Book Review The Crisis Tapes Photographs by Charlie Simokaitis Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis has been sitting on the side table in my library for some months, first puzzling me, and then, speaking directly to my nervous system. After a personal loss left me bereft, my dearest friend began to check in with me regularly to ask 'how is your nervous system?' The answer for weeks was not well..."

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis.

The Crisis Tapes
Photographs by Charlie Simokaitis
TIS Books, 2024. 144 pp., 70 tri-tone images, 9½x11½".

“Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. 

More and more by each glistening minute, 

through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. 

I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.”

—Prayer, Jorie Graham

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis has been sitting on the side table in my library for some months, first puzzling me, and then, speaking directly to my nervous system. After a personal loss left me bereft, my dearest friend began to check in with me regularly to ask “how is your nervous system?” The answer for weeks was not well. During that tender time returning to The Crisis Tapes again and again helped me to reach stasis.

The book begins with a portrait. The portrait is the frontispiece, and one of very few figurative pictures of the book’s 70 tri-tone reproductions. It is the likeness of a girl we do not know. She wears glasses. Her eyes are closed. Then we are on a journey. One that is often quite dark, descriptive of industrial decay. The forest at night, geometric shapes, a dalmatian missing both of its eyes, a girl whose head we cannot see, swimming down into the depths we do not know.

This highly formal book gives its reader the gift of physical space to consider every photograph. The minimal design elevates each image, first on a profoundly individual level, and then felt as a cascading whole. Moving through the pages is like walking by a series of ruins, feeling confusion, and then slowly, figure-by-figure, or more aptly, image-by-image, moving ahead to feel a new awareness of spaciousness in one’s chest. It is a journey from the mundane toward the sacred. A doorway, or a portal, that creates the possibility of a different world. By the end of the pathway, transformation.

The narrative of the book is not easily known. I am not convinced we must know the story behind it all, yet humans are narrative seeking creatures. The publisher, TIS Books, describes that "The Crisis Tapes — the debut monograph of photographer Charlie Simokaitis — is an account of his daughter’s gradual loss of the ability to see. . .” With this fact now known, most all the symbols and geometric shapes point to the anatomy of the eye, the anatomy of the nervous system, and poignantly the presence of the dalmatian becomes symbolic of the fact that the breed can lose their sight due to a number of eye conditions.

By the end of the book I have forgotten the tension and tightness of my own nervous system. I find the experience of the book to be one that allows the length of mourning and the subsequent growth that mourning brings. It depicts the depth of a loss: when something is lost, something is gained. We can feel the echoes of transformation. A transformation that serves to remind us that emotional healing takes far longer than physical healing. But never again are we the same.

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.

Book Review How We Hold the Sun Photographs by Anna Rotty Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “How do we get to really know a place? How does a place hold a fixed impression on our memory? Do we place it by the qualities of its smell, the qualities of its soil, the qualities of its light, the qualities of its water?"

How We Hold the Sun By Anna Rotty.

How We Hold the Sun
Photographs by Anna Rotty
Self-published, 2024. English, 54 pp., 9x10".

How do we get to really know a place? How does a place hold a fixed impression on our memory? Do we place it by the qualities of its smell, the qualities of its soil, the qualities of its light, the qualities of its water?

Part catalog and part monograph, How We Hold the Sun is a softback, perfect-bound book, nearly square, at 9x10 inches, and self-published by Anna Rotty on the occasion of her achievement of an MFA from the University of New Mexico.

I feel the presence of manipulation in the images in both a playful and fastidious sense: as an exploration of the flattening of space and depth that is most integral to photography’s grammar, as well as the sophisticated approach to pacing the images, text, and cut out windows that are a part of the book’s pages.

Rotty’s photographs included in this book were made around the landscape of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The images instigate many questions: How does light travel? How can it bend? And what can it reveal about the natural world, and its wonders, that we don’t already understand?

I keep coming back to the word diffraction. Diffraction is defined by Merriam Webster as a modification which light undergoes especially in passing by the edges of opaque bodies–like water–or through narrow openings and in which the rays appear to be deflected.

“Part of what is owed is not to look away. Although I see mourning underneath the surface of these photos, somewhere there between all the layers of water and time’s relentlessness that she has stacked together within the frame, what strikes you from the surface is the light. The light is achingly beautiful. If Anna points something out to you, I suggest you follow her gaze and try to see what it is that she’s seeing. Knowing that it takes some time for your eyes to adjust to the sunlight, please be patient. Sit and watch all day long with her. Do it again the next day, and a week later. Keep coming back, and looking, and looking.”

– Excerpt from Please look closely, this is important, 

an essay by Robin Babb included in the book

Much like Rotty’s photographs, How We Hold the Sun exhibits modifications, interventions, and layers: isosceles triangle cut-outs that have been slightly burned near the corners, mimic the shape of geometric light diffractions in a photograph on the subsequent pages, echoed later in an aerial photograph of the Rio Grande. The shapes repeat. The colors shift. The difference between the earth’s matter and what might be human flesh isn’t clear. Visual interplay is abundant. Rotty wishes to remind us, or confuse us, over and over again, that these transformational entities — light, water, sediment — are not impervious to manipulation. And that, like the sun, they can be seared into our mind’s eye.

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.

Book Review Witness Mark Photographs by Klea McKenna Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “If Klea McKenna’s spiritual practice is her creative work, Witness Mark, published by Saint Lucy Books, serves as a gospel for the ritual of process..."

Witness Mark By Klea McKenna.

Witness Mark
Photographs by Klea McKenna

Saint Lucy, Baltimore, MD, 2023. 230 pp., 8½x10½". 

If Klea McKenna’s spiritual practice is her creative work, Witness Mark, published by Saint Lucy Books, serves as a gospel for the ritual of process.

“I think that conceiving of art projects is a way to prescribe myself an experience that I need to have. I tell myself a thing needs to be made, and then the path to make it requires me to do something which is often strange or inconvenient. In retrospect, I realize that thing didn’t really need to be made, I just needed to do that activity. I imagine that for people who have gurus or listen to oracles, that they might be told: you need to go to this place, at sunset, and sit for this long and observe this quality, as a mediation. My art practice does that for me.”

Witness Mark catalogs a decade of McKenna’s camera-less analog renderings, from 2013 through 2023, taking readers on a journey through five bodies of work: Rain Studies, Web Studies, Faultlines, Automatic Earth, and Generations.

Intermittently there are images of McKenna, both in the studio and the field. To see the artist, who has powerfully dedicated her book to her “daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter,” absorbed in the act of the intense physical process of making, adds to the marvel and importance of her physical self in her creative process.

It is a wonder to follow the genealogy of McKenna’s making. To know McKenna’s work is to be aware of a beauty, technical sophistication, and complexity of seeing that is unlike any other. The language of silver gelatin prints, embossment, and rubbings holds distinctive memories that are effusive in their sensuousness — aspects of a print’s materiality that are hard to reproduce in a book become tangible in the way the book is assembled and sequenced.

Rain Studies’ images saunter across the gutter; Web Studies' go full bleed; an installation of Faultlines and Generations emerges as a delicious reproduction of a photographic relief seen beyond the book’s width as an unexpected gatefold. The surprises of the book's content pull the reader deeper into McKenna’s studio and psyche.

The materiality of each unique photographic object — often large-scale, embossed, silver gelatin prints, intended to be seen on the wall — would seem impossible to replicate in book form. Yet, through image, text, and a unique book construction, we are given a different vantage into the ways that these works convey the emotion of their careful meditative making.

The image reproductions are thoughtfully interspersed with insightful texts by experts in the field, including Corey Keller, Leah Ollman, Vanessa Kaufman Zimmerly, and McKenna herself. I find the artist’s own diaristic writing, Darkness / Light / Touch, to be most profound. The entries are powerfully non-linear in time and evocative of the emotional landscapes that underpin everything included in the volume. These pages are produced on a matte peach paper, in contrast to the bright white glossy paper stock of the rest of the book, and are situated nearly in the center of the volume. They call out to the reader’s senses, refusing to be overlooked.

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.

Book Review Cloud Physics Photographs by Terri Weifenbach Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “Cloud Physics, a book borne from Terri Weifenbach's 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, brings us into a world where words no longer suffice..."

Cloud Physics By Terri Weifenbach.

Cloud Physics
Photographs by Terri Weifenbach

The Ice Plant, USA, 2021. In English. 216 pp..

Cloud Physics, a book borne from Terri Weifenbach's 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, brings us into a world where words no longer suffice. Weifenbach’s quintessential way of seeing — luscious color views of the land, animals, weather events and, for the first time, scientific tools — invites the reader to consider the interconnectedness between things, notably between clouds and the rest of biological existence. She implores us to consider that the natural order can no longer be overlooked:

“It’s difficult to study things that disappear and reappear, that are ephemeral. Weather is still difficult to predict. Through an animated conversation at a party I found there is a place in the center of the US, in Oklahoma, that studies clouds and the particles necessary for cloud making. They study the effect of photons. They study the atmosphere, and this is where my interest is… Photography too, is a measurement of sorts of atmosphere, of the effects of photons. In a photograph, it is seemingly unquantifiable.”

Moving through the pages we see moisture, rain, flowers, lush forests, weather occurrences and animals, all as evidence of patterns that repeat in nature. As I advance through the book, I feel a connection between the formal qualities of disparate observations of both the natural and manmade world. My heart beats to the tempo of the images: the pattern of a doe’s coat (that highlights a similar pattern to moisture particles floating in the air pages before), a scientific schematic graph, a scientific tool set against a Weifenbach-blue sky, and then cloudscapes, water behaving against gravity, insects and data. Amid these enumerations, I am transported and transfixed: in a cognitive loop of looking, noticing, perceiving, feeling.

The quantifiable and invisible facts that cannot be seen in the 117 color photographs of Cloud Physics are all “data captioned” near the end of the book with the location, date, precipitation, maximum temperature, humidity, wind speed and sea level pressure specific to each image. Numeric data visualizations made by the tools the artist photographed in Oklahoma at Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) of Southern Great Plains site are also interspersed throughout the pages, such as the Solar Irradiance measured by the Multi-filter Rotating Shadow Band Radiometer (20 June 2014).

Solar Irradiance measured by the Multi-filter Rotating Shadow Band Radiometer (20 June 2014)

The multifaceted visual facts of the book beckon to both the poetic and scientifically inclined alike. Or, as Luce Lebart phrases it at the conclusion of her essay in the book: “As Constable remarked, it also reminds us that the sky could still be a place in which to walk ‘arm in arm with Milton and Linnaeus’…”

The through line of Weifenbach’s books is her true reverence for the natural world. This first appears in her debut monograph, In Your Dreams (Nazraeli Press, 1997), where her signature lyricism, differential focus, and vibrant hues show us life as we’ve likely never observed it before. In Cloud Physics, this is magnified not only by her exacting eye and brilliant sequencing, but also by the sense of urgency to communicate the interconnectedness of the world no matter where the reader may find themself.

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.

Book Review My Husband Photographs by Tokuko Ushioda Reviewed by Sara J. Winston “Generally, photographers photograph what they see. When a photographer becomes a new parent, what do they see?"

My Husband By Tokuko Ushioda.

My Husband
Photographs by Tokuko Ushioda

torch press, Tokyo, Japan, 2022. In Japanese and English. Book 1: 122pp.; Book 2: 76pp., both 7 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2".

Generally, photographers photograph what they see. When a photographer becomes a new parent, what do they see?

Tokuko Ushioda’s My Husband is a set of two books delicately held together by a nearly three-inch-wide obi, or Japanese style-belly band. We are given access to the one room Western-style flat Ushioda shared with her husband, photographer Shinzo Shimao, and their daughter, Maho, during their first five years together as a family. Yet My Husband doesn’t produce the sense that Ushioda is photographing Shimao and Maho as though they are her muses, but rather she photographs gracefully all that is before her — all that she sees. The stairwell, a mirror, Maho in her crib, three figurines, towels hung to dry, Shimao trimming Maho’s incredibly straight bangs, the view out the window, herself in the mirror or her likeness seen by Shimao.

We learn from the publisher's description, and later the essays in the book, that the work included in My Husband sat dormant in the photographer’s storage for 40 years until it was re-discovered while the space was being packed up. The latency of these photographs, while much longer than most, delivers imagery that feels totally contemporary. Frank, yet quiet. Contemplative and observant. Neutral without a psychological tilt. Highly autobiographical but without overbearing nostalgia. 

“Living her life with a young child, where just getting through the quota of daily tasks uses up the entirety of her energy, Ushioda-san is suddenly visited by moments where nobody is around. These are quiet, slightly lonely, and yet intensely rich moments. The sense of loneliness, and an accompanying sense of the joy found even in that loneliness. Even if you spend the vast majority of the day as a mother and a wife, those fleeting moments when you can photograph are opportunities to validate your own existence and bring a deep sense of relief.” — from the essay “Scenes from My Husband” by artist and author Yurie Nagashima

For me, this two volume set is an overdue introduction to Ushioda’s work. Book 1, a hardcover, contains a series of 6x6 black-and-white images. Book 2, a softcover, includes 35mm black-and-white photographs. Both volumes include similar subject matter, and it could be said that only the image format and the distinct book covers distinguish the two. The square format is quintessential of Ushioda’s later works for which she is best known, while the 35mm format is attributed more to the men of the era, including Shimao.

My Husband: Book 1 is set in motion with an image of Ushioda herself holding her child, with image credit given to Shimao in the author’s notes. Direct sunlight washes over the figure which makes it difficult to decipher who is walking toward the camera. If one looks quickly, it would be possible to read the person as Shimao. But we aren’t introduced to the likeness of her husband until page nine, and then once we are acquainted with him, his presence is intermittent. This fact causes one to wonder, how did the title of the book come to be?

In the case of the best books, it isn’t just what is in the pictures that draws us in and beckons us to return, but also what we try to understand and piece together in the space between images. In this case, it’s in the space between books. 

In My Husband: Book 2, the tempo of life appears to speed up. We begin with views from Ushioda’s maternity clinic; Maho is an infant again at the start of Book 2, and then suddenly, she is no longer an infant, but a busy toddler like she is at the end of Book 1. There is more motion contained within the images, and the family begins to venture outside of the home more. Vantage points change more rapidly, and the softback allows for faster flipping through the pages. There is only one portrait of the family of three, with credit given to a self-timer. Shimao is never depicted holding his camera, though we know that he was photographing during this period too, as evidenced through his book Maho-Chan published in 2004 by Osirus, featuring 82 black-and-white 35mm photographs of the couple's daughter.

There isn’t enough time or space in this review to get into the history of patriarchy or submission in Japanese culture, as well as its photographic canon, but it would be careless not to praise Tokuko Ushioda for her decades of perseverance. My Husband is released into a world much different than the one that existed at the time of its making in 1978-1983. Thanks to female photographers in Japan in the intervening 44 years, the world is ready to receive a female gaze of domesticity and motherhood as being worthy of the subject of art. 

My Husband is a joy. I am glad that it has finally arrived. 

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Sara J. Winston is an artist based in the Hudson Valley region of New York, USA. She works with photographs, text, and the book form to describe and respond to chronic illness and its ongoing impact on the body, mind, family, and memory. Sara is the Photography Program Coordinator at Bard College and on the faculty of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program.