Book Review Arresting Beauty Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "Cultural gatekeepers of the Victorian era initially deemed Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs 'inexcusable.' Critics argued her “slovenly manipulations” were so 'altogether repulsive' that even having been made by a woman couldn’t excuse them..."

Arresting Beauty by Julia Margaret Cameron.

Arresting Beauty
Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron

Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2023. 208 pp., 125 illustrations.

Cultural gatekeepers of the Victorian era initially deemed Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs “inexcusable.” Critics argued her “slovenly manipulations” were so “altogether repulsive” that even having been made by a woman couldn’t excuse them. Such contempt did little to shake Cameron’s confidence in her work or make her doubt her insights into the medium that were far ahead of their time. Arresting Beauty is a petite yet comprehensive book celebrating what made Cameron one of history’s most provocative photographers. 

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) started photographing in 1863 at age 48, having been given a camera as a gift by her daughter. Most in this new role of 'photographer' valued the camera as an objective tool and used it to collect facts about the world, but Cameron immediately intuited photography’s dual nature as an art form. Among the first to probe its power to transform and provoke feeling, she began by questioning the camera’s most basic function. Despite having the technical prowess to create sharp images, Cameron halted her focus based on what looked most beautiful, asking: “What is focus, and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” Her use of softness and close-ups is now considered groundbreaking. Cameron’s approach to the print was controversial as well. She was early to realize that darkroom interpretation was part of what made photographers artists. She remained indifferent to cracks or marks, possibly even welcoming them, and refused to discard damaged works. Her radical acceptance of the process anticipated future deconstructions of the photographic theater.

Cameron’s concepts were also unconventional. Assuming from the start what would take over a century to be generally accepted, she ignored the argument that photography is inferior to drawing or painting because it is a mechanical and chemical process. Cameron understood that all art is intention, the image is a thing in itself, and the human spirit can be expressed by hand or by eye. Beyond her pioneering portraits, Cameron’s other pictures were unapologetic attempts to turn life into myth. She staged scenes from the Bible, classical mythology, Renaissance painting, English literature, and famously helped her friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson breathe new life into Arthurian legend by illustrating his poetry. Cameron believed that photography could transcend reality, and she repeatedly used the same models, props, and drapery to make her point. The art establishment considered these tableaux to be in poor taste, and it took until the 1980s for them to be positively reassessed.

One of Julia Margaret Cameron's primary aims was to immortalize. She saw that, by holding images of people in time, photography offered an afterlife — a divine art that aligned with her religious faith. Cameron’s methods cut to the heart of photography’s strange magic, prefiguring Pictorialist aesthetics, Surrealist photography as imaginal tool, and snapshot artists such as Nan Goldin, who sacrifice technical perfection for intimacy. Arresting Beauty is an accessible volume drawn from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s holdings, the most extensive collection of her photographs in the world. It introduces new viewers, or invites those already familiar, to appreciate Cameron’s intent to “electrify you with delight and startle the world.”

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Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.

Book Review PHOTO | BRUT Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "PHOTO | BRUT, the catalog for the eponymous exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, boldly proposes a new photographic genre with its title. Although the art market has accepted ‘outsider’ or ‘visionary’ art for decades, defining this category for photography is tricky. Democratic by nature, the camera invites untold numbers of amateurs to make pictures with its ease and availability. In the twentieth century, photography was only slowly taken seriously by museums and galleries, and its classification as ‘fine art’ is relatively recent. Bonafide masters of the medium — such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard — are famously self-taught. How, then, is ‘Photo Brut’ determined?"

PHOTO | BRUT.

PHOTO | BRUT
Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie

Flammarion, 2020. 322 pp., 9¾x11x1¼".

PHOTO | BRUT, the catalog for the eponymous exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, boldly proposes a new photographic genre with its title. Although the art market has accepted ‘outsider’ or ‘visionary’ art for decades, defining this category for photography is tricky. Democratic by nature, the camera invites untold numbers of amateurs to make pictures with its ease and availability. In the twentieth century, photography was only slowly taken seriously by museums and galleries, and its classification as ‘fine art’ is relatively recent. Bonafide masters of the medium — such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard — are famously self-taught. How, then, is ‘Photo Brut’ determined?

In essence, PHOTO | BRUT champions photographic works made with enigmatic purpose and without an art world intention. The contributors trace its lineage back to Jean Dubuffet’s 1940s conception of ‘Art Brut’ (Raw Art) — art ‘uncooked’ by cultural forces, made by creators working outside of the academy, often alone, or in institutions, hospitals, or prisons. Although related to vernacular photography, PHOTO | BRUT’s photographs, prints, photomontages, and photocollages defy the ‘daily life’ category in mind-boggling ways. The five hundred-plus pieces by fifty-three artists are spectacularly odd, emotionally explosive, and shockingly intimate. Despite the range of originality, biographical texts make clear that there is at least one thread uniting this unleashed creativity: trauma.

PHOTO | BRUT is a collection of visions inspired by psychological need. ‘Private Affairs’, the first of four sections, focuses on sexual desire, obsession, and fetish. Among the works are Morton Bartlett’s tender yet terrifying photos of handcrafted, anatomically correct child mannequins. Of these tableaux, Bartlett once said: “Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies—to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels.” The next category, ‘Reformatting the World,’ presents inspirations of epic proportion, such as Henry Darger’s enchanted masterpiece on the ‘Vivian Girls.’ The selections here speak to Darger’s process, revealing his use of commercial imagery to construct the intersex nymphs that fill his war-torn, watercolor world. The section ‘Performing, or Another I’ reinvents identity and gender. Amidst the self-portraiture is a series by Tomasz Machciński, known as the ‘man of a thousand faces.’ Machciński changes himself into both famous and unknown characters of different ages, sexes, and races. Of these documented metamorphoses, he states: “I don't use wigs, tricks, but I use everything that happens to my body, such as hair regrowth, tooth loss, diseases, aging, etc.”

The final chapter of PHOTO | BRUT concerns an area of photographic inquiry that has long stood outside of the canon. ‘Conjuring the Real: Spirits, Fluids and Threatening Forces’ addresses attempts to picture the invisible. It opens with John Brill’s ghostly images that mix analog and digital processes. Although Brill’s works are contemporary, their theme harkens back to photography’s earliest days, when some of the most prominent figures in Western culture tried to capture the supernatural with cameras. Among those distinguished researchers was Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Charles Richet. In 1919, Richet co-founded the Institut Métapsychique International in Paris, the source for many of PHOTO | BRUT’s examples of thoughtography, spirit photographs, and images of ectoplasm. This introduces one of Photo Brut’s most compelling aspects — exposing photography’s problem with truth. Paranormal experiments were the first to challenge the idea that cameras could faithfully record reality. The resulting images are among the most bizarre, absurd, and uniquely unsettling moments within the medium’s history.

The artists in PHOTO | BRUT externalize their inner worlds with photographs made or borrowed. Some also play with the artform’s stranger possibilities. Photography’s ability to freeze time and preserve disembodied presence connects it to ancient ideas about magic; the notions that a person’s soul is in their reflection or that the eye can cast a spell are among the world’s oldest superstitions. With examples such as Gunter K.’s sexual mementoes, Zdenêk Košek’s tattooed formulas, and Adolf Wölfli’s sigil-like collages, PHOTO | BRUT reconsiders the photograph as talisman. The book’s works plunge emotional depths, and their authenticity feels implicit. An uneasy realization affects the viewer — this art was not made for us, it has a private function. We were likely never meant to see these images, and maybe we shouldn’t be looking. PHOTO | BRUT celebrates photography’s feral features, inviting questions about voyeurism, transgression, myth-making, and transformation. Finally out from under the shadow of painting and embraced by the establishment, the medium’s full potential may now be ready for reassessment.

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Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.

Book Review Hunger – Epilogue Photographs by Michael Ackerman Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue reminds us that photography is a death-defying feat. The book, his fourth, concludes Hunger, an anthology of photographs in seven parts, published by Void. The project is inspired by Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist — the tale of, literally, a ‘starving artist’ who displays his emaciated body with enthusiasm, despite losing his audience to new amusements..."

Hunger – Epilogue. By Michael Ackerman.

Hunger – Epilogue
Photographs by Michael Ackerman

Void, Athens, Greece 2020. 48 pp., 8¾x12½".

Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue reminds us that photography is a death-defying feat. The book, his fourth, concludes Hunger, an anthology of photographs in seven parts, published by Void. The project is inspired by Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist — the tale of, literally, a ‘starving artist’ who displays his emaciated body with enthusiasm, despite losing his audience to new amusements. Epilogue, the series’ lone solo act, is a shrewd tribute to another practice past its golden era. Ackerman’s photographs confront us with the medium’s primary power — its spooky ability to transform time. Here, reality is altered. The dead are present, and the living preserved. Photography’s death and resurrection show is on parade.

In Ackerman’s dead/alive universe, the fourth wall is broken. The photographic process speaks directly to the viewer. Anomalies read as auras, unseen forces, or time itself: a horse trots into a void of fogged film lined with sprockets; an orbit of dust and scratches embeds a woman frozen in a hammock; a child floats in a glob of white chemistry, as if held by an apparition. People and places materialize through Xerox-like patterns of film grain. Holocaust victims beam brightly in pictures of pictures, projecting the uncanniness of copies. The book eulogizes photography’s analog age with contact-sheet sequences, polaroid grids, and prints with full-frame edges intact. Epilogue amplifies all of photography’s visible features.

This second edition is shrunk down from the original massive broadsheet to a standard size. Its newsprint paper stock emphasizes Ackerman’s use of chiaroscuro, and fans of his previous books will note how the repeated pictures vibrate differently here. As always, his pictures are instantly mesmerizing and need no introduction. However, the included short texts add dimension. Ackerman himself contributes a poetic piece about the outsider status of both being a photographer and being a father. An essay by filmmaker Jem Cohen touches on the many layers at work in Ackerman’s art, such as how he masterfully ‘respects and destroys’ time, and the way he brings back dead friends, just ‘a little bit.’ 

Cameras entangle light, time, observation, and automation. It is a curious thing. Michael Ackerman’s Epilogue celebrates photographic reality. In its pages, transfigured beings and landscapes flicker like memories, or hallucinations. The book’s tone is mournful and strange: everything depicted seems to acknowledge that its dance with death is being recorded. Epilogue memorializes life’s impermanence, and photography’s mysterious gift to capture it.

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Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.

Book Review Séance Photographs by Shannon Taggart Reviewed by Erika Larsen In 2001, while working as a photojournalist, Shannon Taggart began photographing where that message was received—Lily Dale, New York, home to the world's largest spiritualist community, proceeding to other communities in, for example, Arthur Findlay College in the UK.

Séance. Shannon Taggart.

Séance
Photographs by Shannon Taggart

Fulgur Press, United Kingdom, 2019. 304 pp., 162 color, 8 black and white illustrations, 11¾x9¾".

"I realized the accidental photo was more psychologically true to the event then the photograph I intended to take." With this declaration Shannon Taggart sets the tone for her haunting and evocative portal into the world of spiritualism, titled Séance.

This is Taggart’s first photographic monograph and spans her twenty-year exploration into the realm of Spiritualism, an American religion founded in 1848. I would go so far as to say that Séance could be regarded as a bible for modern-day spiritualism. It houses a rare, archival, visual collection on mediumship accompanied with essays by notable Spiritualist Dan Aykroyd, artist Tony Oursler and curator Andreas Fischer as well as Taggart’s own words, unfolding a rich history underpinned by the profound visual journey set forth through Taggart’s images.

Séance reveals Spiritualism’s influence on modern art, its importance in western esotericism, and its tumultuous relationship with the photographic arts. This book is a constant reminder of the influence photography has in our lives and our interpretations of experience. The camera wields power as a recording device, a communication tool, an evidence provider, and most powerfully, in my opinion, as a time machine.

Spiritualism classifies itself as science, philosophy and religion; Taggart’s images could be classified in all of these categories. Encased in this collection we see the camera dip into realms of documentation, investigation and research, time aberration, and physical deconstruction. With a mastery in this medium, Taggart forces us to see the things we want to believe, and then immediately reminds us why we doubt. Fear, confusion, intellect and knowledge all spin a web that crystalizes our gaze and separates us from our body, until Taggart turns on the lights and reminds us that we are home.

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Séance. Shannon Taggart.

Séance. Shannon Taggart.

Séance. Shannon Taggart.

Séance. Shannon Taggart.

Erika Larsen is a multidisciplinary storyteller who believes that photography is one of the most important ways to explore our understanding of time. She is fascinated by the way we communicate with nature and often focuses on people that maintain strong relationships to the natural world. Her monograph Sami-Walking with Reindeer, a reflection of her time living in the Scandinavian Arctic, was published in 2013.

Book Review Some Kind of Heavenly Fire Photographs by Maria Lax Reviewed by Shannon Taggart Inspired by her grandfather’s book Maria Lax combines her own photography with family archive and newspaper cuttings to pass on the essence of the bewildering stories relayed to her throughout her youth. Using these elements the book weaves together a delicate and ambiguous narrative, about a small town with a big secret.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire. By Maria Lax.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire
Photographs by Maria Lax

Setanta Publishing, London, UK, 2020. In English. Unpaged, 8¼x11½".

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire is about ‘a little town with a big secret.’ The debut monograph by Finnish photographer Maria Lax revolves around a series of UFO sightings documented by her grandfather in the 1960s. In this petite volume, with an X-files feel, Lax remakes her hometown’s historical mystery by mixing her own work with her grandfather’s journalism. Using private and public material drawn from both past and present, she splices phosphorescent photographs of Northern Finland with eyewitness reports, press clippings, and family snapshots. The result is a photomontage of eras and impressions that questions whether we can access other dimensions in life and in art.

Lax’s twilight interiors, anonymous figures, and celestial nightscapes invoke the supernatural. In these scenes she confronts the countryside, as if petitioning the town to give up its secrets. Trained as a cinematographer, Lax credits her ‘inexperience’ and affinity for ‘old digital’ technology as the formula of her success. Surrendering control to her camera, she is in an unconscious conversation with the place and its past. Lax’s exposures suck up the atmosphere, allowing the ambient light to tell its own tale. This approach brings to mind the musician and composer Kim Cascone's concept of ‘Errormancy’: ‘In the hands of the right artist, a glitch can form a brief rupture in the space-time continuum, shuffling the psychic space of the observer, allowing the artist to establish a direct link with the supernal realm.’ Lax’s glow-bright photographs do manage to feel as if they connect to whatever happened long ago in that dark landscape.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire. By Maria Lax.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire was originally envisioned as a movie, and the book’s cinematic mood is consistent throughout. Lax transports the viewer to the extraterrestrial events of the 1960s through an aesthetic circa 1990, citing films such as ET and Jurassic Park as inspiration. Constructed like a scrapbook or storyboard, the book presents Lax’s otherworldly visuals alongside Finnish newsprint, cursive quotes, and B&W blow-ups, some of which are hand-tipped onto the pages with bright red tape. It’s a puzzling sequence that gives the sensation of entering into Lax’s thoughts and associations. It is appropriate that a sense of incompleteness and missing details pervades her sketch-up. Like any keen observer of the paranormal, Lax offers no definitive answers. Her cross-cutting edit amplifies the theme of unfathomable questions.

In the cult-classic ethnography The Trickster and the Paranormal, author George P. Hansen demonstrates that reports of supernatural experiences often accompany cultural points of instability. The incidents at the center of Some Kind of Heavenly Fire also play into this pattern. Lax notes: “The UFO sightings coincided with a time of great struggle for Northern Finland. People flooded from the countryside to the cities in search of jobs leaving abandoned houses scattered across this beautiful but harsh landscape. It’s no wonder that the UFO sightings embodied a fear of the future, the unknown and the inexorable shift in lifestyles and livelihoods going on around them. Some reacted to the mysterious lights with fear, some took them as a sign they were not alone.” Embedded quotes within the book bring to life the era’s angst: “In this town we have always waited for someone or something – God, a millionaire, or aliens – to come and lift us from this misery.” Our own era’s pandemic, social unrest, and economic uncertainty make Lax’s content ever more compelling.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire is a supernatural saga that plays with the themes of time travel, outer space, and mind-to-mind contact. Although Lax was following in her grandfather’s footsteps, she was unable to seek his counsel, as he was suffering from dementia and died soon after she began the project. In her art, she merges multiple perceptions – her own, her grandfather’s, and those who witnessed the UFO mystery. One of the final spreads pairs Lax’s most radiant image with the quote drawn from her grandfather’s book that inspired the title. It ends the quest on a cliffhanger: “I don’t know what I saw that night, but it wasn’t from this world. It was some kind of heavenly fire.”

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*Some Kind of Heavenly Fire is currently Out-of-Print, at the time of publishing we have a few copies remaining. A second edition is also forthcoming.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire. By Maria Lax.

Some Kind of Heavenly Fire. By Maria Lax.

Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.

Book Review La Cucaracha Photographs by Pieter Hugo Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "Invited by the curator Francisco Berzunza to create a body of work on the themes of sexuality and death in Mexico, Pieter Hugo responded with La Cucaracha. The book is big, blood red, and opens with a picture of a disembodied head..."

La Cucaracha. By Pieter Hugo.

La Cucaracha  
Photographs by Pieter Hugo

RM, 2020. In English. 
136 pp., 56 illustrations, 12¼x13¾".

Invited by the curator Francisco Berzunza to create a body of work on the themes of sexuality and death in Mexico, Pieter Hugo responded with La Cucaracha. The book is big, blood red, and opens with a picture of a disembodied head. In the pages that follow, Hugo offers an electric memento mori captured in a land riddled by violence. As a photographer inspired by symbols and media images, Hugo draws here from the visual history of Catholic iconography, Biblical stories, Mexican folklore, Aztec culture, Renaissance painting, and drug cartel crime scenes. The result is a Mexican fever dream that retains the hallmarks of Hugo’s distinct oeuvre.

La Cucaracha’s hauntological narratives transport the past into the present: a child held horizontal, a slain gelding, and a man laid flat on a dolly reference a history of ritual sacrifice. Hugo invokes crime and its forensic aftermath: fake legs peek out from a blazing fire, a flayed body on an aluminum table reveals its interior torso, and an assault survivor presents his disfigured flesh to the camera. A woman with long hair and breasts caked in blood confronts the viewer, harkening Mexico’s victims of femicide. A wax sculpture of the Mexican icon Frida Kahlo gazes out as if she is witnessing a horror show. A burning bush and a crown of thorns imply that God is also watching.

La Cucaracha. By Pieter Hugo.

La Cucaracha. By Pieter Hugo.

Of Mexico, Hugo observes: “There is an acceptance that life has no glorious victory, no happy ending.” Naked figures—exiled Adams and Eves—populate the book: a couple embraces in a barren landscape, a sex worker poses suggestively, a massive snake coils around a man. Hugo mixes the mundane in with the metaphorical, taking care to represent Mexico’s innocent visions, including its fruits and flowers. His clothed subjects offer proof that the people’s daily life indeed goes on, and Hugo treats their resilience with reverence. Interspersed portraits — such as a chambermaid, a mango vendor, a photographer and his family, and a girl in her first communion dress—interrupt the spin of myth and history, periodically jolting the viewer into everyday reality.

La Cucaracha. By Pieter Hugo.

La Cucaracha translates into ‘The Cockroach’, referencing the well-known tragi-comic Spanish folk song about a bug with missing legs, struggling to walk. Hugo explains: “The jingle-like refrain, combining humor and derogation, is tied deeply to the specific geopolitical, historical and pop-cultural expression of Mexico – a place where hyperviolence, the joyful treatment of death, extreme machismo, expanded viewpoints on gender, dogmatic Catholicism, a reverence for the supernatural, cyclic autocracies, the provision of equitable social housing, chronic desperation and a communal outlook have all somehow found a way to coexist.” Hugo’s cockroach analogy commends the country’s ability to march forward despite its imbalance. It also recognizes Mexico’s outsider status, such as in Trump’s America, where some denounce it as parasitic, corrupt and criminal.

One of the most triumphant moments in the book is Hugo’s three technicolor ‘Muxes’, which run consecutively. Ancient and modern at once, these ‘third-gendered’ men presenting as women carry on a tradition rooted in cross-dressing Aztec priests and the Mayan gods who embodied both sexes. Their prominent presence in La Cucaracha celebrates Mexico’s capacity to grapple with ambiguity, and to endure.

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*All Pieter Hugo quotes from: Hugo, Pieter (2019) ‘Finding a Home for your Demons’, July, The Eye of Photography.

La Cucaracha. By Pieter Hugo.

La Cucaracha. By Pieter Hugo.

Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.