Book Review Spanish Summer Photographs by Gerry Johansson Reviewed by Brian Arnold "...I must confess that I find photographer Gerry Johansson very difficult to write about, but I do think this experience with Terri [Weifenbach] is the right place to start.."

Spanish Summer. By Gerry Johansson.

Spanish Summer
Photographs by Gerry Johansson

MACK, London, UK, 2021. 320 pp., 6¾x9½".

The first time I met photographer Terri Weifenbach was at a woodfired pizza place deep in the woods of Alleghany County, New York. I was teaching at the Alfred Ceramics College at the time, and Terri flew in from Washington DC to work with my students as a visiting artist. Terri had just completed her second book with Nazraeli Press, Hunter Green, and I was so enthralled I had to find a way to meet her. We drank elderberry wine in the luscious hardwood forests of Western New York while Terri convinced me that in the right hands, inside a truly complex and insightful artist, beauty is always a ruse. Beauty, she said, should just be a way to tempt the viewer, and once they enter the picture with you, you can show them that beauty is both band-aid and confessional, and can share something profound about the most complex layers of our being.

I must confess that I find photographer Gerry Johansson very difficult to write about, but I do think this experience with Terri is the right place to start. Johansson’s newest book with MACK, Spanish Summer, all photographed between 1992-2021, is intoxicatingly beautiful. Each page reveals an exquisitely composed photograph, full of rich, poetic, and complex tones and perfectly proportioned and balanced frames. There is a lush proficiency that feels a bit like Michael Kenna. There are hundreds of photographs in this book, 320 pages with no text and often two pictures per spread. As I repeatedly delve into the book, I keep coming back to Terri’s comment, that beauty is a ruse, just a device to tempt the viewer into the photograph. I am still not sure how to understand these photographs, but I think dissecting their beauty can show us more.

Balisa by Gerry Johansson.

The book has a rich linen cover, dyed brick red with a print mounted in an embossed frame, photographed in Castellanos de Villiquera, Salamanca, Western Spain in 2021, depicting a crossroads in a rural landscape (a lovely metaphor). The pages that follow are on a luscious bright white paper that somehow balances the best of both glossy and matte printing (perhaps a varnished matte paper?)¹. Each page has one square photo on a classically weighted page — top, left and right margins all the same with a deeper white space beneath the print — and captioned only with the location, printed in a clear, sharp font. There is no essay or accompanying text to guide our understanding of the pictures, and the colophon only provides the most basic information. All that we have to understand the pictures are the pictures themselves.

The exactitude of each photograph is astonishing, rendered with a clarity and precision that I can only compare to the Bechers for the remarkable discipline and proficiency they display (make no mistake, Johannson is more of a romantic than the austere German duo). And like the Bechers, going through this book you will see hundreds of perfectly executed photographs of landscapes and basic architecture, but never a human being. There is a chilling emptiness to Johansson’s photographs, equally proportioned to the level of warmth in his prints. Perhaps this is what Terri meant by the ruse?

Aguilafuente by Gerry Johansson.

Villaflores by Gerry Johansson.

The emptiness expressed in Johansson’s photographs poses some interesting questions. Whether in or Spain or elsewhere, his photographs describe places full of quaint, banal, ephemeral, and timeless lives, and yet always without human bodies. I know most critics like to think of the Bechers as conceptual artists, but I prefer to think of them as German existentialists, showing the most utilitarian of lives in the most rigid of manners. Johansson offers a similar kind of existentialism, depicting both an incredibly precise and loving view of the world, but also a profound longing for something different.

Trying to put too many words on Johansson’s pictures seems like a mistake, and I did begin by saying this is difficult work to write about. It is another in a long list of gorgeous books from the juggernaut MACK Books. I have seen other books by the photographer, and I might prefer Pontiac and Deutschland to the newer Spanish Summer, but when you look at the prices these earlier books are fetching among collectors, it is hard not to recommend you pick it up now. It’s clearly the work of a master photographer, lusciously produced, and accessible to lovers of classical photography and book collectors alike.

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¹ If interested in this kind of thing, check out the great interview with MACK Book designer Morgan Crowcroft-Brown with Sasha Wolf.

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 with Oxford University Press, Cornell 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 Of The Week American Winter Photographs by Gerry Johansson Reviewed by Blake Andrews Since the early eighties, Gerry Johansson has made quiet pictures of quiet places, often lying in the shadows of industrial decline. For American Winter, Johansson travelled through semi-deserted towns in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, finding as much beauty as there was misery in landscapes cloaked in snow

American Winter. By Gerry Johansson.

American Winter

Photographs by Gerry Johansson

Mack, London, United Kingdom, 2018.
360 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 6¾x9½x1½".

Studying Gerry Johansson's photographs is like watching a Tai Chi master at work. He hardly seems to be doing anything at all. He slowly moves into a pose and holds still. He then moves to another. To the casual observer it looks effortless.

Johansson's photobooks are even less ostentatious. They’re typically understated and packed with small images, one or two per spread. His photos are neither part of a narrative nor components in a project; they don’t really interact at all. They merely form a chain of observations which, taken together, describe the book's titular location. Then he moves on to the next place. But don't let the form of Johansson's books fool you. He remains in total command.

His most recent book, American Winter, follows precedent. But since this is a Mack publication it hews even more tightly to script. The design, size, color, layout, and photographic style are virtually identical to Johansson's previous Mack books: Deutschland and Pontiac, as well as the self-published Sverige, which preceded them. These are all thick volumes bound in plain brown linen with minimal decoration beyond tipped-in cover photos.


The photographs inside are simply titled by location, and then sequenced alphabetically. Even the typeface —Helvetica, of course— is generic. In design terms, American Winter is about as sexy as an old chemistry textbook, an indication that Johansson is mainly concerned with image making.

American Winter's title is a bit of a misnomer, since the book doesn't cover all of America. Instead, the focus is on various high prairie towns in the heartland, spanning roughly from Montana through Kansas. Coastal residents may call this flyover country, but to a photographer like Johansson it's a treasure trove of possibility. "I like the vastness, emptiness and peacefulness. It’s a bit like being alone in an ocean of land."

Photographically, Johansson is a formalist. That is to say, he's less concerned with content than how he might jigsaw items together in a square frame. It doesn't take many puzzle pieces to make him happy— an old silo juxtaposed with utility pole will do just fine. As will a brick wall, or bare trees, or shadows, or a forgotten industrial site, or some other combination of vernacular detritus. The heartland is full of such material. Add a layer of crisp white snow to the mix, translate it all into monochrome, and Johansson's cup runneth over. His exposures display Friedlander’s skilled layering, Callahan’s tonality, and Shore’s Americana. There’s also something else, to quote Mack: a bit of "characteristic Swedish melancholy."

Did I mention how small the photos in American Winter are? They're roughly four by four inches each, "close to the format you would have in an old family album," according to Johansson. Like a small snow globe, you've got to hold the dioramas close, and then poke around a little to see everything. Even at that range it's hard to discern all the bits and ephemera.

I must admit, I didn't like the small size at first. There is so much going on in these photos that to see them larger would be great! But after repeated browsing, the diminutive size has, well, grown on me. If I can't pick out every detail the first time through, maybe that's ok. The book is a slightly new experience each time through. It's 360 pages thick and there are always more photos to see.

I think this must be how Johansson feels out in the field with his camera. Surrounded by potential photos, he can hardly keep up with himself. First here. Then he slowly moves over there. Then back over here, holding another pose. To the casual observer it looks effortless.

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*Some quotes in this post are pulled from Blake Andrew's Recent interview with Gerry Johnsson*

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