The Way Home. Photographs by Tom Hunter.
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2012.
 

The Way Home

Reviewed by Faye Robson

The Way Home
Photographs by Tom Hunter.
Hatje Cantz, 2012. Hardbound. np, 9-3/4x11-3/4".

Writing of his 25-year odyssey through photography – most of whose paths have lead through and towards his home, the London Borough of Hackney – Tom Hunter stresses the uniquely diverse and multiple character of his favorite subject and locale. As Hunter puts it: "Hackney is veneered with traces of a bygone era of grandeur, interwoven with people washed ashore, mixed-up cultures and architecture, worlds within worlds." It is a good place to start when discussing The Way Home, as this fascination with place-as-palimpsest is key to Hunter's subtle handling of themes such as urban poverty, industrial history, and marginal or mobile communities; it also, however, throws up the limitations of the slightly unfocussed edit presented here and of this book as object.

Haboob. Photographs by Anderw Phelps.
Aperture, 2012.

Haboob

Reviewed by Faye Robson

Haboob
Photographs by Andrew Phelps.
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2013. Hardbound. 80 pp., 42 color illustartions, 12x9-3/4".

The emblem, or key image, of Haboob appears in a photograph placed early in the book's sequence. A metal cut-out frieze – the rusty remnant of some signage or decorative architectural element – shows four (presumably wild) horses galloping across an open plain, snow-capped mountains looming in the background. However humble its context – the screen has been dumped on a scrubby stretch of suburban road verge, along with some abandoned tyres - the image it presents remains a potent one. It is evocative of freedom, the romance of the wilderness and, in the context of Phelps' book, the dream of the West. The epic landscape it describes no longer exists here, however, except by an act of imaginative effort. Phelps has subtly composed his shot so that the horizon of the frieze matches that of the landscape behind it. The horses gallop over the dusty ground of Higley, Arizona, with a lowering sky visible behind their rust-red heads.

The image of galloping horses reappears – hidden in plain sight – as a silhouette, niftily applied as a transparent spot varnish to the case of the book. Here, it floats over the ostensible cover image – a photograph of DIY-store paint colour strips scattered on sandy, stony ground. Themes that have recurred throughout Phelps' career – the opposition between romance and the banal, past and present, wilderness and civilisation – are restated here, but with a developed subtlety and flair. This is a book that you have to 'work out;' it demands the presence of the reader.

Haboob, by Andrew Phelps. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2013.

One of the photographer's early books, Higley looks to the same landscape and milieu as Haboob; pre-financial crash this time, however. Perhaps because of the changed circumstances of Phelps' subject-landscape, perhaps because of a simple change in creative approach, he has abandoned some of the tics that, for me, make that early work the less remarkable. The deadpan, snapshot aesthetic used, Eggleston-like, to capture details of teeming family homes has disappeared in Haboob, as have direct, frontal portraits, of both people and buildings. In his foreword to the more recent book, Phelps describes it as something of a parable; the suburban American middle class newly destabilised in the wake of fiscal crisis, subject to the vagaries of capitalism. Even this, however, understates the effect of this new work, which is, yes, more melancholic, but also more allusive, varied and self-conscious.

Haboob, by Andrew Phelps. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2013.

The title of this book – Haboob – refers to the Arabic word used in Higley for the violent sandstorms that 'blow in summer,' bringing sand from the desert into the town. This poetic image references the flux and uncertainty that is, thematically and formally, at the heart of Phelps' project. One way in which this is expressed is the dextrous use of light, which often works to puncture any complacent sense we might have of Phelps' political or cultural sympathies. The slightly over-familiar use of artificial light – its shiny, deadening quality – to throw artificial environments into relief against softer, implicitly preferable, natural landscapes, is confused by photographs in which Phelps creates ambiguity, romance even, from the use of artificial light. One image, picking up on preceding images of a painted seascape and a landscaped plunge pool, is a soft close-up of rushing water, lit (from below?) by a bright yellow lamp - mixing up, within the photographic frame, the hierarchy of man-made and natural.

Haboob, by Andrew Phelps. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2013.

Light also works, allusively, to situate both reader and photographer as readers of a fluctuating landscape. A monumental building looms out of the twilight, the dramatic evening sky gathered behind it somehow lending an epic grandeur, even religiosity to our reading of the architecture. Simultaneously, the road lighting dominant in the foreground expresses the more mundane possibility that this is a municipal, contemporary structure. On close inspection, there is actually no way to tell, and an almost comically tall and spindly crane towering over the building itself highlights the fact that this is a landscape 'in progress,' waiting to take shape and meaning.

Haboob, by Andrew Phelps. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2013.

Phelps repeatedly confronts us with the possibilities of the suburban landscape, and the way in which it has become a testing ground for human effort and imagination, as well as natural forces. The spirit of adventure, these photographs often suggest, has perhaps been replaced by the spirit of 'venture' – one photograph shows an artist’s impression of a restaurant interior; a sepia-toned temporary mural draped over a building entrance. What is there is the vision of what might be there. In another shot, Phelps has photographed an amateurish painting of a neon kraken, dragging a ship down to the deep, stood square against a painted suburban fence – the epic 'wild' of the imagination set against the landscape we have to hand. He has turned his attention to the views we choose to frame and framed an original, unsettlingly vision of the present in the process.—FAYE ROBSON

purchase book

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE.

The Bitter Years. Curated by Edward Steichen.
Published by DAP, 2012.

The Bitter Years

Reviewed by Faye Robson

The Bitter Years
Curated by Edward Steichen
DAP, 2012. Hardbound. 288 pp., 229 duotone illustrations, 9-1/2x12".

In a close wooden shack - strewn with clothing and bedding, door open to the elements - a small family are seated, the mother looking down at her barely clothed toddler, while her son leans, sullen, against the mattress that is packed between the walls. There is, perhaps, an atmosphere of resistance in this image, the large bed forming a barrier that cuts across the composition and highlights the photographer's awkward presence in what is patently a cramped, private space. Both children turn their shoulders to the camera, as if rejecting the documentarian's gaze. One might equally argue, however, that Carl Mydans photograph – which occurs early in The Bitter Years - has a tender, if not essentially hopeful, undertone. Light streams in between the boards of the walls, lending the gentle mother figure a quite literal aura of calm, her softly inclined head recalling the Madonna figures of religious painting.

Whichever way you read the image, it is clear that human affect is at its centre, thematically and formally. Whether you see resilience or resistance, human responses to hardship are central to this and, indeed, to the majority of the photographs in The Bitter Years, a book which will appeal to all those with an interest in the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) – the photographic archive of which documents a vast swathe of North American life during the worst years of the Great Depression - and its star photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. It is worth stressing this humanistic, even sentimentalising, emphasis, however, as this book is emphatically 'a,' rather than 'the,' history of the FSA and its archive.

The Bitter Years, by Edward Steichen. Published by DAP, 2012.

In particular, The Bitter Years is the story of MoMA's seminal exhibition of the same title, curated by Edward Steichen and held in 1962, just after the photographer's tenure as Director of Photography at this institution had come to an end. As a lengthy note to the reader explains, the editors of this publication have gone to great lengths to reproduce the experience of the exhibition as closely as possible in book form, from reproducing marks and damage as they appear in the actual prints exhibited, to replicating Steichen's idiosyncratic, almost magazine-like, hang for the show. Steichen - as Arianne Pollet points out in one of the introductory essays to this book - was shaped as a curator by his experience in magazine publishing (he had been director of photography at both Vogue and Vanity Fair previous to joining MoMA) and his editorial training gave him a predilection for 'monumental installations that exploited the reproducibility, the theatricality and the flexibility of the photographic image.' This treatment gives the book, at least, a variety and readability that might not inhere in a more sombre, 'respectful' treatment of these images.

The Bitter Years, by Edward Steichen. Published by DAP, 2012.

However, as Pollet and several other of the writers featured here point out, Steichen's 'monumentalizing' and emphatic vision works to the exclusion of many strands of the complete FSA archive (which comprises nearly 200,000 individual images, as opposed to the 208 shown here). He favoured portrait work to an overwhelming degree, excluding a great deal of landscape photography, for example, from 'The Bitter Years' exhibition. Nor was he afraid to manipulate his source material by reframing and cropping, as is illustrated by several, very interesting, 'before-and-after' shots included here.

The Bitter Years, by Edward Steichen. Published by DAP, 2012.

Roy Stryker, another towering figure in the history of the FSA, had reservations about Steichen's selection, arguing that it placed 'too much emphasis on human suffering,' and you may find yourself occasionally questioning the relevance, and impact, of repeated portraits that take dignified, unquestioning economic and personal suffering as their implicit subject, however masterly they may be (Walker Evans' 'Alabama cotton tenant farmer wife'). However, one advantage of this book's emphasis on exhibition historiography and context, is that it attunes the reader to the historical circumstances in which these emotionally weighted photographs have been used (in Steichen's case, arguably as part of a near-propagandistic, institutional pro-war effort at the time of exhibition) and makes their reading a more carefully considered process.

The Bitter Years, by Edward Steichen. Published by DAP, 2012.

It is also worth noting that the photographs collected here, whatever their bias, are beautiful; thoughtful and informative both. The 'Houses' section is a fascinating glimpse, not only into regional architecture and building skills, but into the bare compositional, bones of the architectural photograph. Many individual photos in the 'Sharecroppers' section of the book, such as Dorothea Lange's group shot of three female generations of a sharecropper family, provide startling psychological insight into family groups and transcend their strictly anthropological origins to communicate not only the character of families, but that of 'family' in straitened circumstances.

This publication marks the installation of 'The Bitter Years' as a permanent exhibit at Chateau d'Eau in Dudelange and is perhaps a tad reverential both of this event and its documentary origins. However, as an introduction to the work of the FSA and one of its greatest champions, it is an excellent and thought-provoking collection.—FAYE ROBSON

purchase book

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE.

The Address Book. By Sophie Calle.
Published by Siglio, 2012.

The Address Book

Reviewed by Faye Robson

The Address Book
By Sophie Calle
Siglio, 2012. Hardbound. 104 pp., 2 color and 26 black & white illustrations, 5-1/4x7-1/2".

"I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs. I decided to photocopy the contents before sending it back anonymously to its owner, whose address is inscribed on the endpaper. I will contact the people whose names are noted down… Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances." -- Sophie Calle

It is not often that one can honestly describe a photobook as 'a page-turner,' however beautiful or well-designed it might be. Yet I found myself taking this small, modest volume out on the subway - snatching the opportunity to read another entry - or picking it up in the middle of reading another book, to find out what might next be revealed about film-maker 'Pierre D,' the unsuspecting subject of Calle's controversial investigation.

The Address Book is structured in a particularly appealing way; the bite-sized, journalistic, yet periodically lyrical, texts here were originally published as a daily column in French newspaper Libération, appearing from 23 August – 4 September 1983, and retain their snappy, anecdotal appeal even in translation. These short, diaristic entries are digestible and fascinating in themselves, but it is their relationship with the images in the book that is the most engaging part of the work. For the most part, these are black-and-white photographs of street scenes, rooms, objects and, very occasionally, people – uncaptioned and unattributed. The single exception is a colour reproduction of Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1909), which, it is revealed on the following page, relates to a postcard sent by Pierre to a friend in Paris ('What a masterpiece. See you soon, Pierre.') Characteristically, the image and text are not placed in such emphatically close relation that you can shirk or avoid inspecting the image closely when it first appears.

The Address Book, by Sophie Calle. Published by Siglio, 2012.

The Address Book, by Sophie Calle. Published by Siglio, 2012.

This image is, however, exceptional in that it relates so directly and explicably to Calle's text and her encounters with Pierre's various acquaintances. For the most part, images bear only fleeting thematic relevance to the text – an unanswered phone hangs next to two empty chairs in a neglected hallway, opposite text that documents Calle's early, failed attempts to contact her sources - or their status is complicated, their authenticity and relevance made uncertain. Documents that Calle refers to in her account of Pierre D., such as a letter of resignation she has supposedly sourced, are not illustrated. Other, more fleeting moments – a woman relates how Pierre D. laughed as she fell and dropped a shoe - are (in this case, by a film-still-like close-up of a woman's feet in white shoes). Such an image is a kind of 'fictional' counterpart to a remembered event and casts doubt, or at least a shadow of it, back into the written account as a result, so that 'fictionality' becomes part of the character of the text in a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald's use of photography in cultural memoirs such as Rings of Saturn.

The Address Book, by Sophie Calle. Published by Siglio, 2012.

This troubling, fictionalizing approach to a real individual and, at least from one point of view, a very real intrusion onto their privacy, contributes to a guilty sense that one should not, perhaps, be reading Calle's book at all. Indeed, there is a reason that this book is only now appearing, 30 years after the work's original, and infamous, appearance, in an English edition – once Pierre D. was aware of Calle's column he threatened to sue Libération and relented only when the paper had published nude photographs of Calle as a kind of (questionable) counterpart to her own project. However, it is a game with which the artist is familiar – one of her best-known works, The Hotel (1981), consists of photographs taken of hotel rooms and their intimate contents, whilst employed as a chambermaid – and in which she is adept. She encourages the reader's curiosity, even invites you to enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of peeling back layer after layer of Pierre D.'s life. The intelligent design of The Address Book not only approximates its namesake and original – 'a 12 x 15cm bound book… has a red cover with a black spine' – but has the secondary function of enhancing your uncertainty, perhaps even your embarrassment, at reading such a personal exercise, by referencing the anonymity of erotic novels and magazines. The twist, of course, is that you learn very little of Pierre D. in the book, beyond (often conflicting) memories, fragmentary anecdotes and references to 'character' and appearance.

The Address Book, by Sophie Calle. Published by Siglio, 2012.

This is why, in the end, it makes sense to review The Address Book as a photobook specifically, instead of a conceptual artwork or simply an artist's book. This is not a lavishly illustrated volume of technically accomplished photography, nor is it strictly a work of photo-documentary, constructing a narrative out of sequencing or clever compositional effect. Calle herself has been frank about her relationship to photography - she doesn't always take her own photographs – and critics including Yves Alain-Bois have commented on the apparent inadequacy of the results, 'you can expect no revelation.' However, this book could not function without its photographic backbone – the mysterious, expressive images Calle uses and the interrogation of subjectivity and authenticity they make explicit.—FAYE ROBSON

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2012 by:
Anne Wilkes Tucker

purchase book

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side. Photographs by Brian Rose and Ed Fausty.
Published by Golden Section Publishers, 2012.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side

Reviewed by Faye Robson

Time and Space on the Lower East Side
Photographs by Brian Rose and Ed Fausty. Foreword by Suzanne Vega.

Golden Section Publishers, 2012. Hardbound. 120 pp., 106 color illustrations, 11-1/4x9".

What defines a place? Is it the people; their faces, their clothes, their gestures and habits? Is it the buildings these people inhabit; their houses, places of work and social hangouts? Or is it a different kind, an ethical architecture? If, in the twentieth century, what moulds the fate of a place is its economic, social, political circumstances, then how can photography go about documenting such forces? Can a place really be seen?

A quick glimpse at the cover of Golden Section's Time and Space on the Lower East Side suggests one set of answers to these questions. With its carnival atmosphere – the fluttering streamers in the top third of the frame, multi-coloured buildings and cars, and the dynamically positioned boy who swings a baseball bat right into the centre of the image – the image seems to suggest a clarity of vision to match the clarity of composition. This is a place, the book suggests, characterised by variety and improvisational energy (the street as a sports field). The image also nods to a visual history – a photographic tradition that has tended to see the Lower East Side, the LES as abbreviated here, in intimate, human terms. This cover image echoes Weegee’s active shot of children playing, captured squealing under an arc of water, near a fire hydrant on the LES (c. 1937). Nan Goldin, even Jacob Riis – the notorious nineteenth-century photographer of impoverished tenement-dwellers in this part of Manhattan; these photographers have focussed on the human scale in the space defined as the Lower East Side.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side, by Brian Rose and Ed Fausty. Published by Golden Section Publishers, 2012.

Brian Rose has in the main approached the neighbourhood in a more topographical way – he even refers to his project as 'drawing a map' – and his cover image is in the minority in Time and Space, where most images (though similarly vibrant and dynamic) show few or no people. Very often, where they do appear, humans are rendered anonymous by crowds or distance, and it is more likely than you will open the book to see a store frontage, a monument or intersection (often labelled, Shore-style, simply with avenue and street names). While Rose acknowledges the idiosyncratic nature of the LES population, drawing attention in one of his engaging author texts to its highly diverse immigrant communities, he is also at pains to stress that this is not an anthropological project, or at least not a systematic, unified one.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side, by Brian Rose and Ed Fausty. Published by Golden Section Publishers, 2012.

Layering and multiplicity are watchwords for this collection; from the texts that pepper the book – ranging in subject and tone from the macro-historical to the anecdotal (the General Slocum disaster) – to the views across streets and round corners that lay bare the city grid, both its thriving and desolate spaces. Particularly among the photos taken in the 1980s, there are many views across and into spaces, round corners, so that slices of different architectural styles are simultaneously present and a space opens up in the foreground for contemplation of the neighbourhood’s varied uses. Many of the photographs from around East 4th and 5th streets encompass waste ground, urban thoroughfares, industrial, civic and residential architecture – all captured in the warm, clear light that Rose and Fausty favor.

Time and Space on the Lower East Side, by Brian Rose and Ed Fausty. Published by Golden Section Publishers, 2012.

Despite its title, the book cannot even be read in a straightforwardly chronological manner. The photographs are divided fairly evenly between those taken in 1980, in collaboration with Ed Fausty, and images made in 2010 by Rose alone. However, the structure of the book thwarts attempts to compare and contrast the two sets of images either formally or with respect to the neighbourhood they document. While the book may open with a spread that positions a thriving, bustling summer scene on Orchard Street with the same, empty, street on a winter's day in 2010, the book is seldom so direct. Neither does it tell a unidirectional tale of social improvement, or decay. Rose is at pains to point out that he considers it as a mistake "to see everything emblematically. That is, a broken window signifies decay while a new door represents rejuvenation." Accordingly, this book often draws complex comparisons between the New York of thirty years ago and today. Often, it is only the incursion of luxurious modernist architecture into the otherwise unchanged cityscape that identifies a photograph as belonging to the present day (Houston Street, 2010). Similarly, while one spread may contrast a run-down, eyeless tenement building obscured by graffiti (1980) with its tidier, more visually regimented modern counterpart, another spread contrasts a confused, but crucially populated street scene, with a gentrified, but empty street corner, on which a luxury goods advertisement is underwritten, literally, by massive, looping graffiti and a sign ordering 'no standing anytime.'

Time and Space on the Lower East Side, by Brian Rose and Ed Fausty. Published by Golden Section Publishers, 2012.

That Rose decided to use a view camera for this project reveals a great deal about his approach – these clear, sharp, detailed images present more visual information than the eye can take in. They are a view across time and space, beyond the merely human perspective. This complex and handsomely-presented project is a portrait, or map, of a place, which challenges our assumptions about urban street photography.—FAYE ROBSON

purchase book

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE.

The Mark of Abel. By Lydia Panas.
Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2012.

The Mark of Abel

Reviewed by Faye Robson

_____________________________

Lydia Panas The Mark of Abel
Photographs by Lydia Panas
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2012. Hardbound. 96 pp., 50 color illustrations, 11-3/4x9-1/2".

I first saw Lydia Panas' work from the Mark of Abel series when it was exhibited at Foley Gallery, New York, in early 2010. Back then, I remember thinking that the photographs – muted group portraits, in which obscurely connected individuals stand before anonymous rural backdrops – were engaging but hard to access. Each photograph is simultaneously a tempting puzzle, its subtle visual clues inviting you to 'work it out,' and a rebuke, resisting your attempts to draw any conclusion about its subject. Whether that discomforting effect is an intentional experiment with formal tension or, rather, a weakness in Panas' project, remains unresolved in this book.

'Group portrait' is an awkward description of what Panas does. The phrase suggests a formality, a sense of occasion, which these images are conspicuously lacking. A sense of 'inbetween-ness' is generated by the almost listless attitude in which the photographer captures her subjects. These figures rarely engage directly, physically, with the viewer or, in any dynamic way, with the frame of the photographs, though we are subjected in nearly every image to their blank yet unrelenting gazes. They 'do' almost nothing and the result is an air of expectancy, a sense of pause. George Slade puts it neatly, in his short text towards the end of the book, when he refers to the way in which these loose compositions of figures and ground create a 'dwelling within the photographic frame,' a space in which we think about and around the people depicted.

The Mark of Abel, by Lydia Panas. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2012.

This delicate sense of presence is offset by occasional moments of explicit drama or theatricality, as in an image in which a young woman wears a white wedding dress – its slightly odd fit and her almost mournful expression informing us that she is only playing at the role of bride, and that half-heartedly. The visual reference to the commercial photography of 'occasion' underlines Panas ambivalent relationship with physical appearance – it gives us, she seems to say, everything and nothing; clues to human behaviour and character without any real or accurate understanding.

The Mark of Abel, by Lydia Panas. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2012.

There is action of a subtle, gestural kind in Panas' photographs. At her best, she has a technical mastery and sense of visual space that activates the reader's imagination and invites interrogation of her images. In The Mark of Abel where family groups are depicted (without captions or explanatory text) this is particularly acute – what can we glean about these people and their relationships? How are they similar and how different? We wonder about the character of the woman who adjusts her partner's hair in the background of one photograph, while the 'daughter' figures in the foreground address the camera both more frankly and yet, because of their more plain and androgynous appearance, more anonymously. A slight sharpening of focus brings one woman into relief while her male companion drops back into the image, raising a protective, or self-conscious, hand to his chest. Is he unsure of the camera or disdainful of it? In this respect, in these telling gestures, The Mark of Abel has something in common with the cryptic communications of Thomas Struth's Family series, though it is less varied in scope.

The Mark of Abel, by Lydia Panas. Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2012.

When I last saw Panas work in an exhibition, it was the piece Kitty, Christine and Kira, selected for Foto8 Summershow at the Host Gallery, London. The sense of transience this later portrait evokes is heightened by the way in which the photographer has caught her beautiful subjects at odds posturally with themselves and each other. It seems more resolved than some of the work in The Mark of Abel – I look forward to seeing further Panas books in print, which are slightly less opaque, slightly less of a puzzle, than this one.—FAYE ROBSON

purchase book

Read the photo-eye Blog interview with Lydia Panas here
See her portfolio on the Photographer's Showcase here

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE.

More Cooning with Cooners, Edited by Kalev Erickson.
Published by Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011.

More Cooning With Cooners

Reviewed by Faye Robson  _________________________________

Kalev Erickson More Cooning With Cooners
Edited by Kalev Erickson
Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011. Hardbound. 60 pp., 39 color illustrations, 8-1/4x8-1/4".

As a British citizen, I have to confess I didn't know much about 'coon hunting before I opened this book. Now having closed it, I'm not sure how much better informed I am. This is simultaneously the most confusing and the most beguiling thing about this book. It is not an obscure, difficult or even unfocussed publication – More Cooning With Cooners is as much about raccoons, and the hunting thereof, as a sixty-page photobook can be. Even the cover is designed to resemble a raccoon pelt, with the bloody red endpapers inside evoking the inevitable conclusion of the chase. It's just that, alongside this thematic coherence, this blatancy about its theme, there is an ambiguity about the photographs within, and the book project itself, that far exceeds one's initial expectations.

So, what are you looking at? A short note at the beginning of More Cooning explains that the images within have been edited from 'a family collection of Kodachromes taken during the 1960s in Ohio.' We never find out who this family are, how editor Kalev Erickson encountered their photographs or, indeed, how he knows for sure that they are 'the work of a single, but unknown, photographer with a clear enthusiasm for the hunt' (all of the photographs are presented without captions). Other minor mysteries pervade the book: where one would normally expect to find a contextualising, critical 'essay' on the body of work presented, there is a short, straight-faced prose piece on 'The Art and Craft of Cooning,' describing the sport’s history and traditions. Similarly, the 1924 vernacular poem 'Dat Scanlus Coonhunt Itch' is dropped into the book without introduction – yet another element in a patchwork of references that circle the 'coonhunt' at the centre of this book, but never quite state their relationship to it.

More Cooning With Cooners, by Kalev Erickson. Published by Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011.

Perhaps what I'm trying to get at is the problem of attitude posed by this book – what and who it is for. It is not simply the document of an enthusiast, though it makes reference to the eponymous 1924 'Cooning' manual whose cover illustration is reproduced on the title page. Nor, quite obviously, is it a sentimental campaign against blood sports, though the violence of the kill is emphasised in a number of individual photographs in the book and echoed in the raccoon skull line-drawing featured towards its end. It is conspicuously an 'art' book, an edition of 500, but without the patronising discussion of 'vernacular' photography and its charms that can appear in such collections.

More Cooning With Cooners, by Kalev Erickson. Published by Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011.

More Cooning With Cooners, by Kalev Erickson. Published by Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011.

What this book captures is the strangeness of going through someone else's photo archive – their memories and their passions caught on film – and the inevitable editorial distance that is created when one tries to order or 'archive' this work in any way. It is impossible to know the names, lives and motivations of the men captured in these photographs, and so they are reduced to a series of gestures and poses – presenting their dogs, sweeping their flashlights, posing with their kill – which we read from a distance. As a work of art in its own right, the book belongs to a tradition mined by photographers such as Zoe Crosher, working with 'found' material, who are interested in what is gained and lost when we 'read' a foreign group of photographs. The publishers of More Cooning, the resolutely mysterious Archive of Modern Conflict, have won international awards and garnered themselves a cult following by releasing a number of beautifully-produced titles in this vein, in which often historically fraught collections of photography (see Nein Onkel – a collection of playful domestic photos taken by Nazi soldiers) are mined for their significance and their conflicting effects.

More Cooning With Cooners, by Kalev Erickson. Published by Archive of Modern Conflict, 2011.

So much for the conceptual ambitions of the publisher, what about the images themselves? Cropped with rounded corners, to emphasis their antique origins, and with errors of exposure and colour intact, these are enthusiastic, playful photographs edited with an eye to their humour and energy. While there is an element of threat about the images which juxtapose hounds with young children (and this is a recurring theme in the edit), emphasizing the contrast of vulnerability with strength, domesticity with animal instinct, there are equally images included that are about tenderness (a young man holds a hound puppy) and also, simply, routine (identically dressed men sit, blankfaced, outside a hunting lodge at night). Erickson also gives free rein to the excitement of the chase, as captured in a number of blurred, close-up shots showing hounds as they pursue their victims to the treetops. The images themselves are taken with an eye to composition and colour, while the editing – which focusses emphatically on the volume of kill towards its end, with repeated photographs of 'trophy' walls of raccoon tails – usually allows the emotional and formal range of the images its full play.

You may feel like you've been on a hunt after finishing this book, but whether for raccoon or a couple of cold, hard facts, it's hard to say. How much you enjoy it will depend on how informative, how eloquent, you like your photobooks to be. I, for one, only wished there was more of the book to hunt through.—FAYE ROBSON

purchase book

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE.

About Love, Photographs by Gay Block.
Published by Radius Books, 2011.

About Love

Reviewed by Faye Robson

___________________________________________

Gay Block About Love
Photographs by Gay Block. Text by Anne Wilkes Tucker.
Radius Books, 2011. Hardbound. 160 pp., 100 color illustrations, 11x13".

'Through photography, I have learned about love.' The words that open this anthology of Gay Block's work, and give it its title, really are the best possible introduction to her warm and sympathetic photographs. Photography as a way, almost an excuse, to connect with others and as, fundamentally, an empathic medium - these are the principles that shape this collection of portraits.

Intertwined with these concerns, and essential to the structure of About Love, is Block's own biography – born and raised in a wealthy, Reform Jewish community in Houston, Block followed what she felt to be the typical 'plan,' leaving college when she was 19 to marry and raise a family. She discovered photography later in life, having returned to college at the age of 31 after the death of her father. In the coming years she also, this book suggests, discovered herself, eventually entering a long-term relationship with her current life-partner, Malka Drucker. This story emerges only gradually, through the extended texts that Block appends to each 'chapter' of About Love, and would not be afforded so much importance in this review were it not for the fact that the core themes of Block's 'story' – of curiosity, self-education and discovery – are reflected so strongly in the construction of the book and its content. Photography was, as Block herself states, her 'vehicle to consciousness.'

About Love, by Gay Block. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

Arranged chronologically, in loose chapters that are more like families of related works than formal 'series,' the photographs presented here (and the films included on two attached DVDs) relate Block's exposure to ever-widening circles of society and acquaintance – from her own family in Houston, through Jewish pensioners in South Beach, Miami, touching on her record of Holocaust 'Rescuers' (exhibited in MoMA in 1992) and on to her studies of America's female spiritual leaders and Santa Fe's lesbian nightclubs. Her personal and creative development is perhaps best illustrated by comparing the two chapters titled 'Early Portraits' and 'Late Portraits.' The first of these largely consists of portraits taken within the Jewish community of Houston – these appear limited, in both content and technique, compared to the later works, in which a much wider variety of styles and sitters appear. In the later collection, Block's eye hones in on signs of difference (as perhaps is to be expected from journalistic commissions) and on the trappings of style and lifestyle, as well as on the physical markers of age. A number of photographs here depict scars and Block's use of colour highlights the varieties of 'costume' on show among her subjects.

About Love, by Gay Block. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

About Love, by Gay Block. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

However, Block's work is never detached or disdainful and the abiding quality of her photographs – their empathy – can be traced back to the earliest, and most substantial, body of work in this book. Yes, the world of her early subjects in Houston is strictly delimited and David Chickey's thoughtful book design, with a great deal of bright white space surrounding smallish frames (Block also credits David Skolkin for his design input in this regard) emphasizes both the claustrophobic, suburban atmosphere of these shots, as well as our sense that we are only 'glimpsing' a world set apart. Block often accentuates the careful choreography of this social milieu through artfully arranged shots in which family members postures echo either each other or the objets d'art in their homes. However, at the same time, these photos often feel convivial, with Block taking photographs from across a table or a couch, in an intimate fashion. Their subjects are individuated and gaze straight into the camera, frank, so that the images carry no formal atmosphere of pretence or hypocrisy. Here, as throughout this book, hands are important – people hold or gesture towards the people and objects they hold dear, in a physical, visual expression of inner feeling. The experience of reading these pictures seems to echo the process Block describes of taking them; of being puzzled, curious and then increasingly sympathetic as her knowledge of these subjects deepened. It is no wonder that Block felt a twinge of frustration in her 'Camp Girls' series when, on returning to her subjects after 25 years, she felt unable to get beyond their polished appearances and homes to see 'what life might have in store for them.'

About Love, by Gay Block. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

The autobiographical, personality-centered approach of this photography, and this book, has its limitations. A grid of colour photographs of 'People I'm Close To' feels uninformative and a little self-indulgent. Similarly, none of these photographs are accompanied, on page, by captions; they are arranged, not in strictly chronological order, within chapters corresponding to periods of Block's life, rather than within clearly described projects. The approach can feel a little unclear and scatter-shot. Still, the work at its best is dense and powerful and feels like a coherent, humane vision – no doubt down to its clear-sighted, humane author.—FAYE ROBSON

purchase book

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London, and writes a photo-blog called PLATE

Los Jardines de México, Photographs by Janelle Lynch. 

Published by Radius Books, 2011.

Los Jardines de México

Reviewed by Faye Robson

__________________________________

Janelle Lynch Los Jardines de México
Photographs by Janelle Lynch. Texts by José Antonio Aldrete-Haas and Mario Bellatín
Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2011. Hardbound. 80 pp., 41 color illustrations, 11x14".

Los Jardines de México is a meticulously crafted book, with every aspect of its production – from the choice of paper stock through to the finishing on the page and the choice of image printed on its endpapers – calculated to facilitate and enhance your experience of the work contained within. This care over the details of the bookmaking is particularly fitting, as Janelle Lynch uses photography to conjure up a very particular and rarefied world – she cultivates an atmosphere that you can’t help but think would suffer in less sympathetic conditions.

The particular quality of Lynch's work can be felt most intensely in the fourth and final series presented in this book: La Fosa Común. Here, 11 full-page images are arranged, one per spread, on large, glossy leaves of paper, beginning with Untitled 8 – a photograph of one, spreading, moss-encrusted tree, whose branches reach round and through each other and out of the frame into the surrounding foliage. Like all of the images in this series, the photograph is visually complex, the frame crammed with textural information, and, as with all of the works in the series, the subject is plant life, to the exclusion of all else - no animals, humans or signs of human civilization intrude upon the tangle of bushes, grasses and trees. The effect is claustrophobic and not a little repetitive, but also decidedly, intensely, eerie and otherworldly. The combination of abundant foliage with a lack of any other visual reference – even the sky is obscured – and Lynch's frequent use of soft, misty lighting conditions gives you the impression of stepping into a science fiction novel in which humans have receded and plants reclaimed the surface of the earth.

Los Jardines de México, by Janelle Lynch. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

This sense of animism and almost threatening fecundity is picked up by author and architect José Antonio Aldrete Haas in his essay for Los Jardines. He argues that Lynch's photography is informed by the notion that life and death are not separate but continuous and 'of the same reality,' and points to another series – there are four presented in this book, made by Lynch between 2002 and 2007 – to illustrate his point. Akna (translated by Aldrete-Haas from the Mayan as 'mother') is a series of portraits of individual tree stumps. These remains – dead or decaying matter appears throughout the book - are in fact now burgeoning with life, each of them sustaining communities of smaller plants and grasses. They are even given names by the photographer, 'Vladimir' and 'Albertina,' to go with the focused, individualizing portrait style of her photography in the work.

Los Jardines de México, by Janelle Lynch. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

Loss, through violence or through simple neglect and decay, is another theme of the book, drawn out by author Mario Bellatín in the fictional element he contributes. The fact that Bellatín's short story deals with the death of a child gives Lynch's work in the series El Jardín de Juegos added resonance, as it is the abandoned pieces of playground furniture in the overgrown parks photographed here that give them their special sense of stillness and absence. Again, this lack of human presence is made conspicuous by the way Lynch arranges her photographs, emphasizing the anthropomorphic qualities of slides, climbing frames and basketball hoops to somehow evoke the playfulness and liveliness that is now only present in this space as a kind of haunting.

Los Jardines de México, by Janelle Lynch. Published by Radius Books, 2011.

All of the above-mentioned elements are bound together in this book in a tightly-structured narrative, so that one has the impression of wandering from series to series like the last human survivor exploring a post-apocalyptic world. This idea is even made explicit through the foot's-eye view of photos in the Donde Andaba set, which show fragments of green foliage as they appear through the cracks in buildings and sidewalks in an urban setting. These images even seem to have been treated differently in production, so that they have a grainy, gritty texture subtly evocative of the dusty streets they depict. The overall effect is of moving through a world carefully constructed by the photographer, as if it were a stage-set.

It can sometimes feel, moving through Lynch's world, like a too seamless experience. The claustrophobia I mentioned earlier slips into tedium occasionally, and the book itself could feel a little overcooked for some readers. Why is it necessary for the cover of this book to be a close-up of the grass shown in countless photos within? Why use the same image again as a graphic theme within – monochrome and negativised, so that the washed-out feel of neglected spaces is stated yet again? These details can feel a little forced rather than poignant, as is perhaps intended. However, this is not to detract from the work within, which is a rigorous, yet affecting, statement on the natural world and its ambivalent beauty.—FAYE ROBSON


purchase book

_____________________________

FAYE ROBSON is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London.

State of the Union, Photographs by Faye Robson.
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

State of the Union
Reviewed by Faye Robson
________________________________________
Mitch Epstein State of the Union
Photographs by Mitch Epstein
Hatje Cantz, 2011. Hardbound. 120 pp., 59 color illustrations, 10-1/4x14-3/4".

State of the Union has the scope and character of a photographic 'Great American Novel' (even if it does not trumpet its status as such) and it's hard to avoid the description 'novelistic' when turning the pages of this handsome, thematically substantial volume. The comparison is somewhat specious, in that authorship here is the business of publisher Hatje Cantz and the Kunstmuseum Bonn - this is, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalogue rather than a monograph - as much as it is of the photographer. Strictly speaking (again) these photos also constitute two chronologically distinct bodies of work rather than one long narrative. However, the description seems to suit work that is as complex and eloquent, and as sensitive to the shifting relations of individual, social and natural scale, as this photography is.

Epstein himself remarks in the engaging interview with Stefan Gronert, that he is working in 'a tradition of projects that address the idea of nation, and specifically America as a nation.' The two photographic projects presented form a coherent, intelligent overview of the artist's engagement with American life, both from a street-level, intimate perspective (more frequently in the earlier Recreation series) and from a wider, more emphatically detached point of view (in American Power). These series have been published previously as discrete monographs, but this volume makes plain how the artist's distinctive vision has persisted - and evolved - over time.

State of the Union, by Mitch Epstein. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

 Prevailing characteristics include an ability to 'disappear' into a scene, enabling the photographer to capture intimate, even whimsical, moments in everyday life without the resulting image feeling either too staged or else incoherent. A photograph of four women crowded round an obscured object on the city sidewalk in Recreation, for example, is a cannily snapped piece of street theatre. A dense, hectic, unmistakably urban composition as well as a magical visual moment; four crazily-patterned dresses that are, the photographer knows, a joy to look at, though their owners strain to look elsewhere. There is also a genius for making visually legible the relationships between people and their neighbours, their belongings and their surroundings. In the earlier series, this skill manifests itself most obviously in portraits of groups of people, whether it be a family - strung out in a long line, each member subtly failing to connect either physically or by eye-contact with each of the others - or a crowd of Vietnam veterans, each individuated but not one detached or dispensable in terms of the composition. In American Power, an investigation of energy production, consumption and waste in the United States made in 2009, this skill transfers onto a (literally) larger canvas, where Epstein juxtaposes human beings (rarely individuals), their homes and their industry, all within the setting of grand American landscapes.

State of the Union, by Mitch Epstein. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

It is hard to adequately convey the impact of these wide-angle, densely detailed landscapes, which document domestic American rituals, industrial apparatus and epic landscapes, often all within the same frame. The photographs individually become colder, both in mood and palette, partly as a result of the flattening effect that occurs when elements far and near - a golf course and a wind farm, in one memorable example - are given equal attention and brought into direct visual comparison. This is partly also, as both Christoph Schreier and Stephan Berg point out in their thoughtful, precise essays, because the photographer who was once in-amongst-the-crowd, close to his human subjects, has now distanced himself and resists the vivid, humanistic images he made in earlier, less pointedly political works. The cover photograph of this volume - from American Power, depicting an unfinished concrete bridge cutting through untamed countryside - seems to suggest that the 'State of the Union' is not necessarily cause for optimism; technologized but alienating, ambitious but without direction.

State of the Union, by Mitch Epstein. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

What is equally impressive, however, is the sensitivity and variety of Epstein's response to his surroundings and subjects, so that at no point do the photographs (or the book itself) become heavy handedly didactic or self-righteous. This is a point made variously by each of the three focused, analytical texts that have been contributed to this volume, as well as by the photographer himself, who states that he was keen to avoid a 'simplistic agenda' in American Power. The almost collage-like effect of some of these photographs - showing, for example, a glowing oil refinery at the end of a long avenue of trees, or a vast windfarm in the background of a sleepy small town - does not act simply as an indictment of complacent consumers, or a representation of the impassive face of big business. It is also a manifestation of the difficulties many of us face when confronted with 'energy issues', our blankness when presented with, as Stephan Berg puts it, 'the simultaneity of necessary energy production and the exploitation and destruction it wreaks.'

State of the Union, by Mitch Epstein. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

 The book itself makes light work of crafting an enjoyable, absorbing reading experience from two sections of dense, large-format photography, combined with a substantial amount of text in both German and English. The text is handled elegantly through a two-colour, highly readable design, and the two 'plate' sections are laid out in two distinct styles, contrasting the less consistent Recreation works with the more imposing, formal American Power. The only obstacle to the reading experience one may encounter is that the upright format of this book seems wilfully designed to disrupt the large square and landscape-format images - a deep gutter cutting right through the centre of some works. Yet somehow this 'human' orientation does not prove disastrously distracting. The format is dynamic like the work itself and seems to complement images that throw the reader back on his or her analytical skills, as much as on their appreciation for sheer aesthetic skill.—Faye Robson

purchase book

_____________________________

Faye Robson is an editor of illustrated books, currently based in London, UK. She has worked on photobooks for publishers including Aperture Foundation, New York and Phaidon Press, London.