, and in a strange (and altogether military) way, this book supplies at least a partial answer.

Infidel, by Tim Hetherington. Published by Chris Boot, 2010

The book begins with the landscape, and then zeroes in on the men themselves quite quickly. Following Junger's hard-hitting introduction, one that works perfectly with what follows, are two pages of thumbnail portraits - like those that might appear in a high school yearbook - with the names of each man, followed by one rather amusing group shot (one soldier is yawning), and then a series of stunning portraits of individual men, both in and out of uniform. The next part, graphic illustrations of the men's tattoos, was the least interesting to me; I felt I better understood the idea of this sequence from the title of the book, the text about tattoos, and the photographs of the men's tattooed arms, chests, etc., and so found this section to take away (just a very little) from what was otherwise incredibly compelling. Since these graphics occupy just 16 pages, and since they were at least mildly interesting, it was easy to flip through them. Perhaps if I had taken more time connecting them to the portraits (since each tattoo is associated with a name), I would have liked this part better, but I didn't have the patience for that in light of the amazing photographs and text that surround them.

Infidel, by Tim Hetherington. Published by Chris Boot, 2010.

Next are details, some raw and some raunchy -- men playing cards, passing the time -- followed by photographs of combat. To me, fascinating. That way of seeing behind the walls, of feeling the experiences of these men. The surreal juxtaposition of a shadowy figure holding a weapon next to a man in uniform petting a dog - these are the contradictory elements Hetherington aimed to show. As he writes, "War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic." I cannot think of another book that gets at the complexity of war as well as this one.

Infidel, by Tim Hetherington. Published by Chris Boot, 2010.

The book ends with text by some of the men, writing that illuminates exactly what is going on here, followed by incredibly tender photographs of the sleeping soldiers. Their vulnerability could not be any more visible. Finally, there are captions accompanying thumbnails of some of the previous images that take you even more deeply into some of the very particular moments that Hetherington witnessed. My friend who needs a new prescription for her reading glasses (so she told me) thought the print was a tad small in this final part, but I did not mind (my prescription is new).

I will use excerpts from this book when I teach my course on images of the Vietnam War because I think it adds something to the archive of war photography that has not been shown before: the individuality and unity of men in combat. An awesome and important book for everyone.—Ellen Rennard

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Ellen Rennard is a writer, photographer, and teacher of writing and literature at Groton School in Groton, MA. She graduated from Princeton, where she wrote her thesis on images of Native Americans; she also holds an MA in English from Middlebury. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Fraction Magazine and Photovision; her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Black and White and Orion. Images from Rennard’s book project on The Downs at Albuquerque were nominated for a New York Photo Festival Book Award in 2009 and won first place in the 2010 Px3 People’s Choice Awards for Book Proposal and Documentary Photography. www.ellenrennard.com

Views from the Reservation, Photographs by John Willis. 
Published by Center for American Places, 2010.

Views from the Reservation

Reviewed by Ellen Rennard

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John Willis Views from the Reservation

Center for American Places, 2010. Hardbound. 184 pp., Illustrated throughout, 11-1/4x10."

There are several good reasons to own Views from the Reservation. First, royalties from the book will be donated to KILI radio, "the voice of the Lakota Nation." Second, John Willis' black and white photographs are compelling, especially in that, when taken as a whole, they give us some sense of present-day life on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a place where sixty-nine percent of the children live in poverty. Wild turnips, buffalo, a sweat lodge, horses, the mass gravesite at Wounded Knee - Willis turns his lens toward details that convey a reasonable sense of Lakota life. In "Veterans' Honor Guard," and the "Veteran's Protest to the Treatment of Muslims after 9/11/2001," we see present-day manifestations of the warriors who once counted coup on the Plains. And photographs like the one of Victoria Chipps on her 90th birthday and "Vern Sitting Bear and His Niece's Pet Wolf" are powerful images in and of themselves.

The best section of the book, other than Willis' photographs, features the ledger drawings of Dwayne Wilcox. His "Wow Real Blooded White People" might have made a fitting opening to the book; with typical humor it shows three Native Americans photographing two Anglos.

Views from the Reservation, by John Willis. Published by Center for American Places, 2010.

Otherwise, the book contains a mishmash of poems, prayers, essays, historical photographs, and even a CD. Willis explains that this "creative compilation" is for his Lakota friends as a gift for all he has received from them. Yet he plainly also intends this book for the rest of us, and at times these two audiences sit far apart. For example, poems written by Lakota children undoubtedly will be appreciated more by the former than the latter.

In spite of Willis' attempt to include multiple (and Native American) voices, and although Willis' photographs reflect his obviously genuine and lasting friendships with Lakota people, we are still, for the most part, looking at the views of outsiders. To his credit, Willis acknowledges that fact. Still, I wanted to know more about why he was inexorably drawn to Lost Dog Creek - more about what lost part of himself and his past he was searching for.

Views from the Reservation, by John Willis. Published by Center for American Places, 2010.

Views from the Reservation, by John Willis. Published by Center for American Places, 2010.

 The book also includes an essay by Kent Nerburn. I admit that I don't understand why it is that most photography book publishers feel compelled to include essays by "experts." (And no, I do not think Nerburn's other writing qualifies him as an authority on the Sioux.) Not only is Nerburn a non-Indian, but also, the quality of his writing is uneven (and that's a charitable adjective); at its worst it is simply hokey and pretentious. If you buy this book, skip the essay. There is a short piece by Emil Her Many Horses that, thankfully, sheds a sliver of light on reservation life. Read that instead.

The main problem, besides the weakness of much of the text, is that even the good parts don't work together. Except for some of Willis' photographs, the sequencing seems arbitrary. However, in the end, I can forgive this book its considerable flaws, skip the text that is not worth reading, forget about how it all fits together, and just look at the excellent photographs, listen to a few drumbeats on the CD, and imagine myself on the Rez.—Ellen Rennard

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Ellen Rennard is a writer, photographer, and teacher of writing and literature at Groton School in Groton, MA. She graduated from Princeton, where she wrote her thesis on images of Native Americans; she also holds an MA in English from Middlebury. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Fraction Magazine and Photovision; her photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Black and White and Orion. Images from Rennard’s book project on The Downs at Albuquerque were nominated for a New York Photo Festival Book Award in 2009 and won first place in the 2010 Px3 People’s Choice Awards for Book Proposal and Documentary Photography. www.ellenrennard.com