Category: Book

Guillaume Simoneau

Experimental Lake

MACK

In itself, even the most detailed photograph, decontextualised as it always is from its physical and temporal surroundings, carries minimal meaning. But in a book, photographs accrue additional connotations via their mutual relationships, lending each other context, which, individually, they intrinsically lack. However, where the associations between the pictures are loose, there is a danger of incoherence. At worst, and most often, this approach results in a non-committal, confusing or even annoying photobook. At best, but more rarely, it can produce a fascinating, enigmatic work of art.

Fortunately, Guillaume Simoneau’s Experimental Lake tends towards the latter category. Made in a pristine region of north-west Ontario, in and around a world-class research facility exploring human impact on the natural environment, his elliptical, mainly colour photographs seldom vex and mostly intrigue. It certainly helps that Simoneau has a strong command of colour and a sophisticated eye for visual correspondence. A recurrent tangle motif runs right through the book, from the front cover to the very last photograph: a wire model, sewing, grass on water, a screen saver… they all suggest that everything is interconnected, and perhaps validate the need for the research Simoneau documents.

But there isn’t a clearly discernible position taken by the photographer, or even a dominant mood. In typically postmodern fashion, any overall meaning isn’t made obvious by the artist, and must be ascribed by the viewer. Is this research important, or inconsequential in the face of human activity and its effects on the planet? Will these scientists’ work have an impact, or are they just messing about in boats, fiddling while Rome burns?

The latter is suggested by the book’s afterword, a tiny found photograph tipped into the back cover: three youthful carefree figures crowd in a little boat on the water, while on the shoreline beyond, the forest is ablaze.

But perhaps we should not be so swift to judge. This image is not unlike Thomas Hoepker’s controversial 9/11 photograph, in which young people seem to be lounging indifferently across the water from a smoke-spewing Manhattan. As the widespread and heated discussion of Hoepker’s picture has demonstrated, photographs are at least as mendacious as they are meaningless, and we should draw conclusions with care. ♦

—Simon Bowcock

Images courtesy of MACK. © Guillaume Simoneau

Monica Alcazar-Duarte

The New Colonists

Bemojake and The Photographers’ Gallery

The down-to-earth, all American surburban town of Mars, Pennsylvania, USA serves as the backdrop to Monica Alcazar-Duarte’s The New Colonists, … From here she builds out a narrative using additional sequences of images that chronicle how scientists are currently gathering data and doing extensive research in order to prepare ourselves for life on the red planet.

As Dr Marek Kukula explains in his accompanying essay, the idea of Mars as a future territory for mankind has preoccupied our view of space ever since the 18th century. Triggered by our communal imagination and stimulated by technological innovation, we have managed to obtain compelling visual approximations and records. Indeed, as Kukula writes, ‘photography has played a key role in our exploration of Mars, transforming [it] into a real place that we might one day hope to visit or even go to live.’ In return, our species has long assumed that the gaze was to be returned; convinced that Martians were studying planet Earth and its creatures too.

Alcazar-Duarte’s straightforward yet atmospheric documentary images of everyday life in Mars have a certain alienating quality. The complimentary segments focusing on the scientific preparations for life on Mars, the planet, meanwhile hint at the ongoing, human need for disclosure of unknown terrain. Both these elements – our preoccupation with an extra-planetary expedition and the imagined extraterrestrial observation of us – are smartly interwoven in this publication, beautifully designed by Ramon Pez.

Clearly, photography as a fact-bearing medium is being ushered towards more undetermined uses within its cultural production today and a keen selection of creative people are finding alternative routes to arrive at new forms of reportage on current affairs. Alcazar-Duarte is one such artist working in this still erratic enclave, a sanctuary for avant-garde documentary photography often exploring fantastical subjects, slowly but surely finding recognition within the international art world with a forthcoming exhibition at the prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles, France this summer. ♦

– Erik Vroons

All images courtesy of the artist and Bemojake. © Monica Alcazar-Duarte

John Myers

The Portraits

RRB Photobooks

Over the course of the medium’s history, many extremely talented photographers’ pursuits have somehow managed to fly under the radar. For every success story, there are countless who, for various reasons known or unknown, are grossly overlooked or underrated. Occasionally a few of those talents resurface, often decades later, for a brief moment of attention. A recent book from RRB Photobooks on the portrait work of British photographer John Myers is one of these rediscovered bodies of work well worth its moment.

Myers’ images arrest us in part because they describe the vibrant 70s in all their kitsch and glory, but for the more patient viewer, those historical markers are simply an entry point leading to the persons photographed. What is remarkable is how often Myers was able to infuse the best of his portraits with a sense of empathetic human-kindness informed by the subtlest of clues, in a similar manner to August Sander or a contemporary like Judith Joy Ross. Myers, within just a year of picking up a camera, becomes adept at the weighty transaction between sitter and photographer to make pictures that speak to both the individual and universal qualities in people. These portraits provide for us meaningful emotional links to strangers in the space of a photograph that transcend distance and time and certainly Donny Osmond posters or antique furnishings. In the best, those set pieces are mere opening acts. Instead we can’t help but to study the faces and postures of Myers’ sitters and see sometimes they can link to something almost primal inside of us – like a fallen child looking to its mother’s expression to know whether to laugh or cry.

A young bricklayer standing in a doorway poses with a smudged face but seems more conscious of his dirty hands; a girl (Louise, 1975) sitting with tucked knee on a two-step ladder, while summoning patience for the camera her slack face seems to be looking past “us” and seeing perhaps how ordinary her life might be; a ballerina (1973) stands before us in black leotard and white knee socks, the projection of confidence coming straight through a tightened jaw and ever so slightly raised chin; a couple (Charles and Pamela, 1973) sit in what looks to be a coatroom – he feels composed of equal amounts of strength and sadness, stooped almost as if he knew straightening his back would put the top of his head out of the frame. He seems to harbour a secret he can’t speak out loud. She sits with an exuberant look smiling widely, eyes bright but seemingly seeing nothing (is she literally blind?), their hands clasped at the centre of an emotional divide. If the photographer wishes us to cry, he has enabled a moment for us to do so.

In a book of 93 photographs, not all are going to strike these qualities but a surprising number do. If one were to find fault with this book it would be with the edit and perhaps a quarter of the images could have been left behind to leave breathing space for the brilliance of the others. With more volumes of Myers work planned, a larger scope of his efforts will enable further exploration and, if as remarkable as demonstrated with this book, will perhaps finally solidify the inclusion of John Myers within the wider conversation of photography. ♦

—Jeffrey Ladd

All images courtesy of the artist and RRB Photobooks. © John Myers

1000 Words

10 Year anniversary print edition

(Sold out)

*The 10 year anniversary edition of 1000 Words is now sold out*

£25

Book launch/event
Saturday 24 November 2018
Flowers Gallery, London
Details here

Since 2008 we’ve commissioned and published more than 1000 exhibition and photo book reviews, essays and interviews. Contributors include an extensive network of over 90 critics and writers such as David Campany, Susan Bright, Urs Stahel and Charlotte Cotton; as well as respected artists Wolfgang Tillmans, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Vanessa Winship and Taryn Simon.

We’ve grown our audience to readers in over 120 countries and attracted approximately 140,000 unique visitors to the site every month. We have made more than 55,000 Twitter, Instagram and Facebook friends, and we’ve seen nearly 20,000 followers sign up to our newsletter.

We’ve organised exhibitions and workshops, offered awards, and conducted countless talks and portfolio reviews. In 2014 and 2016 we were nominated for a prestigious Lucie Award in the ‘Photography Magazine of the Year’ category.

Now we are launching our first print magazine.

2018 marks the 10th anniversary of 1000 Words, and what better way to celebrate than to publish a special print annual?

Designed by Sarah Boris, and printed at Musumeci S.p.A, Italy, the publication takes the form of a beautiful 200-page bookish magazine featuring a host of newly-commissioned content. At its core lies the high-quality reproductions of 10 portfolios from artists who, we believe, have built significant bodies of work and emerged as increasingly influential practitioners in the past decade. Those individuals include José Pedro Cortes, Laia Abril, Edmund Clark, Esther Teichmann and Zanele Muholi to name but a few.

Other highlights include a series of highly-anticipated city guides. From New York to Milan, London to Shanghai, we focus on some of the most engaging gallery spaces showing photography today. The magazine also contains long-read profiles on curators, opinion pieces on the representation of women photographers at leading photo festivals, reflections on British developments in critical race thinking, as well as insights into a decade’s changes in photography among other features. Finally, we delve into our archives and present a selection of memorable and talked-about articles from the 1000 Words back catalogue.

The production of the 10 year anniversary print edition of 1000 Words has been made possible thanks to 572 backers of a Kickstarter campaign.

Special thanks to Gerry Badger, Norman Clark, Frédérique Destribats, David Solo and Duncan Wooldridge for their generous support.

1000 Words Photography Ltd is registered in the UK as a private company no. 6957640.

ISSN 2631-486X

Table of Contents

Features

9  Editorial
• Tim Clark

10  Photography in Flux
• Lucy Soutter

16 Rewind, Repeat, Repeat with Stuart Hall
• Yasmin Gunaratnam

18 Les Rencontres d’Arles 2018
• Caroline Molloy

20 Multitude of Counterviews
• Taco Hidde Bakker

22 Trapping Time
• Tim Clark and David Campany in conversation

Portfolios

32 Max Pinckers Margins of Excess
• Lisa Stein

42 Laia Abril On Abortion
• Sara Knelman

52 José Pedro Cortes Planta Espelho/Mirror Plant
• Francesco Zanot

62 Daniel Shea 43–35 10th Street
• Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

74 Edmund Clark My Shadow’s Reflection
• Max Houghton

84 Esther Teichmann On Sleeping and Drowning
• Daniel C Blight

94 Zanele Muholi Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
• Renée Mussai

104 Yusuf Sevinçli Oculus
• Natasha Christia

114 Paul Mpagi Sepuya Mirror Studies
• Duncan Wooldridge

124 Carmen Winant My Birth
• Susan Bright

City Guides

136 San Francisco
• Roula Seikaly

137 New York
• Jon Feinstein

138 London
• Gemma Padley

139 Paris
• Laurence Cornet

140 Brussels
• Stefan Vanthuyne

141 Amsterdam
• Erik Vroons

142 Berlin
• Julia Schiller

143 Milan
• Ilaria Speri

144 Shanghai
• Yining He

145 Tokyo
• Ihiro Hayami

Archives

148 Richard Mosse Incoming
• Duncan Wooldridge

152 Dominic Hawgood Under the Influence
• Lucy Soutter

154 Edgar Martins Siloquies and Sililoquies
on Death, Life and Other Interludes
• Daniel C. Blight

156 Arpita Shah Nalini
• Emilia Terracciano

158 Christian Patterson Bottom of the Lake
• Lisa Sutcliffe

160 Alexandra Lethbridge Other Ways of Knowing
• Lisa Stein

162 Matthew Connors Fire in Cairo
• Max Houghton

164 Peter J. Cohen Snapshots of Dangerous Women
• Susan Bright

166 Matt Lipps Library
• Chris Littlewood

168 Sara Davidmann Ken. To be destroyed
• Greg Hobson

170 Valeria Cherchi Some of you killed Luisa
• Emma Lewis

172 Salvatore Vitale How To Secure A Country
• Max Houghton

174 Leigh Ledare Double Bind
• Simon Baker

176 T.J Prouchel ADAM
• Sara Knelman

178 Francesca Catastani The Modern Spirit is Vivisective
• Gerry Badger

180 Lisa Barnard The Canary & The Hammer
• Lisa Stein

182 Matthew Finn Mother
• Elizabeth Edwards

184 Peter Fraser Mathematics
• Jeremy Millar

186 Eva O’Leary Concealer
• Urs Stahel

188 Bryan Schutmaat Good Goddamn
• Gerry Badger

190 Federico Ciamei Travel Without Moving
• Duncan Wooldridge

192 Vittorio Mortarotti The First Day of Good Weather
• Natasha Christa

194 Luke Willis Thompson Autoportrait
• Duncan Wooldridge

196 Laura El-Tantawy In The Shadow of the Pyramids
• Gerry Badger

198 Mimi Mollica Terra Nostra
• Gerry Badger

Distribution:

1000 Words is distributed by Public Knowledge Books through a wide selection of bookshops and specialist retailers across the UK and Europe. If you would like to know more about stocking 1000 Words in your store, or if you cannot find it in your country, please contact: info@1000wordsmag.com.

Advertising:

To advertise in 1000 Words please contact Matt Roberts:
advertising@1000wordsmag.com
Tel +44 (0)20 8985 5778 / +44 (0)7805 022950

Press:

Guardian
British Journal of Photography
Self Publish, Be Happy
Creative Review
Humble Arts Foundation
Redeye

Lorenzo Vitturi

Money Must Be Made

Self Publish, Be Happy Editions

Taking its title from the front of a T-Shirt, spotted by Vitturi in the Balogun Market, Money Must Be Made is in fact it a Lagos motto. The phrase aptly sums up the content of the book, an exploration of the delicate balance between commerce, commodities, people and urban space.

Centered in and around the Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, one of the largest street markets in West Africa, Money Must Be Made is at first glance similar in style to Lorenzo Vitturi’s earlier work Dalston Anatomy in the way that he transforms everyday items of little value into unique, sculptural forms. Here, in an attempt to capture the essence of the sprawling market, Vitturi uses several different approaches, layering and sequencing them side by side to create a surreal narrative. We see documentary images of the market, collaborative portraits with street vendors taken in a make shift studio and still life compositions constructed by Vitturi into sculptural forms. All interwoven through the treatment of collage, which, used here, is as much about the absence and the removal of content as it is about presence and accumulation.

However, the intrigue of this book lies in the contrast both physically and metaphorically between the two rival characters, the market and the Financial Trust House. The mostly abandoned eighteen story monolithic brutalist structure disrupts the sequence and demands to be the main protagonist, offering a central vantage point in which the surrounding market spirals outwards. Occupying the centre of the book the dull, almost monochrome approach to documenting the building perhaps reflects the mundane nature of corporate business as something formal and structured. This removal of colour, or rather the distraction of colour is a technique also used by Nigerian photographer Logo Oluwamuyiwa who photographs Lagos in monochrome in order to ask ‘what will I find’ if I strip Lagos of colour and noise? Vitturi, by resisting the temptation to rely of colour alone, presents a different side of the city, highlighting the contrast between the two overlapping worlds, the official and unofficial, local and global. The tower, with its high vantage point, offers a view down onto the market, a physical distance which again speaks of division and raises questions about class, power and the ownership of public space. Should we feel empathy for the owner of the abandoned tower? Or do we celebrate the masses for occupying the streets? ♦

–Shoair Mavlian

Images courtesy of the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy. © Lorenzo Vitturi

Amani Willett

The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer

Overlapse

In the 1970s, American photographer Amani Willett’s father purchased several acres of New Hampshire forest that a local hermit named Joseph Plummer had disappeared into in the late 1700s, and lived in for 69 years. The two of them, Willett and his father, have rambled those landscapes together ever since, finding traces of Plummer’s legend still lurking there. ‘Getting lost’, Willett tells us simply at the end of his new photobook with Overlapse, The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer, ‘seems to be the point’.

But first to the very beginning. The flurry of images that open the book are of a figure, blurred and hazy, retreating from the camera as they make their way through heavy snow. They are starkly reminiscent of Ori Gersht’s representation of the philosopher Walter Benjamin in his 2009 video, Evaders, in which a figure, playing the part of Benjamin, trudges slowly and purposefully through dark, snowy forest. In the cultural historian Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost she writes of Benjamin, ‘In Benjamin’s terms….one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography’. Willett, who gets just lost enough to learn new things about the landscape each time, but never lost enough not to return, seems struck by this man who went all the way, and never left himself a trail back homewards.

‘Joseph Plummer is remembered because he wished to be alone’, Willett says. What would it do to a person, psychologically, to spend the best part of seven decades on their own in the wilderness? How would their body come to know and relate to the land around them? This book is a result of Willett building a relationship with a man he never knew, and years spent mining Plummer’s almost-lost, barely heard voice from objects and archives. Where he hasn’t found that voice, he’s left us searching.

In the same New England area some years after Plummer retreated, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists would rise to prominence, with their beliefs that people are truly at their best when independent and entirely self-reliant – “intuition over empiricism”. The landscapes in this area of the world hold something enigmatic and elegiac for thinkers, and in the Disappearance of Joseph Plummer, Willett has tangibly managed to distil that, feeling his way through a story that has left barely any clues with such sensitivity. The same figure we see at the beginning of the book recurs throughout it: black and white, blurred, face bleached out, sometimes in almost pitch blackness – there’s always something removing it from reality. The whole landscape as Willett offers it to us is achingly full of solitude. Where water is depicted it’s deathly still – as if taken in those last moments of perfect, wild silence just before dawn. The woods are dark and impenetrable, thick and obscuring, like they would swallow a person whole. At other times, signs of life, houses and cabins, filter in slowly, as though seen by someone somnambulating past. Willett layers different types of images into the book, working and reworking them and experimenting with them in an intuitive sort of way, as if making sense of how he can use photography and images to tell stories, while simultaneously working his way through the land his family owns and making sense of that too. In every sense, this is Willett navigating his own, unmapped territories. ♦

–Joanna Cresswell

All images courtesy of the artist and Overlapse. © Amani Willett

Top 10

Photobooks of 2017

Selected by Tim Clark

An annual tribute to the most exceptional photobook releases from 2017 – selected by our Editor in Chief, Tim Clark.

1. Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan
Steidl

Dayanita Singh continues to play her part in freeing the photobook from orthodoxy with Museum Bhavan. This collection of multiple bodies of work, presented as 9 miniature book ‘museums’ offers a joyous experience, where layers of discovery result from folding out the accordion-like strips which Singh welcomes viewers to curate and install as they choose. The images contained within them run the gamut of Singh’s career – from 1981 to the present – cataloguing everything from machines and furniture to more lyrical explorations of womanhood in ‘Little Ladies Museum’, among others. There is a sense of deep materiality in Museum Bhavan, not to mention an appreciation for both paper and the haptic qualities of the book object. A worthy winner of Photobook of the Year at the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Awards 2017.

2. Nicholas Muellner, In Most Tides An Island
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions

Nicholas Muellner also expands the possibilities of what the photobook can be. Deftly fusing image and text, In Most Tides An Island is a poignant exploration of love, desire and loneliness in the digital age. Photographed in the Black Sea regions of Russia, Ukraine and Russian-occupied Crimea, and on the islands of Kronstadt, Russia and Little Corn in Nicaragua, the project has been guided by dual impulses: to bear witness to the real lives, stories and environments of closeted gay men in provincial Russia – longing for connection yet prevented from openly demonstrating their feelings – and the imagined tale of a solitary woman on a Caribbean island. At once travelogue, document, autobiography and fictional construction, In Most Tides An Island resists any straightforward definition. Its parallel stories are structured into 12 chapters, over the course of which the viewer–reader is taken on a dizzying descent into the lonely, unintended consequences of our isolated yet hyper-connected lives.

3. Simon Roberts, Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies From A Small Island
Dewi Lewis Publishing

More conventional in format but relying on utterly captivating landscape photography is Simon Roberts’ Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies From A Small Island. Released in the wake of the nationalist triumph of Brexit, this brilliant new book takes the temperature of the UK, offering insights most necessary into notions of identity and belonging and, specifically, what it means to be British at this significant moment in contemporary history. With his customary elevated perspective and tableaux style, we oversee views of places and the people that populate them to form a survey: not only of spaces used for leisure and cultural activity but also subjects and events that can now be viewed as defining locations in recent times, such as the London 2012 Opening Ceremony or Greenfell Tower. A real socio-political mood piece, the power and urgency of which reminds us why Roberts is regarded as one of the leading UK photographers working today.

4. Henk Wildschut, Ville de Calais
Self-Published

Made in the French harbour city of Calais, Henk Wildschut’s book chronicles the rapid transformation and decline of a makeshift village, where thousands of refugees and migrants were camped in the hope of crossing the channel into the UK – only to be eventually ousted by the authorities in October 2016. Winner of Les Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award 2017, Ville de Calais lifts the lid on the visible mass of shacks and shelters that sprang up to form a temporary city with its own collection of houses, restaurants, churches, mosques and libraries. Designed by Robin Uleman, this is a complex, multi-layered book that begins with studies of informal migrant settlements located in woods and then shifts its focus onto the area referred to in the media as the ‘Calais jungle’. The course of time becomes integral through sequencing of images that index the development of the camp, while its inhabitants are admirably pictured with dignity and a respect for their strength and resourcefulness. Ville de Calais raises the bar for all work on the migrant crises that follows.

5. Laia Abril, On Abortion: And The Repercussions Of Lack Of Access
Dewi Lewis Publishing

True to its title, Laia Abril’s latest book offers a deeply affecting study of the risks and repercussions of women’s access to safe, legal or free abortion – or lack thereof. The product of extensive research, On Abortion brings to light terrible truths by means of portraits, testimonies and ephemera to both document and conceptualise the ongoing erosion of women’s reproductive rights. Provoking debate around issues of ethics and morality, or making – in that hackneyed phrase – the invisible visible, the Barcelona-based photographer once again boldly squares up to certain taboos and stigmas with great compassion and empathy. Designed by Ramon Pez, and published by Dewi Lewis, it’s heartening to see the trio’s commitment to resisting this moment of revised misogyny that we are living through, reminding us that every year some 47,000 women die annually from botched abortions.

6. Sandrine Lopez, Moshé
L’Editeur du Dimanche/The Sunday Editor

A chance encounter with an 89-year-old Rabbi on the streets of Brussels serves as the starting point for Sandrine Lopez’s creative odyssey. Following a few, initial spontaneous portraits of Moshé, the central protagonist who the publication is named after, the French photographer engaged in weekly rituals with her subject over a period of two years. Visiting his house to provide care, enjoy his company and give baths, Lopez formed a touching relationship, and has come away with a striking set of photographs that are at once tender and terrifying. Unremitting in its examination of the fragility and beauty of a human body, Moshé speaks to notions of decay, impermanence, and also, crucially, about the nature of vitality in the face of the black portal beyond. With its suedette cover – complete with an intricate debossing of Moshé’s face – Lopez’s debut book dazzles in sensuality and existential query, providing a noteworthy contribution to this year’s offerings.

7. Edgar Martins, Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes
The Moth House

Produced in collaboration with the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Portugal, Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes is born out of a frustration with photography’s inability to show the nature of death, as opposed to the media’s glorification of the gory and the bizarre. Contemporary depictions tend to focus on spectacle, rather than attempt to create the space to encourage an understanding of its causes, contexts and consequences. Edgar Martins seeks to bring the latter to the fore. Dealing with violent death and, in particular, suicide, the he meditates on the often unforeseeable but always inevitable nature of mortality. He investigates its legacies through the depiction of material evidence – from extracts from suicide notes, to press photographs reporting family murders to photographic records of deceased persons’ belongings. A kind of conceptually-driven photography masterfully pairing text and image to explore the contradictions and problems inherent in the depiction on death, while also reflecting on language and semiotics. Martins shows us he is as much an accidental theorist as a photographer.

8. Debi Cornwall, Welcome to Camp America
Radius Books

Following her 12-year career as a wrongful conviction lawyer, Debi Cornwall’s practice as a photographer is informed by experiences of representing innocent DNA exonerees, which she channels into empathetic and, at times, darkly humorous photographs that comment on mechanisms of state control. Welcome to Camp America is a weighty tome that has layers upon layers of images of the spaces and surfaces of the Guantanamo Bay, complemented with classified government documents as well as first hand accounts. It is also studded with studio photographs of absurd merchandise available to buy from the detention centre’s very own Gitmo gift shop, including “I Love Guantanamo Bay” t-shirts for toddlers and high-top Velcro “Maximum Security” shoes. Text excerpts from prisoners and military personnel in both English and Arabic also run throughout the book, rounded off perfectly by searing essays from Moazzam Begg (a British-Pakistani man held in extrajudicial detention by the US government) and Fred Ritchin. A rivetting insight into the Kafkaesque qualities of this infamous facility to attend to the details of the West’s military-industrial complex, post-9/11.

9. Giorgio di Noto, The Iceberg
Edition Patrick Frey

Photobooks don’t come any more obscure than this. In The Iceberg, Giorgio di Noto’s mysterious publication, the Italian artist cleverly explores how the Internet’s deep web has served to facilitate a ‘lawless no-man’s land, only accessible using specific software, where anything goes and nothing is traceable, and where illicit online businesses proliferate.’ It is said that this represents 90% of all net usage, yet whose contents are not indexed by any standard web search engines. As such, The Iceberg features an array of both stock imagery and poor quality photographs appropriated from countless advertisements for drug sales, designed to engage prospective clients’ attention. Curiously, the book comes with a torch fitted with an ultra violet bulb in order to view these original photographs, since they are invisible under normal light conditions. Evoking the practice of drug enforcers looking for traces of narcotics, this is a bold and experimental photobook project that pursues the anonymity and temporary nature of illegal deep web imagery – and celebrates it all the same.

10. Susan Bright, Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography
Aperture Foundation

As food photography histories go, Susan Bright’s is of the highest and most delectable order. The renowned writer and curator has amassed her extensive research into the subject for this sizeable publication with Aperture Foundation. Tracing its development from the advent of the photographic medium to the present day, Feast for the Eyes features work from the likes of William Henry Fox Talbot through to Daniel Gordon and Rinko Kawauchi. Illustrated primarily through examples of still-life and fine art photography Feast for the Eyes also looks at the range of different applications and encounter in which food appears – such as fashion photography and cookbooks – to delve into the political, aspirational, symbolic and national dimensions of the genre. Insightful, immersive and extremely aesthetic, at the very least Feast for the Eyes is a great reminder of the manner in which photography touches every aspect of our lives. ♦

—
Tim Clark is a curator, writer and since 2008, has been Editor in Chief and Director at 1000 Words. 

Laura El-Tantawy

Beyond Here Is Nothing

Self Published

‘The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.’

These lines from the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who following World War II moved from Poland to the United States to escape the Communist regime, come to mind when looking at Beyond Here Is Nothing by Laura El-Tantawy. Having grown up between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United States herself, and having experienced the turmoil during the protests in Cairo in 2011, this book is a deeply-personal contemplation on identity, home and the desire to belong.

Designed by SYB, it is a small and precious object, bearing resemblance to a jewellery box. Consisting of three interwoven volumes opening in three directions, the book presents four images at a time in interchanging juxtapositions. Handling it is like trying to get to the very bottom of it. But to find what? ‘I feel like if I dig my hand deep into my soul, I will find nothing’, El-Tantawy writes in one of the diary-form fragments in the book.

At the same time, leafing through its pages feels very similar to opening windows and indeed a lot of them are also depicted. The images, however, at times mesmerisingly abstract, liquid even, and thriving on stark colours, picture an outside world that is too much to grasp. There is nothing tangible there, nothing to connect with. In a world that is becoming more and more fragmented, the notion of home becomes both elusive and illusive. For many this is an age of dislocation.

Switching between inside and outside, the book becomes a riff on the windows and mirrors concept by John Szarkowski, who stated that the photograph can be a mirror, where the photographer projects his or her sensibility onto the things out there in the world, or a window, showing the outside world in all its presence. In Beyond Here Is Nothing they are mirrors, yet one can sense that she desperately wants them to be windows. But all too often the outlook is hindered or turbid. Next to some dark silhouettes, El-Tantawy also photographs her own shadow, evidence of existing in this world. It was again Milosz who wrote: ‘And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth: what has no shadow has no strength to live.’ ♦

– Stefan Vanthuyne

All images courtesy of the artist. © Laura El-Tantawy

Sam Contis

Deep Springs

MACK

Young men, the Wild West, Deep Springs Valley, California. For her first book, Sam Contis has mixed century-old archive photographs with new ones she has made in the same locality. A gentle, unforced continuity runs through the photographs in Deep Springs, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the old from the new.

Rugged landscapes, rugged faces, a cow’s torso, a man’s torso. It’s as if the earth and the animals and the men are the same. But – as the book’s pink endpapers hint – this isn’t just the macho west of the classic cowboy. There is femininity, even a subtle sexual undercurrent. And the tender images are just as likely to be the old ones, such as a delicate young man barely concealed by his towel.

A young man holding a plant, his hands caked in the dirt of today, mirrors another young man reading in the dusty past: sustaining the body and feeding the soul. Nice geometric and thematic correspondences persist throughout the book. The curve of a dusty road as it embraces a rocky hillside is the same as the curve of a man’s arm as it grips another man. All is suggestion, and little is shown. Much is hidden, like a man’s emotions. The images often flow beautifully, such as a water-themed sequence culminating in clothes drying on a line. But by the end of the book, the clothes have become rags.

What can we glean from all this? First, nothing changes. Now is as then. Men are men, but men can be gentle. There’s killing and hard physical work to be done, but there’s also learning and leisure and friendship. Sometimes there’s more than friendship. And it has always been so. Second, we are the land. We spring from it and are shaped by it. Its harshness is our harshness. Its beauty is our beauty. But in the end, only the land remains. We return to its dust. A rocky outcrop which recurs throughout the book sits proudly as its final image. Imperious and impassive, it couldn’t care less. 1917 or 2017, we come and go. The land doesn’t notice. ♦

—Simon Bowcock

Images courtesy of MACK. © Sam Contis

Alessandro Calabrese

A Failed Entertainment

Skinnerboox

“Something to do with loneliness and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings.” In a 1996 radio interview David Foster Wallace explained his understanding of art and writing in relation to Infinite Jest, his complex, dystopian novel that has inspired Alessandro Calabrese’s recent photobook A Failed Entertainment. HD screen-sized with a glossy, laminated cover, Calabrese’s work opens an unsettling dialogue with its audience, grappling with binaries of digital/analogue, proliferation/reduction, representation/abstraction, automation/control, in an exploration of photography, authorship and the Internet.

Twenty-one images formed of multiple digital photographs, overlaid and centrally aligned so that each composite recedes to black. Like window upon window of a desktop in overdrive, the frames pulse centrifugally on bright white pages so that it is hard for the eye to find a resting point. What legible data there is is so varied it seems arbitrary and, like redacted documents, the crux of the matter is obscured. Colours blend between layers to lurid effect. Visual information hits in a barrage (there are at least two figures pointing guns). Faces are anonymous – masked, concealed or obliterated entirely. Marble busts meld with the head of a primate in one particularly sinister amalgam.

Two short texts expose the workings of Calabrese’s project: the artist uploaded analogue photographs taken on the industrial outskirts of Milan to Google’s ‘Search by image’ service. From the results he used an algorithm to make a random selection of twenty-one files, which he printed on individual acetate sheets, arranged in layers and scanned back into the computer.

Calabrese’s original film prints are reproduced in the second part of the book, effecting a stark inversion. These quiet, searching portraits of his home town emanate from matte black paper with a vivid luminosity. If his digital compounds are tangled, noisy, abstruse these pictures are understated, subtle, direct. To compare the two sets is to become startlingly aware of their polarity, and so of our excessive, faceless consumption of imagery on the Web. Here is the longing and loneliness of the Information Age that Wallace sensed so presciently twenty-one years ago. ♦

–Michaela Nettell

All images courtesy of Skinnerboox. © Alessandro Calabrese