Book Review The Wrong Side By Jérôme Sessini Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich Chilean writer Robert Bolaño's stirring description of Ciudad Juarez concludes Jerome Sessini's diverse visual documentary of one of the world's most violent cities. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, 10,000 people have been killed there in the last four years, an average of four people every day. Until 2011 it was consistently ranked the most dangerous city in the world outside of war zones. In 2012, 90 percent of the murders remained unsolved.

The Wrong Side. Photographs by Jérôme Sessini.
Contrasto, 2013.
 

The Wrong Side

Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich

The Wrong Side
Photographs by Jérôme Sessini.
Contrasto, 2013. Hardbound. 176 pp., illustrated throughout, 9-3/4x7-1/2".

"Ciudad Juarez, which is our malediction and our mirror, the blurred mirror of our frustrations and our despicable interpretation of freedom and of our desires." Robert Bolaño July 2003

Chilean writer Robert Bolaño's stirring description of Ciudad Juarez concludes Jerome Sessini's diverse visual documentary of one of the world's most violent cities. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, 10,000 people have been killed there in the last four years, an average of four people every day. Until 2011 it was consistently ranked the most dangerous city in the world outside of war zones. In 2012, 90 percent of the murders remained unsolved.

Sessini had covered war zones such as Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya and photographed Ciudad Juarez from November 2008 through December 2011; during his first stay in Ciudad Jurez there were 70 killings in one week. Discussing the long-term project in a 2012 interview with Vogue Italia Sessini explained, "It is very easy to make photographs of violence, of the dead. That's relatively easy. But I wanted to create a deeper project about the social consequences of the violence and so I needed a lot of time to build up trust in people [being photographed]." That intense sense of purpose and unusual access to the people and places he photographed is felt throughout The Wrong Side.

The Wrong Side, by Jérôme Sessini. Published by Contrasto, 2013.

The frontispiece and several photographs that serve as a visual preface to the book's central photographs establish the desolate and desperate environment into which the viewers are venturing. The photograph of small shanty-town shacks in Ciudad Juarez lining an empty dirt road is printed on the inside covers of the book; in an opening image, the viewer is looking out at the road from the interior of a car driving to Juarez; a lone man in silhouette walks along the road with a wide looming sky in the background. Another shows a billboard of wanted drug cartel criminals against a swirling sky overlooking Juarez. We have fully arrived on "the wrong side" with the last photograph preceding Sessini's evocative and diverse collection: a ravaged courtyard strewn with ripped up mattresses, discarded furniture and rubble. A black spray painted figure of a nude woman covers to entire length of one of the stucco colored walls.

The Wrong Side, by Jérôme Sessini. Published by Contrasto, 2013.

A loosely cohesive narrative ties together photographs of police drug searches, heroin addicts, bloody crime scenes, dank nightclubs, bleak strip clubs, executions, a funeral, gang prisoners, and female prostitutes. A few photographs of daily life in Ciudad Juarez, haunting portraits of children and wide shots of the borderlands emphasizing their desolate expansiveness expresses Ciudad Juarez's desperation more quietly but no less poignantly.

Sessini's photographs alternate between physically ravaged, barren and bloody exteriors and desperate, lonely and abandoned interiors. One of the book's opening photographs is of a single light bulb emanating light weakly from a mold encrusted ceiling; another shows a cramped, run-down brothel room with an empty chip bag gracing the bed's headboard; exteriors exhibit an abandoned armchair eerily illuminated between two trees, a rain-soaked, deserted street lined with graffiti sprayed and perhaps partially abandoned houses; a lone park bench amongst empty streets. 

The Wrong Side, by Jérôme Sessini. Published by Contrasto, 2013.

Many of his photographs of people in interiors reveal physical or psychic wounds or a combination of both: one of the rare named subjects of Sessini's photographs, Yasmine, 31, sits alone with her eyes closed in an empty room, injecting herself with heroin; we see her ravaged, track scarred arms in another photograph. In another image (entitled simplySix Months with Methadone), a woman stares intently yet blankly into the distance in a cramped room with a television's unearthly glow in the corner. Sessini's emphasis on jarring juxtaposition within a single image is perhaps most dramatically displayed in his photograph of the reflection of a man injecting himself in the groin with heroin while a chicken stands on his bed.

The Wrong Side, by Jérôme Sessini. Published by Contrasto, 2013.

"I wanted to photograph the fear, the silence, the sadness of the people [on the Mexican border]," Sessini told Vogue in 2012. "One cannot make an icon out of that." There are perhaps no icons in The Wrong Side (though the Diane Arbus influenced cover photograph of a masked child perhaps comes close) but there are several photographs that demonstrate both the great extent to which Sessini penetrated the worlds and lives the people he photographed and also reveal a powerful intimacy between the viewer and the image. In one, we glimpse the trepidation on the face of a female prostitute as she awakens; in one of the most expressive photographs in the book, a young boy with his eyes downcast affectionately holds his pet dog.

The Wrong Side, by Jérôme Sessini. Published by Contrasto, 2013.

In the same interview, Sessini said, "I look for the equilibrium between aesthetics and information." The book concludes with several entries from the photographer's journal and provides a visually and emotionally descriptive and informative complement to his photographs. His sparsely captioned photographs and highly revealing written chronicle create the very equilibrium that he is seeking.

Sessini's documentary visual narrative powerfully urges the viewer to confront and be disrupted by the existence of a "right side" that allows a "wrong side" to flourish. "Mexico, so near, and yet so far," he writes in the afterward. "I sensed nothing there but despair, resignation and fear… Their life resembled a long expiatory Calvary, for having committed the sin of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time."—JOSCELYN JURICH

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JOSCELYN JURICH is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice.

Book Review The Invisible City By Irene Kung Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich The Great Pyramid of Giza is floating in sand. The teeming city of Cairo is reduced to a few twinkling lights in the background. Pinpoints of stars punctuate the ebony sky. Milan's Torre Velasca skyscraper rises like a periscope from an ocean bed of partially illuminated buildings. Its background is the same black sky that graces each of the photographs in The Invisible City. London's Millennium Bridge stretches like an ivory backbone across a glistening still water whose depth and distance are unknown and perhaps infinite.

The Invisible City. Photographs by Irene Kung. 
Contrasto, 2013.
 

The Invisible City

Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich

The Invisible City
Photographs by Irene Kung. Text by Ludovico Pratesi and Francine Prose.

Contrasto, 2013. Hardbound. 120 pp., 55 black & white illustrations, 9-3/4x11-1/2".

The Great Pyramid of Giza is floating in sand. The teeming city of Cairo is reduced to a few twinkling lights in the background. Pinpoints of stars punctuate the ebony sky. Milan's Torre Velasca skyscraper rises like a periscope from an ocean bed of partially illuminated buildings. Its background is the same black sky that graces each of the photographs in The Invisible City. London's Millennium Bridge stretches like an ivory backbone across a glistening still water whose depth and distance are unknown and perhaps infinite.

Up and Down Peachtree. Photographs by Martin Parr.
Contrasto, 2012.

Up and Down Peachtree
Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich

Up and Down Peachtree
Photographs by Martin Parr
Contrasto, 2012. Hardbound. 208 pp., 100 color illustrations, 8x10-1/2".

"Don't be scared of photographing a storm-out, crying fit or strop…" British photographer Martin Parr advised readers in a 2010 Guardian column about vacation photography. "I would argue that the more valuable document is the honest one." Parr's vivid documentary chronicle of Atlanta's main's street, Peachtree Street, is a provocative, pleasurable mix of honesty and hyperbole.

Originally commissioned for Atlanta's High Museum of Art's June 2012 "Picturing the South" exhibition, Parr's documentary project was exhibited at the High Museum alongside work by photographers Kael Alford and Shane Lavalette. A documentary about Parr's work in Atlanta in 2010 and 2011 has also been made into a documentary film, "Hot Spots: Martin Parr in the American South" which premiered in June 2012. Though Parr was on assignment in Atlanta rather than on holiday, he has the eye of a consistently curious and genuinely engaged outsider who wants to document even and especially the most quotidian of details. For Parr, the everyday is rich, valuable and often wryly comical.

Up and Down Peachtree, by Martin Parr. Published by Contrasto, 2012.

The book opens with a two-page close-up portrait in profile of a middle-aged man that emphasizes the saturated colors and pronounced textures that delight Parr. His stringy blond hair and a scraggly beard graze a cream shirt printed with orange and yellow tulips and he's standing in front of square turquoise structure with a red SNACK BAR sign affixed to its roof. The viewer is going where he's headed: down Peachtree Street, replete with gay rights advocates holding up signs reading I "heart" my gay sons; gay rights opponents holding up banners that read "I now pronounce you pervert and pervert;" couples ballroom dancing around a swimming pool; groups of Braves' fans drinking cans of Bud Light in a parking lot. We will also encounter a woman licking her lips in between bites of a corn dog slathered with ketchup and mustard; a woman's fake aqua and lilac striped nails digging into a hunk of roasted meat; a disembodied arm offering an oversize candy apple coated with multicolored sprinkles to a disinterested child.

Up and Down Peachtree, by Martin Parr. Published by Contrasto, 2012.

An honest image for Parr is a close-up of a person or object that possesses discomfiting, tantalizing details, like the portrait of an African American woman wearing a platinum wig with nylon hairs poking out around her forehead; her heavily eye shadowed eyes are half-open and her mouth partially agape to reveal a wide gap between her two front teeth. Or it may reveal the dynamics of social interaction at a fancy garden party, a Pentecostal church service or a dog show. One of the collection's most evocative group environmental portraits is of four female wait staff standing behind the Formica counter at their classic diner, the Silver Skillet. Each of the women's expressions is revealing and distinct; their backdrop is a wall decorated with hand-lettered signs advertising Roast Beef Sandwiches, Country Grilled Ham Steaks, Chicken Salad Cold Plates, Fruit and Ice Box Pies. Parr relishes the repetition of commercial signs and products: stacks of jumbo plastic football shaped jars of pretzels on a supermarket shelf, rows of bright red and white flips flops printed with the Coca Cola logo. And he delights in droll, bold juxtapositions: one page we see a photograph of a church deacon holding a palm leaf; on the facing page, we see a panda at the zoo munching a bamboo leaf. He also revels in showing how an image differs as a cropped close up and as a larger print that reveals the original context. One page shows a full size image of a fried corn dog in all its phallic grandeur; on the next page, we see a blond hair woman at a street fair biting into it. 

Up and Down Peachtree, by Martin Parr. Published by Contrasto, 2012.

The collection's prints almost all take up a full page, published without any captions or identifying information. Parr's photographs are large in scale and personality: they are flashy, brash, whimsical and garish and much less subtle than Garry Winogrand's work, one of Parr's most revered photographers. His style and subject matter is almost akin to Tom Wolfe's early journalism: performative, opinionated and exaggerated. But his curiosity, energy and delight in his subject matter is palpable and infectious for the viewer, who enthusiastically becomes the photographer's fellow traveler down Peachtree Street. "Life is weird. If only we could see it," said Parr in a 2003 interview. Thankfully, he is here to show us.—JOSCELYN JURICH

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JOSCELYN JURICH is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice.

Left Behind. Photographs by Jonathan Hollingsworth.
Published by Dewi Lewis, 2012.

Left Behind

Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich

Left Behind
Photographs by Jonathan Hollingsworth. Foreword by Gregory L. Hess MD.

Dewi Lewis, 2012. Hardbound. 112 pp., 75 color illustrations, 12x8-3/4".

A man unlocking a morgue door is the first image in Left Behind. The next is a two-page spread of bodies stacked one atop another in a morgue, one with a red tag attached by a string to the body bag zipper with "Doe, John" written on it in black marker. The final photograph shows two "Personal Effects" tags of individuals only identified as "John Doe."

Hollingsworth's provocative project permits the reader to enter a rarely seen world, the often deadly and anonymous world of border crossers. Every year, between 150-250 Mexican migrants die crossing from Mexico into Southern Arizona. The Arizona Human Remains Project, a grassroots human rights NGO, reports that between 2011-2012, the remains of 179 migrants were recovered. The vast majority were male and under the age of 40. Some of the remains were not intact enough for this basic information to be determined.

A short essay by Gregory Hess, Chief Medical Examiner of the Pima County Forensic Science Center in Tucson prefaces Hollingsworth's carefully structured visual narrative and clearly identifies its intention. "Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living," wrote 18th century physician Giovanni Morgagni, who pioneered the field of pathological anatomy. His statement hangs in the offices of contemporary pathologists like Hess, who granted Hollingsworth access to the Center. "It reminds us of the purpose of investigating the dead," writes Hess. "To help the living." Like the physical bodily and personal remains of the deceased, photographs are documentary evidence. Hollingsworth's images of physical and personal remains of migrants who died on the Arizona-Mexico border, Hess writes, may be another way the dead can help the living.

Left Behind, by Jonathan Hollingsworth. Published by Dewi Lewis, 2012.

The book is divided into three distinct sections, like a triptych whose three panels portray the autopsy process, the documentary remains of the deceased and the exterior of the borderlands between Arizona and Mexico. Its first section is a visual guide to the recovery process. Hollingsworth brings the reader from the recovery van to the receiving room and into the autopsy room with stark individual shots of each space. Metal receiving room gurneys sit in the corner of a seemingly empty room, shot to emphasize the contrast between the gurneys' glistening legs and the dull, soiled floor on which they stand; an autopsy table is photographed to emphasize its functionality, in an attempt to reveal and demystify the post-mortem process. Perhaps the most jarring image in this section is not the photograph of skeletal remains resting on a white sheet, but a list of the vital organs in black capital letters pasted on an autopsy whiteboard, ostensibly a check-list for the examining pathologists. The clinical nature of these spaces is rendered only semi-intimately as Hollingsworth shoots to reveal essential detail but also to maintain a degree of distance.

Left Behind, by Jonathan Hollingsworth. Published by Dewi Lewis, 2012.

If the first images emphasize the repetitive and anonymous nature of the post-mortem, the book's central section reveals individual photographs of the "personal effects" of twenty-eight Hispanic migrants who died on the border. Combs, watches, multicolored cigarette lighters, family photographs, ornate and colorful saints' cards, one-dollar bills, two-dollar bills and identification cards are all photographed against a bare white background. The first photograph shows what are representative and repeated items in many of the images: a 100 peso bill; a $30 phone card; a macramé crucifix; the stub of a pencil; a wallet; some scraps of paper scrawled with names and phone numbers.

Left Behind, by Jonathan Hollingsworth. Published by Dewi Lewis, 2012.

Each deceased individual's personal remains are photographed separately, accompanied by descriptive text from the Pima County Forensic Center about the individual's gender, approximate age and ethnicity as well as information about how and where the deceased's body was found and the body's condition at the time of discovery. The text provides poignant and revealing details in juxtaposition with the individual's objects: the reader learns that a one-dollar bill, Bic lighter, Guess! wallet and a few scrawled phone numbers belonged to "Male, 20-35; Hispanic Latino; Not recognizable/Putrefaction." Several of the individuals are described as being mummified. These descriptions bring the reader into the experience of finding the deceased: "Pinal County deputies were flagged down by a female in distress and advised of the location of the deceased," reads one; another is just as disturbing: "Decedent found partially suspended by tree by shoelaces tied around neck." Hollingsworth understands the visceral power of simple factual information, both textual and visual, and uses them to potent effect.

Left Behind, by Jonathan Hollingsworth. Published by Dewi Lewis, 2012.

The book's last section brings the reader away from the interiors of autopsy rooms and individuals' stories and outside to the US border patrol in Nogales, Arizona and a common pick-up stop for migrants in Green Valley, Arizona. Hollingsworth's photographs of the landscape are the most powerful of the few images included, particularly the final photographs of Mesquite trees, flying vultures and the Pima County Indigent Cemetery, where the unidentified remains of migrants were buried with "John Doe" and "Jane Doe" markers (the county now cremates the remains).

Left Behind, by Jonathan Hollingsworth. Published by Dewi Lewis, 2012.

Hollingsworth concludes with his own thoughtful reflection about the process and intent of creating Left Behind, which is dedicated to the migrants who died trying to reach the US. "For those who die in the desert," he writes, "Pima County Forensic Science Center is their Ellis Island. It is through the cooler doors that they all pass, their belongings catalogued and their analyzed, each bearing a number instead of a name. But instead of some manifest destiny that the nation's dream is built upon, theirs is one of long, quiet waiting."—JOSCELYN JURICH

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2012 by:
Jonathan Blaustein
Melanie McWhorter

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JOSCELYN JURICH is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice.

Dies Irea, Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin.
Published by Contrasto, 2011.

Dies Irae

Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich

____________________________________

Paolo Pellegrin Dies Irae

Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin
Contrasto, 2011. Hardbound. 208 pp., Black & white and color images throughout, 9-3/4x12".

I felt compelled to listen to the 13th century hymn Dies Irae while looking at Paolo Pellegrin's collection of the same name. The hymn's first lines describe the apocalyptic world the listener is about to enter: Dies iræ! Dies illa/Solvet sæclum in favilla:Teste David cum Sibylla! (Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets' warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning!). Pellegrin brings viewers into mournful, wrathful worlds that are man and nature made: West Bank violence, the Kosovo and Iraq wars, Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami. Only a few photographs of individuals' struggle for life in the face of personal and collective destruction – a mother and child fleeing violence, an injured Cambodian soldier being comforted by his wife -- provide a redemptive respite from an otherwise relentlessly violent, disrupted and disruptive reality.

The collection displays Pellegrin's astonishingly wide-ranging portrayals of contemporary global apocalypse: organized chronologically, it begins with his photographs of Cambodia (1998) and includes sections on Kosovo (1999-2001), Iraq (2003), Darfur (2004), Palestine / West Bank (2002-2004), New Orleans (2005), the Indonesian Tsunami (2005), Gaza (2005), Haiti (1995 -2010), Afghanistan and Lebanon (2006), Iran (2009), and concludes with Palestine / Gaza (2009). All of the photographs, save for those of Hurricane Katrina, are black and white, which Pellegrin associates with universal experience (as contrasted with the immediacy of experience, which he shoots in color.) A thoughtful and extensive interview with Pellegrin by Contrasto founder Roberto Koch concludes the collection.

Dies Irae, by Paolo Pellegrin. Published by Contrasto, 2011.

Uniting these disparate times, places and contexts is what Pellegrin describes as his commitment to "a concerned photography…a humanistic photography." Even Pellegrin's photographs of spaces without people are humanizing in their emphasis on the absence of human presence: a destroyed village in Sudan, whose landscape shows only the barest remnants of human presence; the rooms of a hospital in New Orleans where a calendar, a crucifix, a page from a child's coloring book decay on the mold-speckled walls.

Dies Irae, by Paolo Pellegrin. Published by Contrasto, 2011.

Many of Pellegrin's most intensely humanizing individual and group portraits possess a Baroque sense of dynamism, immediacy and intimacy. The photograph of women at a funeral in Kosovo is a close-up portrait of a dramatic moment, crowded with faces and gestures. Mourners' hands form a chain that leads up to a young woman grieving. Her anguished face, eyes shut and mouth half open, is held in the hand of another woman who seems to be preventing her imminent collapse. The portrait of Phanna, a 24 year-old Cambodian AIDS victim, is an intimate psychological study of her bathed in a light and darkness reminiscent of a Georges La Tour painting. The cover, a grainy, blurred image of young Palestinian mourning her child, captures the height of the emotional moment, a moment that for Pellegrin is often ultimately the decisive moment.

Dies Irae, by Paolo Pellegrin. Published by Contrasto, 2011.

The collection's organization also emphasizes the deeply expressive power of Pellegrin's photographs by separating their informative captions (listed at the end) from the images themselves. Displaying them without text infuses the book with an explosive quietude that might well have been lacking if text and image were combined. It also makes the viewer responsible for seeking out the precise details about images that may otherwise be highly ambiguous: the frontispiece photograph shows a group of soldiers surrounding a man lying on the ground – are they helping him, hurting him, arresting him? There is no way of knowing by just looking. Pellegrin seems to want the viewer to suffer these questions, and then seek the answers.

"I happen to think of photography as a foreign language," says Pellegrin. "The question isn't how to take good photos, it's how to take photographs that succeed to do a number of things simultaneously: to document, to transmit information, and to strike a chord emotionally." Pellegrin's images have the rare ability to communicate on these multiple levels: as evidence, as information and as emotion. 

Dies Irae, by Paolo Pellegrin. Published by Contrasto, 2011.

Perhaps nowhere is this more powerfully or more painfully revealed than in the last series of photographs from Palestine, almost all of which show Palestinian children gravely injured by the Israeli army. The first image in the series is of Palestine Tambura, 15, seriously injured by Israeli shelling; she stands alone against an expansive blank wall, her face and eyes downcast and partially sheltered by her hijab as she lifts her pant leg to reveal a punctured leg that has been operated on five times.

"My duty – my responsibility – is to create an archive of our collective memory," says Pellegrin. If Dies Irae is an archive of our contemporary collective memory, it is a record so barbarous and so brutal that the viewer can only hope – if even futilely – that Pellegrin's future archives will not look exactly like this one.—JOSCELYN JURICH

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JOSCELYN JURICH is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice. Jurich is currently a Fellow at the Writers' Institute at the City University of New York.

André Kertész, Photographs by André Kertész. 
Edited by Michel Frizot and Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq.
 Published by Editions Hazan, 2010.

André Kertész
Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich
_______________________________________
André Kertész André Kertész
Photographs by André Kertész. Edited by Michel Frizot and Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq
Editions Hazan, 2010. Hardbound. 360 pp., 500 color illustrations, 10x12-1/4".

"I am an amateur," photographer André Kertész said in 1930, five years after he had left his native Hungary for Paris. "And I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life." In 1961, a year before Kertész retired from what he described as eleven "lost years" working as a magazine photographer on contract to Condé Nast, Kertész reiterated his declaration. "I still regard myself as an amateur today and I hope that's what I'll stay until the end of my life. Because I'm forever a beginner who discovers the world again and again."

The notion of Kertész as an amateur may seem disingenuous. By 1961 he had worked for influential international publications such as Vogue and VU, the French photojournalism magazine whose contributors included Robert Capa and Man Ray, had published five books of photography and had exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum. But as this exquisite collection reveals through text and image, the self-taught Kertész remained true to the dual definition of amateur throughout his tortuously successful career.

The book accompanies a major retrospective of Kertész's work that is touring internationally. Though the books' size and scope might make it seem a coffee table collectable, this exhibition catalogue stands alone as a work of art criticism and art history. Replete with images and a considerable amount of text (500 superbly reproduced photographs and seventeen critical essays), neither overwhelms the other. The meticulous scholarship of authors Michel Frizot and Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq is matched by a vital and vigorous writing style both passionate and persuasive.

André Kertész, by André Kertész. Published by Editions Hazan, 2010.

Frizot's arresting enthusiasm for Kertész is immediately apparent in his introductory essay. Reading like part manifesto, part monograph, declarative sentences ("Kertész is a seer;" "Kertész is a poet") begin swiftly paced paragraphs that address what Frizot sees as the photographer's defining qualities. He sites the earliest attempt to define Kertész's photography, a short poem written by Belgian poet Paul Dermée for the photographer's first exhibition in Paris in 1927. "Kertész, the eyes of a child, whose every glance is his first/Kertész is a seeing-eye brother." Kertész's primary tool, Frizot argues, was not just his camera but the innocence of his vision. While Kertész never called himself a poet, photography was the poetry of his experience expressed in images. When asked about how photography influenced his life, he explained that the real question was how life influenced his photography: "It is very much a tool, the same way poets or writers describe their life experiences...I interpret what I feel at a given moment. Not what I see, but what I feel."

André Kertész, by André Kertész. Published by Editions Hazan, 2010.

Expression through felt images, not words, is partly understandable considering the problems Kertész had with language. Though he lived in France for eleven years, he never really learned French and in his almost 50 years in the US, Kertész never mastered more than broken English, beginning all of his interviews with American journalists by asking, "You speak Hungarian?" Yet even Kertész's spoken Hungarian was reportedly sparse and fragmentary. "Photography," he said, "is my only language." According to Frizot, it was a language deeply influenced by Hungarian culture. "Kertész" means "gardener" in Hungarian and in an imaginative if not wholly persuasive argument, Frizot describes Kertész as a cultivator of images as contrasted with the "hunter" photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. He concludes the book's most provocative essay by siding with philosopher Roland Barthes, who discussed Kertész in Camera Lucida (1980), "Kertész's images make us think," Barthes wrote. "Photography is subversive not when it brightens, repels or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks."

Kertész said he wanted "to give meaning to everything" and only through looking at his photographs can one begin to grasp the multiplicity of this meaning. Uncomfortable with the spoken word, Kertesz used advertisement text in his photographs to juxtapose their jubilant promises with the often lonely realities of urban existence as in "Buy" Long Island University (1962) and Boulevard de la Madeleine, Paris (1917). He used titles to dramatic, ironic effect in Hotel de l'Avenir (1929) ("Hotel of the Future"), where a prosthetic leg lies on a soiled rumpled bed and his desire to de-bunk and de-mystify iconic structures is clear in Eiffel Tower, Paris (1933) where the crevices in stacks of bricks in the foreground mockingly echo the scaffolding of the Eiffel Tower, blurred in the background.

André Kertész, by André Kertész. Published by Editions Hazan, 2010.

The essays that follow the collection are historical in focus, following Kertész from his birth as Andor Kertész in 1894 into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, to his 1925 move to Paris where he changed his name and developed a lifelong love of France while struggling to make ends meet and photographing the city in his free time, to his photojournalistic work for VU and other magazines, and his 1936 move to New York City to work as a commercial photographer, repeatedly described by Kertész as "an absolute tragedy" because of his cultural alienation and professional setbacks and the "lost years" working as a photographer for House and Garden, which he called "slave work." Though Kertész photographed New York City constantly while working at Condé Nast, he did not feel liberated until he retired in 1962 and had time to devote to his real love, street photography.

The text covers Kertész's career in copious detail but leaves some significant questions unasked, specifically regarding his identity, relationship to Europe and commercial photography, and his feelings on critical characterization of his work by theorists like Barthes, given his personal insistence on photography's emotive power. Perhaps these omissions exist because the entire collection is more a lover's discourse than a critical inquiry into the narrative Kertész self-consciously constructed to explain his own life and art. Frizot and Wanaverbecq know the most meaningful homage to Kertész is to observe and feel his remarkably diverse oeuvre, carefully reproduced in this collection to reflect the images' original scale, printing and color. Many of Kertész's most moving photographs are his most personal: Lost Cloud, New York (1937) shows a small cloud floating alongside a hard angled skyscraper, its soft edges almost pierced by the building's sharpness -- a photograph Kertész would later describe as a metaphor for himself adrift in the "alien world" of New York City. The book's final images are similarly metaphorical and melancholy, small color prints from Kertész's stunning Polaroid series, all shot in the Greenwich Village apartment he shared with his wife Elizabeth for thirty-five years until her death in 1977. Many are photographs of a small glass bust that reminded him of her, positioned in different places in the apartment -- against their window overlooking a view of the Twin Towers or placed on the floor encircled by sunlight and shadow. Others are self-portraits of Kertész in complete shadow, sometimes so far removed in the frame that he is barely visible.

André Kertész, by André Kertész. Published by Editions Hazan, 2010.

"I am a lucky man," Kertész said while creating the Polaroid series and just a few years before his own death. "I can do something with almost anything I see. Everything is still interesting to me."


The quotes from Kertész not included in the book were taken from the National Gallery of Art catalogue of André Kertész edited by Greenough, Garbo and Kennel—Joscelyn Jurich

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Joscelyn Jurich is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice. Jurich is currently a Fellow at the Writers' Institute at the City University of New York.

War Is Only Half the Story, Vol. 3, Photographs by Louie Palu,
Asim Rafiqui, Rodrigo Abd, Andrea Bruce, Davide Monteleone,
Saiful Huq Omi, Ami Vitale and Donald Weber.
Published by The Aftermath Project, 2011.

War Is Only Half the Story, 
Vol. 3
Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich
____________________________________
Louie Paul War Is Only Half the Story, Vol. 3
Photographs by Louie Palu, Asim Rafiqui, Rodrigo Abd, Andrea Bruce, Davide Monteleone, Saiful Huq Omi, Ami Vitale and Donald Weber.
The Aftermath Project, 2011. Softcover. 132 pp., black & white and color illustrations throughout, 11x11".

When I was working in Sarajevo in 2005, a well-known reporter for an even better known publication told me, "There are no more stories here." True, the war story no longer existed in the form often most alluring to journalists, their editors and the corporations that sign both paychecks. But a range of different stories had replaced the old one: how people re-build after conflict, how they re-define themselves and a country which, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons, as of 2011, is still missing more than 10,000 people from the 1992-1995 war. New stories of this type from Bosnia-Herzegovina were rarely told through photographs or articles in 2005. In 2011, more than 15 years after the war's end, they barely exist. Yet then, as now, the war is truly only half the story. This invaluable collection, War Is Only Half the Story, Volume 3, reminds us of the essential other half and that it should remain neither silent nor invisible.

A non-profit supporting documentary photographers covering post-conflict areas, the Aftermath Project was founded by Sara Terry, a photographer and writer and former staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor who spent five years covering post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. The photographs in this diverse yet cohesive collection are the work of the project's two winners and six finalists who received grants from the organization in 2009 to pursue projects in India, the US, Guatemala, Iraq, the Russian Caucasus, Burma, Kashmir and Ukraine and this collection of over 100 pages of text and images show the often brutal physical, psychological and social effects of conflict. Only Rodrigo Abd's "Reclaiming the Dead from Mass Graves in Guatemala, A Story Only Partially Told" might be described as "post-violence." Yet even his essay tells the same story that each in this book does: the effects of conflict, war and upheaval evolve but are ultimately enduring.

Abd's photo-essay, though a finalist not a winner, has one of the most fluid narratives and is among the collection's most moving. The contrast between the images' vibrant, saturated colors and their despairing subject matter is arrestingly discomfiting: a gape-mouthed skull lies in a mass grave among the tangled glowing threads of traditional Mayan clothing, strands of fuchsia, purple, hot pink and lime green entwine around the skull's eye sockets. A man and woman squatting on the grass of a former military base look at a large photograph of a bullet punctured skull, a victim of the Guatemalan Army. The glowing cream color of the man's hat echoes the skull's off white, suggesting that the moment is itself a memento mori. The most powerful image in the essay is also its least representational, a portrait in reflection of two individuals killed by the Guatemalan Army in 1982 taken at a commemorative mass in 2004. The lingering shadow images of these victims suggest how the long dead are mirrored and absorbed into the daily experiences of the living.

War Is Only Half the Story, Vol 3, by Louie Palu. Published by The Aftermath Project, 2011.

 The winning photo essays, Asim Rafiqui's "The Idea of India" and Louie Palu's "Home Front," could not be more disparate in subject matter or approach. Rafiqui's project takes its name from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's statement that "the idea of India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others, which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflict." Focusing on Hindu and Muslim communities in Uttar Pradesh, Kashmir, Rajasthan and Kerala, many of Rafiqui's photographs portray contrasts or unexpected visual echoes: the intense red of a man's string Kabala bracelet matches the red in a sexy billboard above him; intricate geometric patterns on an elderly man's ivory topi (prayer cap) seem an extension of the elaborate decorative patterns adorning the mosque in the background.

War Is Only Half the Story, Vol 3, by Louie Palu. Published by The Aftermath Project, 2011.

Where Rafiqui's images are crowded with colors, spaces and textures, Palu's photographs of American soldiers and veterans from the Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam wars, possess a stark minimalism both lonely and intimate. Several of the essay's photographs are uncomfortably close portraits showing expressions that range from the pained to the fatigued, to the seemingly single-mindedly determined. Still others are unsettling in their distance: one of the eeriest is the portrait of Vietnam veteran Craig Barber taken through frosted glass so that his image - a torso with one hand raised as if attempting communication or escape - is nothing more than a blurred, ghostly shadow.

War Is Only Half the Story, Vol 3, by Louie Palu. Published by The Aftermath Project, 2011.

  Many of Palu's images are hard to look at - not just those showing soldiers' deformed or amputated limbs, but also his quietly anguished portraits. Several of Andrea Bruce's "Unseen Iraq" photographs, which focus on Iraqis coping with the multifarious effects of the war, also portray individuals who seem heartbreakingly alone in their suffering, whether it is internal (Qasim Ali, who closes his eyes to the detritus around him as he waits for his minibus to work) or physical (nine year old Omar, who lies wounded in bed, his small body curled up against the wall of the hotel room where he is waiting for treatment from Doctors Without Borders).

War Is Only Half the Story, Vol 3, by Louie Palu. Published by The Aftermath Project, 2011.

The collection's final essay, Donald Weber's "Into the Half-Life," about the city of Zloitnye Vody in Ukraine, is despairing in text but not image. He documents this Uranium mining city of 54,000 people, 40,000 of whom have been hospitalized for radiation related illnesses. Save for the opening and closing images, the photographs are serene, almost innocuous - but the captions remind us that something else is going on. The photograph of a young woman striding though an open green field portrays a contaminated village whose radiation levels are equal to Chernobyl, and the wistful portrait of a young boy is Danil Kravets, 6, who has environmentally caused lymphoma.

"Perhaps the most important stories," James Traub suggests at the end of his foreword to War Is Only Half the Story, "are the ones that can't be told with words alone, or with pictures alone." The separation of the captions from the images in each photo-essay thoughtfully provokes the reader to consider how much of the "whole story" either can tell alone. While photographs provide the story's "what," Traub writes, they are incapable of providing the necessary context to answer the "why." But in trying to answer "why," print journalism, he argues, is often too programmatic and reverts to simplistic fixes for complex problems. Traub suspects it also often loses the ability to portray suffering, what he deems as the collection's "master subject." One of Susan Sontag's central questions, "What to do with such knowledge as photographs of faraway suffering bring?" remains explicitly unanswered in the book, though it is implicitly asked on almost every page.—Joscelyn Jurich

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Joscelyn Jurich is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice. Jurich is currently a Fellow at the Writers' Institute at the City University of New York.

Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life.
By Mark Haworth-Booth. Photographs by Camille Silvy.
Published by The Getty Museum, 2010.

Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life
Reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich

_________________________
Mark Haworth-Booth Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life

Photographs by Camille Silvy.  By Mark Haworth-Booth
The Getty Museum, 2010. Hardbound. 160 pp., 113 color illustrations, 8-1/2x10-1/2".

"Since all centuries and all peoples have their own form of beauty," Charles Baudelaire wrote in his 1846 essay, "On the Heroism of Modern Life," "so inevitably we have ours...There are such things as modern beauty and modern heroism!"

In this collection of over one hundred photographs, many from a private collection in Paris and published here for the first time, Mark Haworth-Booth, author of the first book on Camille Silvy, (Camille Silvy: River Scene, France) consistently though not always convincingly argues that the 19th century commercial photographer embodied many of the qualities Baudelaire ascribed to modern painters in his 1863 essay, "The Painter of Modern Life."

Modeled on Constantin Guys, Baudelaire's modern painter is an urban flâneur who portrays the fleeting beauty not of the Classical world but of "the world around him...the beauty of the present:" its fashion, its street life, its manners. During his highly successful but mere decade-long career (1857-67), Silvy never purported to document modern beauty or modern heroism, nor did he ever refer to himself as "modern," but his images reflect an elegant mastery in crafting and capturing the aesthetic pleasure of the everyday during a period when photography was not considered fine art. 2010 is the centenary of Silvy's death, and this book's publication coincides with a Silvy retrospective currently on view at London's National Portrait Gallery.

Photographer of Modern Life, by Camille Silvy. Published by The Getty Museum, 2010.

 The 19th century version of Facebook, Haworth-Booth points out, was the carte de visite (a small, photographic calling card) and Silvy was mid-19th century London's preeminent carte-de-visite photographer. Born in 1834 in a town outside of Chartres into an upper middle class family, Silvy studied Law and was a diplomat in the French foreign office. While posted in Algeria, he was commissioned to draw buildings and landscapes to encourage French immigration to its new colony. During the project, Silvy quickly favored photography's ability to replicate "exact views" over drawing's imprecision and began studying photography upon his return to France in 1857.

Photographer of Modern Life, by Camille Silvy. Published by The Getty Museum, 2010.

These few biographical details are in the book's first chapter and though organized chronologically with a photograph on almost every page, Haworth-Booth's text is far more the story of Silvy's images than of Silvy himself. He traces the photographer's evolution from his early images of Algiers to his last panoramic landscapes of the Champs-Elysée and reveals new elements in one of Silvy's best known images, La Valée de l'Huisne (1858), uncovering the photograph's illusions and composite techniques. Other chapters include his evocative light studies, street scenes, portraits of actors and actresses, cartes-de-visite and portraits of upper-class Londoners and their children.

Silvy's portraits of children are among the most striking images in the book. Mrs. Holford's Daughter (1860) shows the young girl with her lace dress suggestively pulled just below her not yet formed breasts, in a pose echoing one of Lewis Carroll's best known photographs of his model for Alice in Wonderland, Alice Liddell. In Alice Hall and Mrs. Hall (1862), the child faces the viewer, her face scrunched and pouty, as if on the verge of crying. Her mother's back is turned toward the viewer revealing the glistening ripples of her dress and the severe, perfect plait of her hair. It is an eerie portrait of mother and child, more post-modern than modern.

Photographer of Modern Life, by Camille Silvy. Published by The Getty Museum, 2010.

 Also remarkable is Silvy's Studies on Light: Twilight (1859), a mood study that combines four negatives and hand drawing on the negative to create an image contrasting defined foreground figures and blurred background landscape, revealing the nuances of light as day passes into night. Silvy's portrait proof sheets and postage stamp portraits, whose series of differentiated repetitive images not only recall photography's commercial power of mechanical reproduction but also its later influence on artists like Andy Warhol and Randy Hayes.

Haworth-Booth's prose possesses a spare elegance that deftly complements the quietude of many of Silvy's images. Yet some biographical omissions frustrate: he never mentions whether Silvy had any early ambitions as an artist and even more glaringly unclear is how and why Silvy decided in 1859 to leave diplomacy for photography - a sizable and strange omission. The reader learns the photographer was married only when Haworth-Booth references, more than halfway through the book, a letter Silvy wrote to "his wife," who remains nameless. And while we learn that Silvy became London's most successful carte-de-visite photographer, at his peak taking a portrait every twelve minutes and praised by contemporary Félix Nadar, Haworth-Booth never deigns to explain just how he did it.

Photographer of Modern Life, by Camille Silvy. Published by The Getty Museum, 2010.

 In 1859, the same year Silvy moved to London to open his portrait studio, Baudelaire wrote a scathing Salon review in which he warned the public about the "madness" and "extraordinary fanaticism" of those "buffoons, male and female" who equate photography with art. Photographers, he wrote, are little but peintres manqués, of "too slender talent" or "too lazy" to actually become painters. Photography, he wrote, will never transcend "external reality" and is therefore not an art but its "very humble servant," akin to printing and stenography.

It is therefore curious that Haworth-Booth, a noted photography historian who has written books on Lee Miller, Paul Strand and Bruce Davidson and is former Senior Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, never mentions Baudelaire's famous critique. It is even more curious considering Silvy himself considered photography "industrial" rather than imaginative. "Fine Arts create," Silvy wrote to the Photographic Journal in 1862. "Photography copies."

Perhaps implicit in Haworth-Booth's association of the photographer with Baudelaire's modern painter is an effort to challenge Baudelaire's critique of photography by now defining Silvy's diverse, sometimes haunting and often meditative images as art, and Silvy as an artist. "Modernity," Baudelaire wrote, "is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable." Silvy is this modernity's photographer par excellence.—Joscelyn Jurich


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Joscelyn Jurich is a freelance journalist and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice. Jurich is currently a Fellow at the Writers' Institute at the City University of New York.

"'No photographer in their right mind had ever meticulously brought back home a sample of stinky Coney Island trash,' write Sophie and Bruce Gilden in their slim wax paper catalogue (written in French and English) for Baptiste Lignel and Johnny Miller's evocative Coney Island. Coney Island, which won a prize at this spring's New York Photo Festival, is like the real Coney Island - vivacious, brazen and decidedly unsanitized (and maybe even unsanitary!)." -- from Joscelyn Jurich's review of Coney Island with photographs by Johnny Miller and Baptiste Lignel.

Read the whole review of Coney Island in photo-eye Magazine.