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Bury Me in the Back Forty By Kyler Zeleny.

Bury Me in the Back Forty
Photographs by Kyler Zeleny
The Velvet Cell, Berlin, Germany, 2024. 168 pp.

When we last checked in on Kyler Zeleny, in November 2020, he had just published Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle. The product of 10,000 miles and 4 years of road tripping, this sharply observed monograph revealed the rural Canadian heartland through a colorful blend of portraits, social landscapes, and prairie vistas.

Crown Ditch was the second volume in a planned trilogy of photobooks, following on the heels of Zeleny’s debut Out West (The Velvet Cell, 2014). That title had staked out similar territory (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in methodical style: square format pictures of rural outposts captioned simply by census counts, e.g. 633, 504, 394, 108, and so on. You didn’t need the place names to get the general gist of either book. These were tiny burgs to begin with, and their populations seemed to shrink before Zeleny’s lens.

For the final book of his trilogy, Bury Me In The Back Forty, Zeleny has turned his attention to the Canadian prairie once again. This time he has zeroed in on a single location: Mundare, population ~700. This is a small town in central Alberta, first settled by Ukrainian immigrants in 1907. It proudly claims to host the world’s largest garlic sausage statue. It is also the original hometown of Kyler Zeleny. Never mind Thomas Wolfe’s warning. Zeleny can indeed go home again. He toted along his camera gear, plus an old yearbook for good measure. The resulting monograph documents some of the people and places of modern day Mundare. Better yet, it offers a window into Zeleny’s shifting curatorial style.

What do I mean by stylistic shift? Well, design-wise Bury Me In the Back Forty is markedly different than either of its predecessors. For starters, the raw physical framework is lifted directly from an earlier book, a decidedly non-artistic community history from 1980 called “Memories of Mundare”. As best I can tell, this was something like a town almanac or annual register. Its bygone happenings are reproduced as facsimile pages, renumbered and repurposed into the new tome. Zeleny provides all of this material without much explanation or context, at least initially, and it’s up to the reader to sort through the mundane Mundare minutae. A table of contents lays out the local nuts and bolts, listing such subjects as the Mundare Choir, the Mundare Fire Brigade, the school system, and various civic stalwarts and events. Taken altogether, “Memories of Mundare” is a sort of book length encyclopedia entry. It’s comprised of dense two-column text, spiced regularly with half-tone monochrome pictures, all faithfully replicated.

The old tome is well produced and squeaky clean, and it glows with civic pride. It’s a pleasant enough read. But for Zeleny’s purposes, “Memories of Mundare” is merely the first layer. Its fawning accounts become a sort of visual wallpaper, the foundation for a mélange of added photos, notes, and mementos. A color print of a friend in a bar is nice enough on its own. But it takes on new meaning when montaged atop past social gatherings. A studio shot of glazed donuts makes an intriguing contrast with posed photos of group calisthenics. Zeleny’s photos of utility poles, campers, and obscured ladders veer into experimental territory in their own right, and they’re given an absurdist jolt when juxtaposed with old news accounts.

The old pages are generally subservient, sometimes buried completely, other times lost in the experimental frenzy. After all, who needs an archival counterpoint when contemporary playthings are right at hand? Zeleny bobs and weaves between various media, interjecting cutouts (a symbol for declining rural populations?), sewn collage, crayon markings, cropping notations, and typewritten correspondence. “The result,” at least according to Velvet Cell, “is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events.”

The range of specs, styles, and approaches is impressive. Zeleny probably had a lot of fun putting this book together. But it’s hard to get a good fix on his intentions. Is Bury Me In The Back Forty meant to be a trip down memory lane (he was born in 1988, several years after “Memories Of Mundare”), a post-modern assemblage, a slice of prairie living, or avant-garde monograph? Hmmm. I’m afraid I can’t answer that question with much certainty. But rest assured, his book is entertaining. And readers will likely learn some Mundare trivia while browsing. After all the visual fireworks have closed, Zeleny’s lengthy afterword sheds some light on the subject. His essay ties together Mundare’s history with some of his own connections there. Zeleny himself has decamped for Edmonton (roughly 40 miles west of Mundare) and the rest of the town is on a similar trajectory. The story is the same throughout Canada’s rural west. Most towns face declining prospects. “The prairie party is over,” Zeleny writes. “Today the town is full of solitary drinkers, drinking from bottles that empty them.”

Although Zeleny’s essay is interesting, the tone is somewhat impersonal and academic, closer to reportage than diary. Perhaps that’s just his inner photographer speaking, hewing to straight facts? Or maybe some of the old almanac’s expository style has rubbed off? Or it could be those many years living away from Mundare, tucked in a cohort of urbane photo theorists. In any case Bury Me In The Back Forty leans smartly into the contemporary photobook zeitgeist, which has come to favor curation, editing, and design over the straight style of his debut. This is probably why it succeeds as the final volume of the trilogy. He’s come a long way from Out West, in both years and method. Bury Me In The Back Forty feels like a mark in the sand. Here I am, it announces, the third and final book. This is the impossible spot where Mundare meets photoland.

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

My Dreamhouse is not a House by Julia Gaisbacher.

My Dreamhouse is not a House
Photographs by Julia Gaisbacher
The Velvet Cell, Berlin, 2023. 160 pp., 8¼x11".

If you listen closely to almost any human being who has recently acquired a dreamhouse, certain noises will emerge once the welcoming dog-and-pony show comes to a close and the cheese plates disappear. The living room will be perfect once we repaint that accent wall. The kitchen just needs a new backsplash. The condo board won’t allow radiant heating in the bathroom floors. The builders really cut some corners with the tile caulking.

Perhaps there is a glimmer of delight in the perpetual dissatisfaction, providing both dinner party fodder and an existential tooth to wiggle like a hobby. As Frasier declares in that one episode where he and Niles return from a French restaurant probably complaining about the cognac (to be clear, this is every Frasier episode): “What is the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.” Either way, a dreamhouse is often a lifehack to ensure that something is forever not quite right.

These are monied complaints, of course. Enough to buy or build the place; not enough to demo the whole thing to the ground and start over. What you don’t often hear amongst these homeowners are statements like: “I shared a bedroom with my mother before moving into this house”, or, “I knew I wanted a bathroom because I’d never had one before”, or, “It’s going to take me eighteen years to replace this cabinet.” Dreamhouse problems, after all, are still designed for people who can afford to dream.

Yet these are the paraphrased sentiments encountered between images in Julia Gaisbacher’s My Dreamhouse is not a House, a photographic compendium of the Gerlitzgründe, the renowned architect Eilfried Huth’s radically experimental social housing project constructed in Graz, Austria, between 1976 and 1984. Government subsidized housing was not the novel idea in this time and place, but rather the participatory nature of the project with its prospective residents. Huth consulted each family on the design of their future home, from drawing up blueprints to breaking ground to installing the flooring. Hands-on involvement in building these structures was optional and offered as a means for inclusive ownership, instead of alienated labor. He defined a dreamhouse as “daydreams, places, spaces, landscapes, where experiences fleetingly encounter desires”, and believed that “human existence in the house is what matters, the house is just a shell” –- an architectural philosophy much more aligned with Gaston Bachelard than HGTV.

To peruse this book is to oscillate between two books, or rather, to take a leisurely stroll through a present-day neighborhood of charming pastel façades before being invited inside for a private tour down memory lane and a meet-and-greet with the neighbors from yesteryear. My Dreamhouse is indeed not a house, but a double-decker sandwich of imagery and text: three parts architecture, two parts archival photographs punctuated by first-person memories transcribed from a resident with a story to tell. Gaisbacher sequences her own deadpan photographs of each home’s exterior into an accordion layout bound at the seam, which smartly incentivizes the page turn, as a hexagonal robin’s egg roof picks up where a canary yellow porch leaves off, and lavender fades to sage, to apricot, to mint, to slate, to crimson, to midnight blue. No wonder this community was maligned as a ‘parrot settlement’ by its joyless onlookers who had yet to revive their achromatic souls.

Gaisbacher interrupts the lustrous color feast with black-and-white archival snapshots of the Gerlitzgründe and its interiors, printed on a rougher matte paper reminiscent of newsprint. She includes interview excerpts of one anonymous resident, whose anecdotes confirm that this communal endeavor was by no means a frictionless utopia. There were still cheaply made windows and neighbors who ran up the shared gas bill and mobility issues ameliorated with stairlifts in life’s later years. There were also pig roast potlucks and flea markets and children and couples dancing to live bands, whose photographic evidence features a lead singer whipping off his shoes and tie mid-performance.

There is a warmth in the cadence of these pages that belies the matter-of-factness in their compositions and chronologies, all of which seem to say: herein lies the minutiae and transcendence of a life shared with others; the human experience around which the shell is built. This book, much like Huth’s dreamhouse, is a meditation on one neighborhood’s legacy of community, on creative collaboration, on giving someone something to own, and watching them polish it.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Ecology of Dreams By Ewan Telford.

Ecology of Dreams
Photographs by Ewan Telford

Velvet Cell, Berlin, Germany, 2022. In English. 176 pp.

Manifest Destiny was the name given to the cultural doctrine that said we, as Americans, were a righteous people, and that it was our duty to expand our resources and take control over the land we envisioned as the United States of America. It was the time of Deadwood, and together the railroad industry and the federal government strategized ways to take over the American West. In my mind, Los Angeles is the perfect metaphor for westward expansion, truly pushing us from east to west and north to south. It provided all the opportunities, vistas and dreams that characterized our ideal vision of the west — mountain views, some of the nation’s best beaches, a rich agricultural climate and plenty of land for the coming settlers. And at the heart of Los Angeles is Hollywood, the perfect expression of the American Dream — here even a small-town man can find stardom. Los Angeles is, after all, the city of dreams.

Of course, this was destined for failure, as was every other vision of empire. With Hollywood ever present as a backdrop, the city’s demise has inspired many incredible photobooks — Robert Adams’ Los Angeles Spring, ZZYZX by Magnum photographer Gregory Halpern, Karin Apollonia Muller’s mysterious color work in Angels in Fall, the rigorously mundane Candlestick Point by Lewis Baltz and Larry Sultan’s The Valley all come to mind. I’ve only been to LA once and don’t really have a desire to go back. I am sure there are lots of amazing things about the city, but it’s hard for me justify places like Las Vegas and Los Angeles — who had the idea to conquer these parched, sunny lands by invading them with swimming pools and glamour?

Born and educated in Scotland, photographer Ewan Telford’s newest book The Ecology of Dreams presents another look at the mythic city of our westward dreams. Telford has an interesting background — he’s from Scotland and finished an education in philosophy and film production before coming to New York to pursue a career in film and video production. Perhaps an itinerate career in the field, Ewan now lives in Los Angeles and works more as a photographer, exploring text/image narratives. The Ecology of Dreams, Telford’s second book, is full of beautiful photographs and ideas, true to all the icons, symbols, and tropes of the city. Made primarily with pictures of landscapes and interiors (very few people are to be seen), Telford juxtaposes photographs of Hollywood, wildfires, highway systems, wax museums, invasive species, water pipes, petroleum refineries and pedestrian neighborhoods, collectively creating a multilayered portrait of the city and all its contradictions and complexities, a dystopic vision of the American Dream. Each page spread is just one photograph, always on the right side, with the left page presenting different textual experiments Ewan developed in an attempt to encode the images with unexpected ideas.

I am much more engaged with Telford’s pictures than by his text. He is clearly a photographer always ready to make pictures, anywhere and anytime, and he couples this promiscuous style with a keen sense of light, color and photographic metaphor. Despite many great pictures, at 176 pages The Ecology of Dreams feels too long and the photographs under edited (I understand the need to include a picture of the iconic Hollywood sign, but more than once feels redundant — this happens with a few different types of images). I feel this way even more about the text. At times it coaxes surprising and evocative ideas from the photographs, at other times it feels forced and unnecessary, more a distraction than a benefit. After several viewings of the book, I feel like Telford was compelled to provide text for each image rather than having something unique and important for each page spread. For the most part, I find Telford’s photographs strong enough that they don’t need the textual supplements, and the range of pictures included in The Ecology of Dreams provides enough layers for a complex and interesting perspective on Los Angeles.

The Ecology of Dreams was my first introduction to publisher Velvet Cell and looking over all their books I can see they have a unique vision within the glut of photobook publishers working today. Based in Europe, Velvet Cell’s books all look at urban landscapes around the world — with interesting books on cities as different as Beirut, Okinawa, Yangon, Phenom Penh and Budapest — and with a roster that includes some fantastic and well-established photographers like Toshio Shibata, Steve Fitch, Alejandro Cartagena and Peter Bialobrzeski. I will definitely keep an eye on future publications, and I am eager to see how their vision continues to develop.

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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, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam 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.

Suburban Bus. By Alejandro Cartagena.

Suburban Bus
Photographs by Alejandro Cartagena

The Velvet Cell, 2021.

By this point, you’ve been wiping the sleep from your eyes for some time, but it lingers despite the cool fluorescence of the bathroom lights and the water splashed onto your face. It lingers as you are greeted by air that belongs to neither morning nor night. Indeed, you’re only certain that it’s morning due to the unrelenting alarm clock. You amble to the bus stop anyway. You join the small gathering of passengers illuminated by the red-orange glow of streetlights, forming a hesitant pilgrimage — your steps reluctant but dutiful. You, alongside the other passengers, carry the few items that might help them through the day to come: bagged lunches, small backpacks, umbrellas.

It’s still dark but the bus is busy, and it will be for the rest of the way. People lift their backpacks over their heads just to squeeze through the bus’ doors when their stop finally comes. Those who boarded the bus early enough to claim a seat have fallen back into the sleep that has remained on their eyelids since waking. They trust themselves, though, as they always do, to wake up when their stop comes — the mark of persistent routine.

Or maybe, as Alejandro Cartagena might figure it, this is the mark of half-sleep crammed into the only sliver of the day that can accommodate it. In Cartagena’s Suburban Bus you sit alongside half-asleep passengers, frozen in time with their heads tilted and jaws slackened. The pages of Suburban Bus turn with the form of poetic enactment, composing a sequence that simulates the course of one day on just one of the bus’ many commutes. Over the course of the 300+ pages that comprise this beautiful, expansive exploration of a claustrophobic space, you are like a passenger, an observer of routine.

This particular bus connects the cities of Juárez and Monterrey, Mexico. Inside it, Ximena Peredo remarks in her accompanying essay, “we find a type of captivity, of wasted (literally) time, of seeing oneself reflected in this family of exhausted bodies, crushed from their waking at dawn, of getting in each other’s way, squeezing in tighter still to allow someone else on, to finally pushing one’s way through to get off all these bodies melting together like an unavoidable morning ritual.”

“Traveling in these precarious capsules,” Peredo continues, “without enough seats for everyone, in a total absence of safety, is a confirmation of the position these bodies occupy in the consumption society.” This positioning reflects a thematic concern of both this book and the others of Cartagena’s that it echoes, including Suburbia Mexicana (2011) and A small guide to Homeownership (2020) — namely, the tension between compression and expansion in urbanizing Mexico as it impacts the working class. As the urban environment traversed by the bus sprawls outward, and lurches upward, in the form of cookie-cutter housing developments, the spaces its population occupies are ever-diminishing. Its numbers steadily grow, its bus fleet, according to Peredo, gets steadily cut. Against this backdrop, photographs of the hands of passengers reaching directly up to the ceiling of the bus to steady themselves testify to a landscape built for humans but not humanity. Almost everyone seems exhausted.

Cartagena dedicates this work “For my family,” and that italicized clarity means to include everyone pictured in the book. He rode the route for years before he ever began to photograph it. When he did, the photographs came to transmit the sincerity borne of his singular familiarity with the contexts in which they were made — the artist is part of the family, and his images reflect that. His photographs simultaneously revere his subjects and decry the social and political circumstances that surround them: dehumanizing as these morning rituals are, he loves his family for undertaking them anyway, for their resolve to get to wherever it is they are going, day after day.

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Zach Stieneker holds a BA in English and Spanish from Emory University. Following graduation, he spent several months continuing his study of photography in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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