Nic Nicosia. By Nic Nicosia.
University of Texas Press, 2012.

Nic Nicosia

Reviewed by Judy Natal

Nic Nicosia
By Nic Nicosia. Introduction by Michelle White, interview by Sue Graze, fiction by Philipp Meyer.
University Of Texas Press, Austin, 2012. Hardbound. 264 pp., 160 color and black & white illustraitons, 12x10".

Nic Nicosia truly understands, nay passionately embraces, the artifice of the image and the fact that photography is a hybrid medium. It's not motion picture, but it does tell a story through narrative in time and space. In this case, the stories are more short staccato forms of fiction than epic novels or factual biographies depicting the drama of everyday life. It's not reality, but it is drawn from real life. The veracity of the photographic image collides with painted backdrops, stage sets, and every type of theatrical lighting imaginable, paired with everyday contemporary suburban life. So, it is no surprise to learn that Nicosia started out as a filmmaker. His photographs clearly demonstrate a life long habit to act as director of the films he creates, which in his case, are still photographs. The lavishly designed book collects Nicosia's images in his first major career retrospective simply titled Nic Nicosia. He does make moving images, both emotionally and conceptually, literally and figuratively, but they always utilize the stop action of the still camera. Like all great creative directors, he will go to any means necessary to tell a convincing story.

Nic Nicosia, by Nic Nicosia. Published by University Of Texas Press, 2012.

A.D. Coleman, the first photography critic for the New York Times, coined the term "directorial mode" to identify and define a photographic artist and genre where photographic images are constructed, often but not always in a studio, to imagine and interpret life's universal questions rather than going out into the world to find the answers. For these photographic directors, making pictures are acts of interpretation of reality rather then an accurate transcriptions of the thing itself, that are willfully, intentionally and unabashedly subjective rather than objective. It is the studio and the constructed frame, not the world, that is Nicosia's oyster.

Nic Nicosia, by Nic Nicosia. Published by University Of Texas Press, 2012.

Once viewers relinquish themselves to the photographic raison d'être of Nicosia's brain and reconcile with the fact that the conceptual framework is driving all the aesthetic choices, you are in for quite a ride. More is decidedly more! Nicosia's photographic subjects are as varied as his techniques. The unifying principles that hold the work together are the driving force of narrative, and often humor. In the service of playful caricatures, human subjects of all ages are portrayed with exaggerated expressions and comic book styles. He alludes to themes of disaster, both internal and external, with an ever so slight sense of foreboding. But his innate playfulness, use of bright primary colors and inventive materials, seeps into most of the images. 

Nic Nicosia, by Nic Nicosia. Published by University Of Texas Press, 2012.

The one exception to all the imaginative photographic chaos and cacophony of styles are the stark series of "drawing" photographs. This series is unlike anything else in the book. Minimalist in nature, breathtakingly in their restraint, this series is profound and redolent of the existential angst that oozes from the photographs. Nicosia becomes the maestro as well as subject, with the simplest of instruments; human silhouette, mark making, curved wall, dim light, appropriately recorded in contrasty, grainy, black and white images. These refer to "tabula rasa," Aristotle's notion of the mind as a blank slate that is written by sensory experience. With uncharacteristically direct eloquence, Nicosia portrays all the wonder, magic, and tragedy that life embodies. These photographs are as remarkable as they are concise, modern day "cave paintings" with the potential to survive the ages. While comparing Nic Nicosia's photographs to the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo, Michelle White, in her excellent and insightful introduction, theorizes that the power of the novel is "the witty excavation of the invisible dysfunction lurking within us all… toward its existential conclusion." These photographs are haunting, compelling, and unequivocal, and unlike a lot of Nicosia's photographs, unforgettable.

Nic Nicosia, by Nic Nicosia. Published by University Of Texas Press, 2012.

The editorial decision to include so many bodies of work, each represented by only a handful of photographs, does not serve Nicosia's work well. Clearly, the selection of work goes for breadth rather than depth, though perhaps a more judicious selection of images, less interested in demonstrating his virtuosity with the medium, and Nicosia is indeed a virtuoso, would allow viewers the opportunity to sink below the surface glibness of most of his work, and invite the viewer to know Nicosia's concerns better. Monographs work well when the artist has a unifying vision that commits to one idea and spends a lifetime exploring these themes. It is hard to call this book a monograph because it feels more closely aligned with a group exhibition. Design strategies such as image size, position of image on page, etc., that could have assisted in teasing out the unifying themes to address the widely divergent styles and themes that Nicosia explores, are ignored and instead indulges in the same inclusive nature of the work itself. A colleague recently suggested there are finely drawn distinctions between a monograph and a retrospective. This book decidedly falls into the camp of a retrospective, meaning a collection of artworks, rather than a development and revelation of an artistic oeuvre.

Nic Nicosia is a breezy ride across the country of Nicosia's photography that maps his artistic brain. You never stop for long, but you are certain to delight in the joyride, even with the pratfalls and mishaps along the way.—JUDY NATAL

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2012 by Natasha Egan.

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JUDY NATAL is a Chicago artist and author of EarthWords, and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent public collections of the the Museum of Contemporary Art, California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, among others. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Travel Grant, Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowships, Polaroid Grants and New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowships. Natal has also been awarded numerous artist residencies nationally and internationally, most recently in Iceland and the Biosphere 2 for her current work Future Perfect. Her work can be seen at her website http://www.judynatal.com.

House of Coates. Text by Brad Zellar. Photographs by Lester B. Morrison
Published by Little Brown Mushroom, 2012.

House of Coates

Reviewed by Judy Natal

House of Coates
Text by Brad Zellar. Photographs by Lester B. Morrison

Little Brown Mushroom, 2012. Softcover. 118 pp., 68 illustrations, 6x8-1/4".

Little Brown Mushroom (LBM) is the imprint alter ego of wunderkind Magnum photographer, book publisher impresario, blogger and writer, Alec Soth. In an ongoing exploration of everything conceivable that is photobook, Soth expands our ideas of book, photograph, fiction and nonfiction, what is believable or not, and why we should care, and how photographs and books can fit together. Inventively blurring the boundaries between the veracity of the photograph in relationship to the veracity of the text/story, Soth -- and the LBM team, that includes Soth, Brad Zellar, Carrie Thompson, Charlie Ward -- are deft at sleight of hand, all the while romping through a variety of book structures, bindings, and innovative designs. Utilizing everything from zine formats, spiral bindings, folded pages, to books within books, LBM creates memorable books that are affordable, with more than a tinge of DIY mentality. Though small in stature, LBM is huge in its influence on contemporary photographic practice.

Case in point is House of Coates by Minneapolis writer and LBM collaborator, Brad Zellar. House of Coates is also the name of a real life, much beloved bar & grill in Rosemont, Minnesota, near the Twin Cities where the LBM crew resides, famous for their Swanee burger. This is not a direct ode to the bar, but instead, an exquisitely haunting, melancholic treasure of a book about people who drop out and populate tiny towns and rural communities, and the longing and loneliness of the human condition. Lester B. Morrison is credited as the author of the snapshot-like, drugstore-esque disposable camera photos, though most suspect Soth as author. The photographs accompany the text tangentially, with image and text together creating an indirect, perfectly balanced, poetic resonance, at once haunted and haunting. They seem to linger in the reader's mind -- an overturned white truck on a field of snow, contents of drawers open for the viewer's inspection in a cheaply paneled dark room. The landscapes more often than not are of chilly snowscapes on pale, overcast days drawing ranch houses and truck plazas in bleak, weakly lit chilliness. When people enter the photographs, it is unexpected and ambiguous. The interior snapshots frequently consist of poorly lit fake wood paneling and cheap furniture with the detritus of human occupation, of empty wire clothes hangers and scraps of notes, lists and cartoon cutouts.

House of Coates, by Brad Zellar & Lester B. Morrison. Published by Little Brown Mushroom, 2012.

Lester, whose initials are LBM like the publisher's, may or may not be a real person, and he may or may not have actually made the photographs, and this may or may not be a true story though he has made stealth appearances in Soth's Broken Manual. But one thing for certain is his simple eloquence in examining his life and how he got to where he is. And so the mystery begins. The settings of the writing and the photographs are made in and around the communities near Pine Bend refinery, near Rosemont, and both text and image are about forgotten, off the grid, by choice or destiny, people who have dropped out of sight and out of mind of contemporary society. Longing and loss runs through the book -- of what might have been -- and broken dreams and aspirations.

House of Coates, by Brad Zellar & Lester B. Morrison. Published by Little Brown Mushroom, 2012.

Zellar's text relates to Lester’s photographs when defining a character and narrative, though by proximity, not direct reference. The photographs act like dreams or glimpses of realities that you might vaguely recall, small details that seem to tuck into our subconscious, like Lester himself. The book's design is small and unpretentious, with cheap spiral binding the style and size of a personal calendar with a plastic cover.

House of Coates, by Brad Zellar & Lester B. Morrison. Published by Little Brown Mushroom, 2012.

Now available again in its second edition, House of Coates (brown cover is second edition, green cover is first edition) is beautifully designed book whose simplicity belies its elegantly, poignant story and deceptively, complex photographs. The photographs play beautifully with the text in enigmatic juxtapositions. There is a part of Lester B. Morrison in us all. Perhaps the next time we meet a "Lester" we will remember as Zellar writes "...every truly lost man knows exactly where he is".—JUDY NATAL

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JUDY NATAL is a Chicago artist and author of EarthWords, and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent public collections of the the Museum of Contemporary Art, California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, among others. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Travel Grant, Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowships, Polaroid Grants and New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowships. Natal has also been awarded numerous artist residencies nationally and internationally, most recently in Iceland and the Biosphere 2 for her current work Future Perfect. Her work can be seen at her website http://www.judynatal.com.

Fertile Geometry. Photographs by David Pollock.
Published by Punto Marte, 2011.

Fertile Geometry

Reviewed by Judy Natal

Fertile Geometry
Photographs by David Pollock. Edited and designed by Urbanautica. Introductions by David Pollock, Andrea Filippin and David R. Montgomery.

Punto Marte, 2011. Hardbound. 64 pp., 30 color illustrations, 11x10-3/4".

David Pollock, by his own admission, has been staring down at dirt for quite some time. In his recent photographic book Fertile Geometry, he is an expert at it while making quiet, contemplative, large format, color landscape photographs that invite the viewer to join him up to ankles in mud, while considering the state of the earth, our imprint on it, and our lack of generosity toward it.

For two years, Pollock photographed in the farmlands of Sasnich Peninsula on Vancouver Island, positioning the subject of farming as both a romantic relationship between man and nature, and as an inescapable interaction with the natural world. The photographs speak of our use of the land, and the title is a play on the idea that nature is non-linear and human beings are decidedly geometric, measureable, and straight edged. The photographs depict the many ways we draw lines in the earth, creating demarcations that separate us from nature. Plow lines and plantings, gates and manmade canals, the ever present rows of telephone poles and wires, and plots of land cordoned off limits by tape and fences, define the insistent hand of man that is everywhere upon the earth.

Fertile Geometry, by David Pollock. Published by Punto Marte, 2011.

Fertile Geometry, by David Pollock. Published by Punto Marte, 2011.

In Pollock's quiet, well composed, color photographs, however, nature always seems to have the last word, with ameba-shaped puddles and unruly shrubs and trees, plants that escape the boundaries defined by our machines. Nature defies us at every turn, though with a quiet stealth that is omnipresent, overriding the ordered world we like to think we live in.

Fertile Geometry, by David Pollock. Published by Punto Marte, 2011.

Fertile Geometry, by David Pollock. Published by Punto Marte, 2011.

Farms and houses line the edges of the photographs, becoming yet another kind of containment for the dirt, soil, grass, crops, water, clouds, sky. The cover photograph is repeated as the last image of the book and perhaps sums up the message of Pollack's photographs best. The image depicts deep gouges of huge tire tracks that abruptly begin in the foreground and proceed toward the deep space of the horizon that is obscured in fog. The photograph becomes the metaphor by which to read the rest of the images, asking the viewer to consider our land use, where are we going, what is the destination, and most importantly, what is the hurry. No inch of land is left untouched.—JUDY NATAL

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JUDY NATAL is a Chicago artist and author of EarthWords, and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent public collections of the the Museum of Contemporary Art, California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, among others. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Travel Grant, Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowships, Polaroid Grants and New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowships. Natal has also been awarded numerous artist residencies nationally and internationally, most recently in Iceland and the Biosphere 2 for her current work Future Perfect. Her work can be seen at her website http://www.judynatal.com.