Book Review Falkland Road Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Falkland Road is not an enjoyable book. That might be an odd statement to begin a book review, but it’s my frank opinion. Subtitled “Prostitutes of Bombay”, Mary Ellen Mark’s classic monograph assaults the reader with a series of brutal transactions..."

Falkland Road by Mary Ellen Mark.

Falkland Road
Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark
Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2024. 132 pp., 76 images, 11¼x12¾x¾".

Falkland Road is not an enjoyable book. That might be an odd statement to begin a book review, but it’s my frank opinion. Subtitled “Prostitutes of Bombay”, Mary Ellen Mark’s classic monograph assaults the reader with a series of brutal transactions. Young women practice the world’s oldest profession in dingy rooms, fending off an onslaught of horny men, disturbing power dynamics, and grimy conditions. Spend as long as you want putting lipstick on these scenes. It won’t soften the grubby squalor of Mumbai’s red-light district circa 1978.

If the book leaves you unsettled, Mary Ellen Mark is already one step ahead of you. She intended Falkland Road as an exposé to speak truth to power. Photographs can do that on occasion—especially true in the pre-Internet magazine heyday—but only if they’re not sugar coated. Mark applied this maxim to Falkland Road, which became an early foundation for a career built on raw documentary revelation. Most of her later work took the form of black-and-white photography. Falkland Road was a rare foray into color. On the occasion of its recent reprinting, its palette and clarity help distinguish the book as a landmark.

Falkland Road’s first inklings began during Mark’s first trip to India in 1968. She found herself a young stranger in a strange land. She was mesmerized by the titular streets many brothels, but her tentative attempts to photograph them were initially rebuffed. When she returned in 1978—fresh on the heels of her Magnum induction—she was better prepared. “I had no idea if I could do this, but I knew I had to try” she explains in the introduction. She hung around with local prostitutes day after day. “Some of the women thought I was crazy, but a few were surprised by my interest and acceptance of them. And slowly, very slowly, I began to make friends.” From these fitful beginnings, the project gradually extended for four months, from October 1978 to January 1979.

Mark sets the book’s resolute mood with an establishing shot of Falkland Road. It’s an evening exterior view of Bombay’s brothels, taking up most of a two-page spread. Women advertise their services to the street, safely ensconced in open-air rooms behind barred windows. Whether they are being protected or confined is open to interpretation. Mary Ellen Mark’s introduction follows—her essay and captions manifest a sharp writing talent able to match her photo chops—before she dives into the nitty gritty.

The book descends in force. We see photos of women primping and gathering for the upcoming work shift. They gather like school girls, some toting kids or wash buckets. Gradually they’re joined by customers. Anything goes here. Gender bending, domination, toys, and parlor tricks are gently hinted. Anticipation blurs into dusky hues. Couples gawk, cuddle, and get it on, all shot with perfunctory non-judgment. Some photos are quite explicit. Yet none feel especially salacious. These are closer to NatGeo than Penthouse. Whatever the scene or person, Mark is right in the mix, her camera hovering nearby, often with flash in hand. One wonders by what black magic she gained such intimate access, or how she managed to document exotic carnality with such cool remove.

In the wrong hands, sex scenes in a distant country might be easily exoticized. They could be cordoned and emotionally defused if not edited and sequenced with care. Mark maintains a full contact press—with both reader and photo subject—by interweaving portraiture with the more traditional documentary photos. She connects with subjects and receives vulnerable eye contact in return. Some gazes are snatched during nightly duties. Some are quiet poses. One by one, a series of working women take a moment to peer back into her camera. On occasion she catches Johns doing the same. The expressions are typically blank or bemused, not exactly innocent but still hard to pigeonhole. In any case, once they enter the reader’s mind, none of these portraits are easily displaced.

When Falkland Road was originally published in 1981 by Thames and Hudson, it was widely feted as a photographic classic. It was clear that Mark had laid down a marker, but it came with a few hiccups. Color photobooks were technically limited at the time, and the production was flawed with color casts and imperfect scans. Publishing technology has come a long ways since, not to mention place names. E.g. Bombay is now Mumbai.

In 2005 Steidl reprinted Falkland Road with added photographs and improved tonality. That was a step forward, but the 2023 version is even better. Mark’s original Kodachrome slides have been freshly rescanned and printed by Steidl. The colors are rich and contrasty, able at last to meet the raw power of Mark’s subject matter. I won’t say the combination is pleasant. Falkland Road will never be enjoyable to read, and it might sit some time between viewings. But even if it gathers dust on the shelf, it’s a essential component in any documentary photobook library.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

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

Book Review Los Angeles Spring Photographs by Robert Adams Reviewed by Blake Andrews “The first thing to know about Los Angeles Spring is that it contains no actual photographs of Los Angeles. Instead, its pictures explore the city’s far eastern outskirts along Interstate 10, the freeway to Palm Springs..."

Los Angeles Spring. By Robert Adams.

Los Angeles Spring
Photographs by Robert Adams
Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2023. 120 pp., 56 illustrations, 13½x15½".

The first thing to know about Los Angeles Spring is that it contains no actual photographs of Los Angeles. Instead, its pictures explore the city’s far eastern outskirts along Interstate 10, the freeway to Palm Springs. It’s a relatively season-less place, and a more accurate name for the book might be "I-10 Springs." A few highway onramps appear in the book, but there is no city of angels, nor much of anything else heavenly.

It was here, in the vast territory between the San Bernardino Mountains and Orange County, that Robert Adams found his muse. Readers might want to keep a map handy while browsing the various photo sites, to help track his wanderings. Captions identify locations like Pomona, Redlands, Fontana, Colton, Rancho Cucamonga, and Loma Linda. They may have unique names, but the town borders are indistinct. One community bleeds into the next, sprawling collectively into a morass of farmland, roads, orchards, and exurbs. When Adams shot there in the early 1980s, the area was already showing the stress of suburban expansion, with farmlands giving way to subdivisions. Housing developments have only encroached further in the interim.

Adams takes a dismal view of such trends, and of Manifest Destiny in general. We’ve mucked up nature’s bequest, as far as he’s concerned. “All that is clear is the perfection of what we have been given,” he writes in the preface, “the unworthiness of our response, and the certainty, in view of our current deprivation, that we are judged.” In this case, the judge is Adams himself. Photography’s favorite misanthrope has built a long career highlighting the perils of wanton development, from the New Topographics through monographs like The New West, On Lookout Mountain, and Turning Back. Lest the message of those books be somehow misinterpreted, there’s even a title called Eden.

Los Angeles Spring opens innocently enough, with photographs of rural roads infringing gently upon hillsides. We pick up the pace through agricultural fields, byways, and eucalyptus groves, before a defoliated orchard signals choppy waters ahead. The pictures become more blunt from this point, as their critique of civilization is flushed into the open. There’s a telephone pole overlooking crushed cactus, an old tire near an abandoned windbreak, power lines adorning a rock cliff, a scrappy freeway berm, a tracked up mud puddle, and so on. Litter and human detritus are a continual nuisance. The air hangs thick, possibly with smog or humidity? If Spring is a metaphor for optimism, these photos don’t feel very seasonal. Eventually, after many such documents, Adams finishes up with a small photo flurry in, of all places, Long Beach. This is a port city far removed from the I-10 corridor, and it shows. No sign of farmers here. The neighborhoods are dense with streets and housing. It may not be Los Angeles, but it’s a step in that direction.

The thing about Robert Adams is, even as he looks down his nose at us silly humans ravaging nature, his photos marvel at the consequences. His landscapes are infused with prosaic wonder, and an affinity for locale. He just can’t help it. Thus his picture of a lonely windbreak of trees in Redlands seems more defiant than gloomy. An arid landscape bulldozed for a cemetery in Colton becomes a garden of possibilities before Adams’ camera. A dry wash near Norton Air Base shows nature working diligently under a distant flight path. Wherever he directs his gaze, some attention falls upon the horizon. It’s as if a brighter future awaits. Hope springs eternal. Or at least Los Angeles springs. How should we understand such visions? Is the sky in fact falling on Babylon? Or is nature’s triumph finally at hand?

While we await judgement day, Steidl’s production weighs in on the side of beauty. It expands and improves on the 1986 Aperture original in every facet. The tome is huge, slipcased, and linen-bound, with additional photographs added. The cover image is held over, couched in a new design. Throughout the main body, quadratone reproductions are exquisite. They’re printed at large scale on heavy stock paper. There’s a good reason Los Angeles Spring is priced at a premium, because it’s about as close as a book might come to approximating a physical exhibition. Its photographs may reflect a dour take on SoCal hubris. Nevertheless the book is a triumph. It just can’t help itself.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

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

Book Review Ralph Ellison: Photographer Photographs by Ralph Ellison Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Take a bow if you knew that Ralph Ellison was a photographer. I admit I was blind to that fact until recently. I enjoyed Invisible Man as a youth, and I knew of Ellison’s importance in literature. However, Ralph Ellison as picture maker? I had no idea..."

Ralph Ellison: Photographer.

Ralph Ellison: Photographer
Photographs by Ralph Ellison
Steidl/Gordon Parks Foundation/Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust, 2023. 240 pp., 132 illustrations, 8¾x10½".

Take a bow if you knew that Ralph Ellison was a photographer. I admit I was blind to that fact until recently. I enjoyed Invisible Man as a youth, and I knew of Ellison’s importance in American literature. But Ralph Ellison as picture maker? I had no idea. It turns out he was an avid photographer, and not a bad one either. Along with countless shutterbugs in the post-war boom, he built his own home darkroom, lusted over equipment, and shot thousands of pictures spanning much of his adult life.

A handsome new monograph from Steidl explores this world for the first time. Its title Ralph Ellison: Photographer perates as a general description and also as artistic affirmation. It’s a joint effort, organized and edited by Ellison’s literary executor John F. Callahan alongside Michal Raz-Russo of the Gordon Parks Foundation. In Ellison’s photographic archives — safely housed with his papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC — the two were presented with a huge block of unformed clay. Virtually none of the images had been published or seen by the general public. Where to begin? 

Their curation is enlightening if somewhat conventional. The book is loosely sequenced by date, and, within chronology, by subject. Photographs are drawn from two main bodies of work. First up are Ellison’s monochrome exposures from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. This covers the period when Ellison first became enamored with photography, and his pictures are imbued with the excited rush of discovery. He’d settled in Harlem in 1936. After a brief WWII stint in the Merchant Marines, he returned to New York City for good. He befriended many artists, including Parks, and shot scads of film, which he later enlarged by hand as silver gelatin prints. The monograph paces eagerly through early photos of his wife and friends, city kids, and street candids. Occasionally Ellison was hired for paid gigs, but the bulk of his work was amateur, shot by and for himself.

The second and smaller chunk of Ralph Ellison: Photographer consists of color Polaroids from Ellison’s later years, shot long after he’d dismantled his darkroom. These come in a variety of formats beginning in the late 1960s, just after Ellison had endured a tragic house fire. Among his many lost possessions was the unfinished manuscript of his second novel. His subsequent photos reveal a charred soul in a ruminative mood, meditating over flowers, still lifes and household interiors. Perhaps these were fleeting grasps at pre-conflagration domesticity? Viewed now they document the same everyday items captured by a billion iPhones. In Ellison’s time Polaroids scratched the same possessive itch, and he shot over 1,200 of them, right up to his death in 1994. 

Taken as a whole, both bodies of work — early b/w film and later Polaroids — form a collective portrait of an artist wrestling with photography over a long period. Pictures were no passing fancy for Ellison. They were an integral part his creative life, the visible counterpart to his anonymous titular protagonist. Adam Bradley’s introductory essay takes the hobby one step further, casting photography as a complement to his literary legacy. “A continuity of craft unites Ellison’s approach to both arts. At the center of his pursuit is discernment, a refinement of taste and intention that guides what he includes and excludes from his frame.”

Fine, but were his pictures any good? Well yes, but only to a degree. “No one would mistake these images for the work of a photographic master,” declares Bradley, and I think he’s right. They’re fine, but not earth-shattering. After an establishing pic of Ellison shot by Gordon Parks, the book’s opening passage features several portraits by Ellison of his wife Fanny. Some are quite strong with bold lines and tight compositions. They demonstrate a budding talent and an emotional resonance which is rare in young photographers. Fanny returns the favor with a few portraits of Ralph, also well-seen, as are Ellison’s portraits that follow. Langston Hughes makes an appearance, along with Albert Erskine and Mozelle Murray, all capably captured. It’s odd there are no pictures of Gordon Parks. He and Ellison were close, and it seems likely such photos exist. But perhaps they weren’t interesting enough, or the negatives were lost? 

In any case, Ellison was a competent observer, even great on occasion. But he was right to keep his day job. His portraits are descriptive but they lack the je ne sais quoi which pushed contemporaries like Penn, Karsh and Ellison’s mentor Parks into rarified air. Ellison’s forays into street photography also demonstrate a sharp eye, but nothing to distinguish him from the great mass of Leica-toting mid-century humanists. There are grab shots of kids and crowds, muddy framing, city skylines and so on. As an insider’s take on mid-century African-American life, they are unique and important. But as pure photos, they are more pedestrian. This perspective is reinforced in the book with occasional contact sheets interspersed among the final photos. Perhaps they were intended as a deep dive bonus into the artist’s mind? Maybe so. But like most contact sheets they seem more routine than revelatory. 

Oh well. If he wasn’t a world-class photographer, Ellison’s images are still informative. In fact, their amateur nature may be their most interesting facet. Ellison’s was a relatively unpolished view, grassroots, authentic and personal. Bradley again: “part of their appeal is the natural curiosity of an iconic artist working in a distant artistic field.” That curiosity is piqued about 2/3 through the book, when Ralph Ellison: Photographer finally hits its stride. A deft sequence of mixed monochromes begins with a snowy park scene. It’s followed by a brick wall abstraction, office equipment, interiors, a boat perfectly positioned upon a lake and (my favorite) a keenly layered jumble of car hood, poster and moving figure.  

Viewing this bounty I realized that Ellison’s pictures had been sequenced by topic until this point. It was wonderful to see them roam unfettered, mingling easily with no documentary burdens. A final b/w photo of Fanny leads into the nice long suite of Polaroids which closes the book. The color snaps are quiet, unassuming and radiant. One can sense Ellison becoming more relaxed as a photographer, more accepting of the results, or maybe just worn down by life. By the book’s closing, the house fire has receded from memory. Youth’s creative flames have been extinguished, leaving behind just a faint trail of photographs, shot by a very visible man.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

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

Book Review Book Building Photographs by Dayanita Singh Reviewed by Brian Arnold "Singh has developed a life’s work based on a deep reverence for books and has pioneered new understandings of what they can be by exploring all their layers — as objects and artifacts, as metaphysical entities, as narrative vessels and as performance pieces..."

Book Building By Dayanita Singh.

Book Building
Photographs by Dayanita Singh

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2021. 160 pp., 90 illustrations, 5½x8¼".

In an essay called “Is Nothing Sacred?,” author Salman Rushdie writes about a reverence for books instilled early in his life. “In our house,” he writes, “whenever anyone dropped a book…the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect.” He goes on to say that the kissing of holy books is a common thing in India, but in his household all books were given the same respect, and that he kissed dictionaries, atlases, novels and comics. Rushdie offers this with a certain level of comedy, but given the title of the essay clearly there is something much deeper happening; he is really defining a relationship he has to ideas and words and the books that hold them. I think his idea is that, if investigated with an open mind and a true spirit, all books are sacred. Rushdie is really emphasizing the power of the written wordd, and given the decades of turmoil his writing created, he can share this with a more profound insight than most of us.

Rushdie’s relationship with books also provides the perfect entry point for understanding the newest publication by Hasselblad Award recipient Dayanita Singh. Singh has developed a life’s work based on a deep reverence for books and has pioneered new understandings of what they can be by exploring all their layers — as objects and artifacts, as metaphysical entities, as narrative vessels and as performance pieces. She pays the closest attention to all their details by probing the implications of book construction, the social implications they embody and facilitate, and the myriad of possibilities available when combining images and words. In doing so, she has created a remarkably unique practice as an artist and photographer — indeed, has created a remarkably unique approach to life — that is solely devoted to books.

Book Building is part manifesto and part retrospective. Within it, Singh spells out her approach to each of her different books and the ideas, exhibitions and performances they all facilitated and inspired, and in doing so, offers a deep personal philosophy about books. Divided into 7 chapters — Photo-Architecture, Book-Object, Living with Books, Photo-Fiction, Photo-Letters, Gifting the Exhibition, Photo-Biography — a curiously curated glossary and an appendix of testimonials, Book Building breaks down each of her major projects, presenting specific details about things like paper and ink choices (and arguments with Gerhard Steidl), while outlining her transition from a traditional photographer to a multidimensional offset artist.

Each of these chapters describes several different book projects Singh developed, providing clear details about the logistics of each (how do different bindings work?) and deep insight into the philosophies and ideas driving their creation (how does understanding the specific binding properties facilitate new narratives?). I felt familiar with Singh’s work before reading Book Building — I have a few by her in my collection, and I’ve always loved her pictures — but quickly came to realize I know very little. Most surprising to me were the book performances she held in different venues around the world, including the Venice Biennale. Singh custom built a cart, a cabinet with wheels that unhinged to create a signing table covered with tapestries from which she sold the books stored inside, ritualizing each transaction with unique stamps and inscriptions based on her interaction with the collector purchasing the book.

Like anything Steidl produces, Book Building is beautiful. The cover is from Singh’s sketchbook, and the pages that follow reproduce every step of her process — on press with Gerhard Steidl, contact sheets of Zakir Hussain, installation views, studio and performance shots, and even simple mock-ups (early on we learn that Singh always starts her projects with scissors and tape). Very little of the writing, however, is by Singh. After short introductions by Singh and Gerhard, the chapters are written by book designer Rukminee Guha Thakurta and curator Simrat Dugal. Beyond that, Singh’s primary written contribution is step by step directions describing how to turn each of her individual books into an exhibition of any scale. These directions not only have a quirky appeal, but they also offer insight into how Singh developed her ideas about books as exhibition objects.

The appendix is a series of testimonials. A selection of curators and writers were each asked to write a short essay reflecting on one of Singh’s books. I must confess to finding this a bit too much, and by the time I reached this part of the book I felt full of Dayanita Singh and was ready for some different observations about books. Thinking of Book Building as an artist book itself, it might have been more interesting if each of these writers shared something more akin to the Rushdie thoughts cited above, sharing a seedling about their love of books. Dayanita Singh undoubtably has an incredibly complex understanding of all things book — from modest archives in Mumbai, to the Venice Biennale and the greatest intricacies of the offset process — and I love thinking of that in conversation with other philosophies built on a profound love of books. It’s clear to me that all these different contributors are interesting writers and artists, and their testimonials are not without value, but I found it more engaging to come back to them after putting the book down for several weeks.

Having finished Book Building I have a better understanding of why Dayanita Singh was awarded the most recent Hasselblad Award. She has pushed the mediums of photography, offset lithography, performance and photographic installation into entirely new terrain. The Hasselblad Award is always accompanied by a major retrospective monograph, usually printed by Steidl, and I am quite curious to see how Singh’s will follow Book Building, which provides such a unique cross-section of a deeply complex artist. There is no denying that the photobook is a major part of contemporary photographic discourse — while all eyes are on Paris Photo and the Aperture Book Awards, interesting new photobook festivals and exhibitions are popping up in places as far-flung as Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta — and I think Book Building is an essential contribution to contemporary discourse about photobooks. As much as this book is about Dayanita Singh, it also offers perplexing, elemental questions; what really is a book?

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Book Review The Moon Is Behind Us By Fazal Sheikh & Terry Tempest Williams Reviewed by Brian Arnold "Early in the pandemic I connected with two photographers in the UK. One was an eager young critic and artist, energized to make an important contribution to discussions on contemporary photography. The other more patient, a middle-aged man who formerly worked as a photographer for the United Nations in Cambodia, now trying to forge a new career as an academic and a publisher..."

The Moon Is Behind Us. By Fazal Sheikh 

& Terry Tempest Williams.

The Moon Is Behind Us
By Fazal Sheikh & Terry Tempest Williams

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2021. 192 pp., 45 illustrations, 5½x7¾".

"The world rarely makes sense. This letter may not make sense to you, but I am following where your images lead me, Fazal. I trust you as the people you photograph trust you. It’s all about the relationship. In this way, there is always the surprise, not knowing where we are going, but the pleasure of trusting where we will be taken — even if the journey is internal." 

—Terry Tempest Williams

Early in the pandemic I connected with two photographers in the UK. One was an eager young critic and artist, energized to make an important contribution to discussions on contemporary photography. The other more patient, a middle-aged man who formerly worked as a photographer for the United Nations in Cambodia, now trying to forge a new career as an academic and a publisher. I’ve never met these two people, at least in person, but over the last 18 months we developed important personal and professional connections that have become essential for helping me shape each day. I know so many of us share in these kinds of connections in such unprecedented and unnerving times, and while these relationships are essential, few of them have the poetic depth and resonance shared in the pandemic connection and correspondence between Fazal Sheikh and Terry Tempest Williams, now collected in a new book published by Steidl, The Moon is Behind Us.

A student of Emmet Gowin, both a Fulbright and a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur recipient, Fazal Sheikh has repeatedly developed photographic projects and narratives that reveal profound bravery and compassion, in places and circumstances as complex as they are desperate, like those he found in Afghanistan, India, Somalia, and Cuba. Terry Tempest Williams is a writer and environmental conservationist who has devoted her career to understanding the history, geology, people, and crises that have shaped the American West. An incredibly prolific writer, she’s worked with an array of interesting photographers — such as Robert Adams, David Benjamin Sherry, Dorothy Kerper Monnelly, Emmet Gowin, and John Telford. Terry is based in Utah, and Fazal in Zurich, but the two were in the early stages of a collaborative project with the leaders of the Diné Bikéyah, a Native American tribe based out of Bluff, Utah, when the pandemic struck. Locked in their respective homes, the two nevertheless found a way to develop a collaboration — communicating as friends, confidantes, and artists.

Their pandemic correspondence started like it did with so many of us, as a way to divert the isolation and crippling anxiety. Fazal sent Terry a collection of prints made over the last 30 years of his career, highlighting his seminal projects like The Victor Weeps, Ramadan Moon, Moksha, A Camel for the Son, and A Sense of Common Ground. In response to this gift, Terry developed a daily meditation, a writing project in which she wrote 30 letters to Fazal over 30 consecutive days, each one a response to one of the photographs he shared with her. The Moon is Behind Us presents the correspondence, their pictures and letters printed side by side.

The end result mixes the melancholy and fear we all felt during the early days of the pandemic, but also becomes a much larger and deeply personal meditation on the purpose of art, the value of friendship, and how we all try to cope with and respond to the injustices of the world. Each of Terry’s letters are structured similarly, starting with a free association with an individual picture as she tries to find its meaning and connection to her own life. She uses these associations to grabble with family history and personal traumas, the remarkable political turmoil that was burning across the United States at the time of their correspondence, and to reflect on the ongoing humanitarian and environmental crises that afflict our world. After her initial response to the picture, Terry often reads Fazal’s notes handwritten on the back of the print and uses this information to connect with the original context and intent of the photograph. For the reader her approach to the pictures is quite insightful, providing a unique opportunity to witness a profound, creative mind trying to make meaning from such original and richly visualized photographs.

While engaging Fazal’s pictures, Terry often asks challenging questions of art, humanity, and how we can best make meaning from our suffering. She appears desperate to understand the sort of solace we find in art while dealing with such profound, relentless suffering and injustice:

"I have some questions. Did you feel discomfort in photographing them, Fazal? Did you think twice or three times or four? Did I feel discomfort in writing about my mother, my grandmother, my two brothers’ heartbreaking deaths? Or is all our artmaking, no matter the focus, the artist’s mirroring of the self — our fears, our projections, our hypnotic walk toward beauty to transform our anger into sacred rage — as a way to survive our grief?"

At times Terry seems to be asking, pleading really, for Fazal to tell her why we have to endure so much suffering and grief in a lifetime. She does humbly acknowledge that these kinds of questions have plagued humanity since time eternal, but also recognizes that sometimes such beautiful pictures of our pain can calm our troubled hearts. The shared emotional urgency of her writing combined with the remarkable beauty of Fazal’s photographs results in some lovely, poetic observations. And shaping these questions in an intimate format, in letters sent personally addressed to Fazal (in the introduction, we learn that originally Terry was hesitant with his interest in publishing their correspondence), brings an essential timbre for understanding this book, as her questions about Fazal’s pictures and the nature of art are presented with a genuine vulnerability, one that can only be shared with family and close friends. As a reader, this makes the book feel like a gift. I decided to read The Moon Is Behind Us just like it was written, one entry a day, as an attempt to share the experience the creators had. Doing so reminded me of some values I understand as essential as an artist — that the best art comes from urgency and compassion, derived from a daily engagement with and a deep curiosity for life.

In critical and historical discussions about photobooks, Fazal Sheikh feels greatly under-acknowledged. His first book, A Sense of Common Ground (published by Scalo in 1996, when he was just 31), demonstrated incredible photographic maturity. Since then, he has released over a dozen books, ranging from dense, richly illustrated monographs like Moksha or Erasure, to more simply conceived artist books like A Camel for the Son or Ramadan Moon. Most recently he has developed two collaborative books with writers as important and different as Teju Cole and Terry Tempest Williams. His books are always made with the highest commitment to design and production, and show tremendous insight, poetry, and dedication.

The Moon is Behind Us is as much a delight to hold as it is to read — a small format, hardcover book and made with a high-quality coated paper, Sheikh’s pictures are small on the pages, but with the quality characteristic of Steidl publications. Most of the page spreads are given to Williams whose simple, engaging prose is easy to hold close to the heart, as unabashedly she explains her life in the pandemic and Trump era through the photographs given to her. For those familiar with Sheikh’s work the photographs are a self-curated retrospective, but rest assured Williams will present his works as though new to you, seeing things you didn’t know could be found in his pictures.

I hope if/when normalcy returns, Fazal Sheikh and Terry Tempest Williams will be able to complete their collaboration with the Diné Bikéyah, because with this intimate background and exchange, the result will surely be transformative. Williams suggests something important about all this when she quotes writer Zadie Smith, “Time is how you spend your love.”

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Brian Arnold is a photographer and writer based in Ithaca, NY, where he works as an Indonesian language translator for the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. He has published two books on photography, Alternate Processes in Photography: Technique, History, and Creative Potential (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Identity Crisis: Reflections on Public and Private and Life in Contemporary Javanese Photography (Afterhours Books/Johnson Museum of Art, 2017). Brian has two more books due for release in 2021, A History of Photography in Indonesia: Essays on Photography from the Colonial Era to the Digital Age (Afterhours Books) and From Out of Darkness (Catfish Books).