Recent Photobook auction results

For those who enjoy photobooks and have acquired a few of them over the years, one benefit is that they may also increase in value. A potentially nice counterpoint to the argument that you are spending too much for these wonderful books. Ah, yes, a mighty fine investment, indeed!

Thus of potential interest was the recent October Swann Galleries auction of Photographs and Photobooks. So here are a few of the photobook highlights:

MAN RAY. Photographs 1920-1934 Paris.
With a portrait by Picasso.  Texts by André Breton, Paul Eluard, Rrose Sélavy, and Tristan Tzara.  Illustrated with gravures of Man Ray’s photographs, rayographs, and portraits.  4to, spiral-bound photo-pictorial wrappers, rear cover lightly soiled, diagonal crease lower left corner of front wrapper; ex-libris.  Roth 80; Auer 210.
Hartford, Connecticut & New York City: James Thrall Soby & Random House, (1934)
ESTIMATE: $2500/3500 > Sold for $3,840

NEWTON, HELMUT. SUMO.
Edited by June Newton.  Illustrated with over 400 full-page reproductions of Newton’s striking photographs.  Oversize folio, photo-pictorial boards, photo-pictorial dust jacket; with the original custom chrome stand.  First edition, boldly signed by Newton. Taschen, 1999
ESTIMATE: $5000/7500 > sold for $6,480

Camera Work Nos. 13 and 15.  Sold for $6,960
Camera Work #27.  Sold for $$4,560

So something to keep in mind, eh? FYI, the next Swann Galleries Photobook auction is scheduled for Dec. 8, and it will have a much larger number of books available.

Best regards, Douglas Stockdale

Gerhard Steidl inteview – Photography Now

Joerg Coberg, publisher of the blog Conscientious,  is now providing English translations of the original German articles that have been published in the German photography magazine Photography Now.  One of the first translations is an interview of Gerhard Steidl, who is the publisher of the well-known Steidl photobooks, and this delightful interview can be found here.

I found this to be an interesting interview; if you enjoy the photobooks that Steidl publishes, interested in the background on high quality photobooks or an interest in having your photographs published by his publishing house.

Thanks Joerg!

Best regards, Douglas Stockdale

Doug Keyes – Collective Memory

Copyright Doug Keyes 2008 Courtesy DECODE Books

In Doug Keyes photobook, Collective Memory, he utilizes the multiple images of book pages to create complex visual metaphors for memory, and indirectly the duration of time, providing a conceptual product that can only be approximated with photography. An overview of his process is nicely stated in the accompanying essay by Sheryl Conkelton, who writes;

As a photographer, Keyes is also a maker of books, though in a very different way. His photographs of books – art books, works of fiction, popular science paperbacks, works of poetry, textbooks, books on scientific theories – do not describe; instead they are evocative transformations of specific objects. Each photograph shows an open book against a black background; each is sized to echo the actual size of the book being photographed, and Keyes chooses the pages that he thinks will invoke the essence of that particular volume. But semblance ends there and Keyes further elaborates this conceit using multiple exposures so that the book is translated from an object held in the hand to one that vibrates visually, from a utilitarian thing to provocative matter.

Through the use of multiple exposures, Keyes makes the opaque pages of a book transparent, a phenomenon similar to the long exposures by Debra Bloomfield, rendering transparent water opaque, or Chris McCaw, Mark Klett and Michael Lundgren creating a sky with multiple and streaking suns, moons and stars. We can now visualize the difficult and somewhat unfathomable effects of extended time. The duration of time also indirectly speaks to the current moment of visualizing an event now, such as you are reading these WORDS and what becomes of that memory of what you just read?

The mind can store a tremendous amount of information, but usually as discreet visual images. Looking at a series of Watertower photographs by Bernd & Hilla Beacher we may recall the design, texture and mass of an individual Watertower, but not a composite of those images into an overall collective fusion, similar to Keyes’s image below. Paging through the Beacher Watertower book may create a cognitive blurring of the repetitive details, but the finite memory is unlike any that Keyes constructs, thus a new conceptual “reality” and product.

The fascination with memories can be traced to the artistic lineage of investigating the hidden consciousness; turn of the 20^th century ideas by Freud and the Dada-ist, subsequently the allegorical Surrealist abstractions and Man Ray, Somnambulist inquires of dreams and dream-walking by Duane Michals, Ralph Gibson and Jerry Uelsmann and Deja-vu, the openness to past lives and altered existences, also by Ralph Gibson. Regretfully, the homage to memories is seemingly becoming a cliché, as many current contemporary photographers allude to the investigation of memories in their conceptual projects, with the concept becoming redundant.

Delightfully though, Keyes provocative images seem to transcend beyond the common memory allegories and engage in a discourse about inner thoughts and dreams. His  photographs provide an interesting spectrum, capturing a faint trace of a book’s content to providing a heavy intricate canopy of multicolored mass and textures, not unlike the Abstract Expressionist painting.

The photographs of the Chuck Close book, below, hints of the act of stereotyping, the blurring of physical attributes to generalize personal characteristics, such as a nationality, into a bland non-specific grouping, e.g. “I can’t distinguish one Irishman from another, and they all look alike to me”. But the resulting blurring of the Close images does not represent a “typical blueprint” of anyone in particular, an essential element of the stereotyping process. The features are not well defined, we can not extract the sullen red hair, round soft face, sagging jowls, a sea of freckles, deep creases extending across the forehead, or sunken eye sockets. Thus Keyes layered photograph of Close’s book does not generalize a specific person or group of individuals. The blurring of the features does allude to the loss of specifics over time, which sharp features seem to become soft and faded as our memory betrays us.

Keyes is asking what is remembered, retained and able to be recalled as each pages passes, how dim does the proceeding page become with focus on the current page? How does the memory of the images begin to fade, what details remain sharp, while others are enveloped in a cloud of fog? These images are linked to memory of past events, persons, things seen, felt, experienced but quickly becoming layered, replaced with new images, feelings and experiences; the memories becoming stacked, blurred, and slowly softened

The human capacity to remember clearly defined events, and how the event stack and become layered, will slowly diffuse the fact from the soft memory of what might have been. Not unlike the childhood memories of grandmother’s huge and palatial house and returning later as an adult and realizing how diminutive the house really was. As humans, our inexact memories provide but a distant approximation to reality. If you think not, recall a book you read at least a month ago and see if you can correctly recall all the content that was on page 14 or page 86 or the second to the last page.

As an object, the content within these photographs take on a soft patina, with indistinct edges, fuzzy lines, soft spaces, shapes and mass not well defined. Two dimensional space is difficult to read other than the subject is itself is a book, but with ambiguous content. Keyes allows a particular layer to illuminate though, providing a hint as to what the book itself may be about, but allowing conjecture as to the reason for the book and what the photograph may mean.

By Douglas Stockdale

Bill Jacobson – A Series of Human Decisions

Copyright Bill Jacobson 2009 courtesy DECODE Books

The title of Bill Jacobson’s recent book, A Series of Human Decisions, has an interesting double meaning. Jacobson is photographing those things that can represent the artifacts of decisions we as human’s make, and the process of photographing reflects the decisions that Jacobson is making, thus hinting at an autobiographic body of work.

I am not familiar with Jacobson’s earlier work, but it is neatly described in the interview between Jacobson and Ian Berry, with some examples in the afterward. Suffice to say, Jacobson has been earlier exploring the concept of memories by creating out of focus images for about fifteen years until 2002. This current book is composed of sharply focused images, all in a square format, although Jacobson states that he is using a 4x 5” view camera, we can deduce that there is some cropping involved in his creative process. So this leads to one of Jacobson’s decisions, why the square pictorial format when in his interview, he states that he is drawn to rectangular shapes?

Jacobson’s credence in his interview can probably be seriously questioned as he states that he had to re-learn to photograph in sharp focus, meanwhile he states that his day job of photographing art work for museums and galleries requires him to do just that; create sharply focused photographs. Sheeeese. I hope that he was not referring to the mechanics of photography, because that appears to me as to what he is talking about.

Befitting his book title, the subject of his photographs are those things that are man-made, but without the presence of man within them. This has more of the feeling of a Candida Hofer than a Bernd and Hiller Becher body of photographs, about the work of mankind, but without the direct presence of mankind. Jacobson investigates a wide range of manmade objects, furniture, office and home interiors, material patterns and remnants, that reflect many layers of decisions that have occurred over time. Most of his compositions are at close quarters and usually tightly framed, with objects and lines flowing out the pictorial edges.

The book has an odd cadence, with the paired images occasionally working off each other and the content reinforcing an underlying emotional feeling, and other times creating a non-harmonious tension. When this pairing works, such as the window and the painted over wall, below, the rectangular shapes and color scheme play off each other well. Deconstructing this pair of photographs, questions arise about each decision that had been made, such as why the color and texture of the building, paint, wood trim, concrete, and for each and every nuance. You might understand how a rectangular window could architecturally occur, but when painting over a wall, why use rectangular patterns?

Overall, I found that this book has a disconcerting unevenness to it. Perhaps as though Jacobson was trying too hard to make his concept work, which on occasion I feel it does work, but not consistently. There are some great images that invite a multitude of questions as to what was the thinking when the underlying decisions were made to create the resulting objects and situations. There are other photographs of subjects that the theme appears to be forced and have no harmony with the remaining body of work. These photographs, although capturing the work of mankind, are also the decisions of the photographer who isolates these subjects out of their external context.

The book is beautifully printed, with a binding that allows it to lay flat while open, making it a delight to page through and read. There is also a list of plates, but do not expect any additional contextual information about the photographs.

By Douglas Stockdale

Verso Limited Editions : Book Publisher of the Year

Bruce Davidson: Central Park in Platinum

Verso Limited Editions, an imprint of Santa Barbara-based  Serbin Communications, Inc. has been awarded the prestigious 2009 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the year for their publication of Bruce Davidson: Central Park in Platinum, which I had earlier reviewed here.

From the press release: Renowned portrait photographer Joyce Tenneson presented the award to Glen Serbin, President of Verso Limited Editions on October 19th at the 7th Annual Lucie Awards, a gala black-tie ceremony held at New York’s Lincoln Center. Ms. Tenneson, the author of 13 photography books herself, introduced the nominees with a moving statement about the impact that books have on all of us.

The worldwide photography community pays tribute to the year’s most outstanding photographic achievements at the annual Lucie Awards ceremony. This year, 1100 people attended the event from 25 countries around the globe. The Lucies recognize men and women whose life’s work in photography merits the highest acclaim by their peers.

Other 2009 Lucie awards were presented in categories ranging from Lifetime Achievement to Ara Guler, for Achievement in Fashion to Jean-Paul Goude, Photojournalism to Gilles Peres, Portraiture to Mark Seliger, Sports to Marvin Newman, Documentary to Reza and Humanitarian to Fazal Sheikh. Achievements in support categories from fashion to advertising included Harper’s Bazaar for Fashion Layout of the Year and Steve Fine, Director of Photography for Sports Illustrated for Picture Editor of the Year. Nadav Kander won the 2009 IPA competition for International Photographer of the Year.

Congradualtions to them all!

By Douglas Stockdale

Gunnar Smoliansky – One Picture at a Time

Photographs copyright Gunnar Smoliansky 2008 courtesy Steidl

The 55 year photographic oeuvre of Gunnar Smoliansky captured in One Picture at a Time, illustrates how this famous Swedish native continues to mine his local cultural landscape, constantly revealing the subtle nuances that have taken him a lifetime to discover. He has not veered far from his Scandinavian borders to create a broad and rich body of work.

It is apparent that Smoliansky was captivated by the human element early on, whether it was his family or those moving about him at both work and play. In an early self-portrait created in 1952, we can detect other elements that would eventually become a part of his style, the inclusion of geometric architectural elements, bordering on abstraction.

Although Smoliansky did not general work on photographic projects per se, it is evident in retrospect that there are a number of themes that wind their way through his work in addition to his early street photography. Thematically he was attracted to the middle ground landscape, both urban and natural, family, the nude studies of his girlfriend/wife, portraits, self-portraits and later in his career, more emphasis on abstract architectural and environmental studies.

In Marie Lundquist’s essay, she notes that Smoliansky in his later years started to turn his attention away from photographing the people directly, but indirectly by photographing the tracks that they behind. Badger probably states this best, “The removal of the direct presence of people from his pictures has not resulted in a removal of humanity from them, nor of the things that concern people.”

We rarely see a grand sweeping landscape photograph, as his photograph of the snowy car overpass revealing the car tack patterns, seen below, is about the maximum vista you will find. Smoliansky appears to be interested in the details, to explore the various textures and as such, he stays close to his subject.

It is also apparent that he has a worldly view, as he pays homage to various photographers while assimilating their concepts into to his own style.  It is possible to relate to a Penn’s gutter photograph, a Friedlander’s long tree shadow looming into the foreground or a house cloaked by a transparent wall of tree limbs, a Siskind’s abstraction extracted from a painted wall or Stieglitz’s fontal nude of his then girlfriends breasts.

Case in point, the fore mentioned winter landscape below, resembling one of Siskind’s Chicago winter landscapes, includes a lone person striding through the lower edge of the pictorial space, providing a poetic and humanistic touch to what otherwise be a cold and abstract patterned landscape.

In an informative essay by Gerry Badger, he provides an external context to Smoliansky’s photographic style as a Northern European photographic way of seeing;

…predicates a particular photographic strategy, indicating photographs taken on a walk, that is, photographs articulating an everyday experience in which we have all participated, an experience fundamental to our well-being, where we not only take exercise, but spiritually refresh ourselves. And taking photographs whilst walking is essentially a reactive rather that a proactive process. As might be expected, given the period when he began to photograph and upon the evidence of his practice, Smoliansky is a phenomenological rather than a conceptual photographer, photographing spontaneously, as his mood and sensibilities strike him, rather than  than predetermining his picture in the contemporary, postmodern fashion. In a crucial sense, Smoliansky is not making art but responding to life. He is a photographer-flaneur, his lucid and eloquent voice deriving from an almost forensic attention to place, light and time.

One of my issues, although a small nitpick, is that the book’s photograpahs are not sequenced in linear time, thus difficult to visualize and comprehend Smoliansky’s artistic progression. The work from the same period is spread thought out the book, you need to piece it together to grasp how his photographic work evolved. The book is not separated thematic either, mixing time and themes. The parings of the photographs on facing sides of the spread do not readily seem to be synergistic; they are not playing off or complementing each. Perhaps this layout design is intended to create a discontent chord, an uneasy edge to keep you stimulated, involved and to keep you looking.

Predominantly his photographic images are all clearly seen, sharp black and white images with long tonal scale befitting a photographer who cherishes the wet darkroom and the classical esthetics of the printed image.

The essays by Marie Lundquist and Gerry Badger add a nice dimension to this monograph, which includes 230 tritone plates, is nicely printed with a cloth bound hard cover with dust jacket.

by Douglas Stockdale

   

 

  

 

Source magazine: more blurring of magazines and photobooks

I recently acquired the Summer 2009 issue of Source Magazine, a beautiful magazine which is not widely distributed within the United States, as I had to obtain my copy directly from Dublin, Ireland, where it is published.  I had received it shortly after obtaining a copy of Volume 2 of The Aftermath Project.

 From a physical standpoint, it was interesting to compare the stiff cover book of the Aftermath Project with the stiff cover magazine. Dimensionally they are approximately the same size, similar in heft and hand and perhaps similar in page count. It is a little difficult to really compare the quality of the printing as I have temporarily misplaced my 10x loop during the studio re-modeling project, but they look comparable, probably both printed offset. The binding of Source is sewn but not glued, thus it has the capacity to really lay flat on top of my desk, while The Aftermath Vol2 has been glued and does not have the same capacity to lay flat, e.g. it has a memory and wants to close itself.

The paper stock is considerable different, although the paper stock is similar in weight and dense opacity (yeah, you can not see through each page, so no image ghosting), the Aftermath Vol2 is matte stock and the image has been lightly varnished, while Source is printed on a near luster. The paper stock and image varnishing making for one of the biggest differences after the binding in terms of each’s aesthetics.

I will discuss the details of The Aftermath Vol2 in a future post, but suffice to say, there really is a blurring of the higher end magazines like Source as compared to these recent stiff cover books. And the quality of this “magazine”, much like LensWork and a few other magazine,  is actually superior to some of the softcover/perfect binding print on demand “books” that I have reviewed.

I suspect that sometime in the near future, it will be very hard to tell these two apart, which I think in the long-term, benefits us all.

Best regards, Doug

Sandra Lousada – Public Faces Private Places

Copyright Sandra Lousada 2009 courtesy Frances Lincoln Limited

While reading Sandra Lousada’s retrospecitive monograph, Public Faces Private Places, I am impressed with the intimate and sensitive portraits that she has been capturing for the last fifty years. Her subjects are predominately the public figures of the United Kingdom, both in their roles as actors and private personas that occur during the day-to-day behind the scenes.

Her portraits are mostly obtained while on commercial assignment for a large assortment of magazines, eventually including those published in the United States. While we may recognize her subject’s public persona, we may not have been able to identify the photographer behind the lens. Lousada has created a body of professional portraits that attempt to reveal her subject, and now this collection of photographs allow her own professional personality to quietly become a little more visible.

Perhaps Lousada’s ability to understand the private places of those who have public faces can be traced to her public family. Her grandfather was a MP (Oxford University) and author, Sir Alan Patrick (A.P.) Herbert, her “mum”, Jocelyn Herbert, a leading British theatre designer and her mum’s boyfriend was Gorge Devine, director of the English Stage Company. For her, Laurence Olivier just might be known as Larry.

Her start in commercial photography, especially for a woman in the late 1950’s, was more daunting that it is today. To begin as a studio assistant meant hauling enormous amounts of view camera equipment, lighting and associated gear required for commercial assignments, the domain of male assistant’s. To try to capture an assignment meant enduring the gender bias of the time, such as a straight forward rebuff she remembers from Vogue, “Only men do Beauty. Women can’t”.

Lousada was unknowingly in the middle of a big transition within the fashion industry, and the related fashion magazines. She was working during the pre-computer, instant on-monitor assessment & immediate feedback days. Perhaps it was an understanding by the series of editors that she worked with that created an editorial following, such as Willie Landels quote; “Sandra looked in her own way, with tenderness and kindness and understanding” and Felecity Clark, beauty editor while at Vogue; “We liked the soft quality of her results”.

Lousada states that she aimed to elicit as much of the real person in her photographs as possible, even on fashion and advertising shoots, creating circumstances whenever she can where the sitter or the models feels relaxed enough to move and gesture in a way that is true to themselves and habitual, and where they can almost forget that they are being watched.

In the informative Essay by Cathy Courtney, she states;

When she [Lousada] set out with her camera, it wasn’t with the aim of becoming famous. Her focus has always been on fulfilling the brief and on working as part of a team to deliver what was needed rather than on creating a professional persona whose identity was stamped on her photographs at the expense of their subject matter or the client’s requiremets. This restraint of ego has been an asset, allowing her style to develop almost subconsciously so that, as this book shows, her identity emerged through the body of her work rather than by calculated imposition. It may also have been something of a disadvantage, as the coherence and value of her output has not, until now, been properly celebrated.

Her photographs usually have a wide tonal range and she allows her subject to fall out of the frame, providing a candid and casual appearance. It is though she is an invisible observer, allowing her subjects to do what is they do with a minimum of interference. For her subjects to just be themselves, perhaps permitting their inner persona and personal habits to become more visible and be revealed.

She show us her ability to enter into a theater scene and capture the actors doing what they do best, be the character and off-stage, to allow them the space to return to normalcy. For Laurence (Larry) Olivier, to comfortably be seated and reading the newspaper while his two children look on, his daughter with rapt attention with her hair shimmering in the light. These were the days that you might still be formally dressed and relaxing at home, as I also note that his son is wearing a tie. I would guess that Olivier was probably reading the paper to them as he paged through it.

When dealing with her thematic projects, such as Hands, she has the ability capture the essence of her subject, such as the muscular and dusted hands of Sally Clarke, and create a sense of both power and sensuality. The lighting and shading create wonderful forms and lines in this study, which moves your eyes down to Clarke’s right hand manipulating the raw dough.

This book has thematic sections; Fashion, Babies, Hands, Actors, Couples, Writers, Artists, Architects, Musicians, Designers, Directors, Dancers, with a strong bent to theater performances. The majority of her portraits are in black & white, a preferred medium for her, with the fashion photographs and a few of the others in color.

Lousada is not known as well for creating iconic portraits, but has created a nice and refreshing body of work that does celebrate her subjects and not at the expense of her own individual fame. And she appears to be very comfortable with it.

By Douglas Stockdale

Bill Westheimer – Momento

Copyright Bill Westheimer 2009

An emotional trigger is when one experiences an event or in the presence of an object, there is an immediate recall of memories of past events and related emotions. Triggers can be diverse, such as a whiff of a particular perfume may recall visits with a favorite Aunt or perhaps the first dance with a future spouse. The trigger may also recall a traumatic event or a last conversation, and for some, the intensity of the memories may even allow someone to recall the touch, smell and background noises. I swear that when I think of my grandparent’s home in Western Pennsylvania, I can smell the faint scent of coal dust that seems to linger in that region.

Bill Westheimer’s book Momento strives to capture the collected memories associated with an object, in particular cameras, that have been kept as mementos. He couples a specific camera with the story of an associated memory. An undercurrent to this book is the reason why we keep mementos, for the associated memories that we hope to hold and treasure.

For many, the camera is the equipment that we might actual use to create specific memories, the photographic documentation of a person or a place. I do not think that many think of the camera as an memento object to be treasured, save one, the photographer behind the camera. Nevertheless, almost any object can carry with it a memory for its save-keeper. And sometimes those objects and related memories are passed along, with the memories perhaps becoming stronger, perhaps weaker and many times changing specificily with whom it now resides.

Like a lot of momentos, these cameras have been difficult to give up, trade in, sell or give away, as the strong pull of the associated memories appear to be too strong. As an example, Bill shares his personal memories that his collection of camera is associated with memories of his father and grandfather, as well as of events related to his decision to persue photography and his subsequent photographic projects.

The camera may be a keepsake from a favorite relative, perhaps from one that they had not know well, but they may use this momento to dream about where it might have been, what it might have seen, and to know that it was in a special persons hands. For some photographers, these camera momento’s are links to a past experience, such as although they may now be full digital, the film camera brings back the smell of film developer and fixer of darkroom days long past.

I have enjoyed these stories and find myself recalling past memories with my own closet  respository of cameras which sometimes haunt me with their close presence, but no longer in active use. I have my own Nikkormat, Canon FT, Palorid SX-70, Instamatic and twin lens reflex (620 format) cameras stories that silently whispered to me as I paged through this book. And more recently the stories of why my Minolta one degree spot meter is totally unusable, with the prism permanently dislodged and out of alignment from the last time I inadvertently dropped it, and my other film cameras which sit silently on the shelf.  Similar to Jay Maisel’s story about his iPan CrazyCam, that although he has not used this film camera for the last seven years, that “like everything in my life, it’s on my list”.

The accompanying camera photographs were created by Bill using a collodion wet plate (black and white) negatives with an 8 x 10 view camera. A process that pre-dates most of the cameras photographed, that leaves a somewhat trademark of mottling within the image and the wet plate holder shadows framing the image. This provides an interesting contrast of the old process documenting the relatively new camera equipment. The cameras as a still life object has not become a cliche like a vase of lilies, sea shells or perhaps a pepper.

One issue that I have with this book is that what appears to be an attempt to create a larger variety of shapes to avoid a static sameness, some of the photographs are displayed inverted on the page. The placement of the inverted shadows creates an unsatisfactory tension in relation to the memories being shared. Similarly, how the object fills or is truncated by the framing of the pictorial edges, also increases the feeling of tension. It is though the photographic images and the layout design were completed independent of the book’s intent, which I feel to be the warm and fond memories that are related to an object and to be ”comfort food” for photographers. The depiction of the object does not feel related to the object’s own story.

I did enjoy the shared stories and how the many of the photographs triggered my own memories while I was paging through this stiffcover book. Also to note that this book has a glued in spine typically of a print on demand perfect bound book, and the printing does take full advantage of a full black & white tonal scale.

 

Best regards, Douglas Stockdale

Frankfurt Book Fair – Oct 14-18

Just a quick note that the Frankfurt Book Fair will be starting in a couple of weeks, which runs from October 14th – 18th, in Frankfurt Germany.

This year, China is the guest of honor, and more information can be found here. There is a Hall dedicated for photography, Hall 4 which I know some publishers who specialize in photobooks will have their booths.

I have recently received a swarm of press releases from various publishers, so it appears that there will be plenty of photobooks to evaluate.

Regrefully, I will not be heading back to Europe until later this Fall, so I will not be able to attend. Bummer!

Best regards, Douglas Stockdale