Category: Book

Darren Harvey-Regan

The Erratics

RVB Books

An incongruous gap exists in how we conceive of humankind and matter, as if the two were inextricably separated. On a wall in his studio, Darren Harvey-Regan has a crop of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I next to another reproduction of René Magritte’s Invisible World. Both show a de-territorialisation of the rock as an object of nature. Rocks are an incongruous motif in Magritte’s painting: they appear frequently, defying their usual properties, as so many objects in his world tend to do. Some float in mid air: one maintains an occupied castle at its summit, whilst another independently compares itself to a cloud. In Invisible World a rock finds itself indoors. Here it resides by the window, looking out to sea, caught in a moment of wonderment. Dürer’s Melencolia too contains a rock, but here it is by contrast a smooth polyhedron, a mysterious quasi-mathematical object, amongst tools and signs of knowledge, measurement, and culture. The image of the Dürer in Harvey-Regan’s studio is cropped, focusing in upon the polyhedron. Its composition is almost identical to that of the Magritte. They appear side by side at the back of Harvey-Regan’s book, The Erratics, published by RVB Books.

The Erratics is a body of work comprising photographs, sculptures, now a book with an artist-written parenthetical text, which focuses upon stone formations and sculpted chalk, taking as its subject the process of making as well as, if not more than, the what is made. An early crossing from the raw into the technological emerges. Harvey-Regan begins with dry and totem-like stones in the desert, drawing attention to matter and the smooth, sometimes-peeled surfaces of some of the stone. Rocks attest to the forces of wind, water, temperature and time, and here reveal sections of surfaces that appear so defined as to have been mechanically altered. We can think of these objects, continually changing with a duration beyond our comprehension, as objects in-formation. They are also objects that act upon us. On the following page, a sliced piece of chalk, cut cleanly in two, figuratively carves away at our imagination of natural formation, pointing to matter progressively shaped as sculpture, as architecture, as the creator of space and spatial perceptions.

From here, Harvey-Regan introduces and alternates the ‘found’ sculptural stones with images of the sliced forms the artist has made in the studio. Resting on a pristine white plinth, a chalk sculpture extends the hard edges of the plinth’s vertical lines, whilst possessing the same hard black shadow on its front face. Each has a delicate precision, sensitising vision whilst taunting the line between actuality and illusion. Each work in chalk requires the artist to balance not only the spatial consonances of the sliced chalk on its plinth, but the lighting of the space and the placement of the camera in the same environ. From material that might have appeared so immanently natural, Harvey-Regan constructs a network of dialogues between object, tool, artist, camera and receiver; The Erratics presents a series of photographs and photographed sculptural works, which draw together the rough and the formed. Like its surrounding text, which moves in and out of focus, it seems specific, and yet frames a much bigger subject, a technics of time. ♦

—Duncan Wooldridge

Images courtesy of the artist. © Darren Harvey-Regan

Mar Sáez

Vera y Victoria

André Frère Éditions

Please meet Vera and Victoria – two young women in their twenties; wearing jeans, sneakers, piercings, peeling nail polish of different colours from finger to finger. Two young women in love, the lucky ones.

From the very first glance at Mar Sáez’s book with André Frère Éditions, it is hard not to notice how fearless, how proud they were to open the door of their cosy home and welcome the photographer, allowing her silent presence to unveil their life, their naked bodies, their love. Year after year, page after page, depicting the most intimate and tender of their daily gestures. It is only on the midway of the book that we are faced with the nature of their intimate parts. Just one photograph, a bee in the viewer’s bonnet. How does it affect our reading of their story? Here, absorbed by the proudness of Vera and Victoria’s forward-looking gaze, we can barely grasp the difficulties which underlie any relationship experience involving issues of gender.

Back in the 1950s, in Paris, Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm decided to join the transgender community, universally maltreated and marginalised. He photographed those who were struggling for the recognition of their individuality, and he did it from the very inside, by first earning their trust and friendship. Never intrusive or voyeuristic, his photographs – gathered in the ground-breaking 1983 publication Les Amies de Place Blanche – paved the way for a deeper, empathic way of depicting human differences.

Such is the intent of the Spanish photographer Mar Sáez, whose photographic research pursues the goal of portraying the act of becoming one’s true self by describing real life in its sublime complexity. Spanning four years of work, the book is divided into episodes, representative of the photographer’s encounters with the couple, each one completed with a poetic text by Spanish writer Laura Moreno.

The tenderness and empathy suggested by the photographs invites us to embrace the beautiful normality of the two women’s relationship, one which they achieved bravely, and share proudly with their witnesses, be it the photographer or anyone who may encounter this book – a diary which is no longer secret, and which shall not have a reason to be. ♦

—Ilaria Speri

Images courtesy of The Institute. © Mar Sáez

Nicholas Muellner

In Most Tides An Island

Self Publish, Be Happy

Nicholas Muellner’s most recent publication, In Most Tides An Island, is a rich blend of overlapping narratives, both real and imagined, played out through image and text. Divided into twelve chapters, the work shifts between the personal realities of closeted gay men suffocated by the violently homophobic climate of contemporary Russia, Muellner’s reflections on love and isolation in the digital age, and the fictional tale of a solitary female island dweller. Seemingly disparate, these narratives are unified by an underlying theme of loneliness.

From the coastal paths and beaches of provincial Russian towns and villages, to the steamy depths of a public men’s bath, Muellner offers us a glimpse into the isolation of gay men in Russia. One acquaintance introduces Muellner to his supposed best friend, who later asserts: “If homosexuals arrived in our town, we would kill them”. Isabel, the fictional character, on the remote Caribbean is also alone: “Only the ocean can sea her face”. She exists as an anonymous entity, masked by the island’s scenery in the ethereal black and white photographs that accompany the text. And Muellner himself is detached; divorced from the digital generation, his mediations on photography now feel like “dust” on his lips.

The digital realm as a place to fulfil forbidden desires is touched on. For the same man whose best friend regards homosexuality as punishable by death, the Internet provides a momentary respite from his isolation. But like the stories of these men, the digital sphere too is shrouded in solitude; “We are alone together. Or was it: together, we are alone,” Muellner writes. This sentiment is both echoed and alluded to in the faceless profile pictures interspersed throughout the book; their profiles masked, our eyes are drawn instead to the seductive and expressive poses of these anonymous individuals.

In Most Tides An Island is a worthy addition to Muellner’s critically acclaimed image-text books The Amnesia Pavilions (2011) and The Photograph Commands Indifference (2009). Visually and intellectually engaging, it overturns traditional photographic and literary narratives, existing as an experimental hybrid that encourages new perspectives on the state of the modern world and the individual’s place in it. ♦

—Hannah Abel-Hirsch

All images courtesy of Self Publish, Be Happy. © Nicholas Muellner

Daido Moriyama

Pantomime

Akio Nagasawa Publishing

With thin pages between organic-feeling cloth covers, this slight book of photographs seems as delicate and fragile as life itself. Its first image, shot from a dispassionate distance, could be of a tiny pair of strange prawns, touching at the tail. But the next picture, a distressing close-up, dispels any illusion of the non-human: what look like two cowering newborns hug each other, all wrinkled skin and baby-fat wrists. Visual correspondence between two images – common and commonly inconsequential in photobooks – has rarely been used with such life-and-death profundity. For these are not prawns or live babies. They are dead embryos and dead foetuses.

Heartrending yet detached and neutral, Moriyama’s stream of never-borns ebbs and flows between the amorphous and the gravely human. Potent individual images abound: a male silhouette’s hands are stretched out, as if trying to grab onto life; another is dumped upside-down into a translucent bag, the human treated inhumanely. But most powerful of all is a recurring luminous figure, its face to the floor, seemingly trying to crawl. Immobile, we see it from behind, from above, from the side: a few grainy, refulgent pictures of apparent failure which stand for all human helplessness and despair. Nothing could be further from the globally-celebrated scientific wonder of Lennart Nilsson’s roughly contemporaneous pre-natal foetus photographs.

Made over half a century ago, Moriyama’s pictures reflect his embryonic career as a struggling young photographer. But they offer much more. Most of them are ethereal, almost unreal, and the heartbreak they provoke is all the stronger for their sensitivity and gentleness. They also demonstrate a level of traditional technical accomplishment and control not readily associated with an artist best known for rejecting photographic conventions and pushing his medium to a new frantic extreme of unfocused grain and blur.

Most importantly, Pantomime is the work of a young image-maker who is already a true artist, even before finding what we think of as his own photographic voice. At a very early stage of his development, Moriyama created the base material he has now formed into one of his finest photobooks. ♦

—Simon Bowcock

Images by Simon Bowcock, courtesy Akio Nagasawa and © Daido Moriyama

Allan Sekula

Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983

MACK

MACK has a warranted reputation for photobooks, but also well deserving of acknowledgment are their series of collected essays by prominent photographers. The latest of these comes in a thoroughly overdue republication of the early writings and photographs of Allan Sekula, arriving almost exactly three years after his death in 2013.

In the title’s echoes of Walter Benjamin’s plea to read against the embedded ideologies of narrative history, Photography Against the Grain immediately spreads Sekula’s critical and theoretical cards on the table. His Marxist influences might feel uncomfortable to readers who have only ever known the era since these ideas were supposedly confined to the dustbin of history, replaced by the revolving roster of neoliberal mutations, which are supposed to pass for alternatives to each other. However to dismiss Sekula’s ideas as outdated because they rest on unfashionable ideologies is to mistake his importance then, and now.

Sekula achieved that rare thing of oscillating theory and practice to the point where they became indistinct, the two instead blending together like an optical illusion to create the ghostly afterimage of the invariably invisible subjects he so urgently wanted to discuss. And what subjects they were, the grim pantheon of the late capitalist world which Benjamin and some of his Frankfurt school contemporaries had already sensed steamrollering towards the ruins of their own era. Sekula tackled these vast and vital issues with a critical mind and eye, which viewed three decades later, still seems breathtakingly ambitious, not least because so few artists today attempt the same today.

Sekula’s commitment to photography never descends into infatuation, instead stemming in large part I think from an acute awareness of the medium’s shortcomings, its slippery muteness, its status as a commodity circulating in the same currents as the products and people he often photographed, interviewed and wrote about. In a time when theory is often a sort of opaque artistic window dressing, and social or political critique is so frequently defanged for the purposes of commerce, Sekula’s work stands as an example of what truly critical art can be. A reminder that when we find ourselves confronted by an apparently smooth edifice we must run our fingers against the grain, search for the cracks, and on finding them, dig deeply in. ♦

– Lewis Bush

All images courtesy of MACK. © Allan Sekula

Helmut Völter

The Movement of Clouds around Mount Fuji Photographed and Filmed by Masanao Abe

Spector Books

In the fall 2016 issue of Aperture’s The PhotoBook Review, editor Denise Wolff considers what she calls accidental photobooks, ‘other types of books that use photography, but are not considered photobooks qua photobooks.’ Although their impact relies heavily on photography, Wolff argues, they are free from an artist’s agenda and the conventional earmarks of an artist book.

Ever since Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan published their Evidence in 1977, it has become a familiar trope amongst artists to work with found or archive material, to re-contextualise the images and to create a new narrative with them. This practice makes for photobooks that are photobooks by intent; the artist’s agenda usually is unmistakably present.

With this in mind The Movement of Clouds around Mount Fuji – Photographed and Filmed by Masanao Abe by Helmut Völter is a peculiar book. It tells the fascinating story of the Japanese physicist Masanao Abe, who from 1926 until 1941 photographed, filmed and studied the clouds and their activity around Mount Fuji. If the book is peculiar, it is because it has the feel of such an unintended photobook.

‘… one must revisit the question about how to strike a balance between different interests – the historical, the scientific, the aesthetic, the poetic’, Völter writes near the end of the book. Responsible for concept, text and graphic design, Völter manages to rotate as smoothly around the centre of these interests as the cloud around the axis of a stationary vortex of air in Abe’s very first photograph in 1926. All book elements echo the elegant straightforwardness of old scientific publications; the hand of the artist never predominates. Völter generously gives the floor to Abe.

The Movement of Clouds around Mount Fuji is a comprehensive and tender homage to a gentleman scientist who also happened to be a great photographer. A book that is both multilayered and multifaceted; somewhat like the air currents and the clouds in the sky. It is, in a most intriguing way, an accidental photobook by Masanao Abe, brought to you by Helmut Völter with sincere and respectful artistic intentions. Also, the cloud images are breathtakingly beautiful. ♦

– Stefan Vanthuyne

All images courtesy of Spector Books. © Masanao Abe/Helmut Völter

John Cohen

Cheap Rents ... and de Kooning

Steidl

According to the artist Mary Frank, in Lower Manhattan around 1960 “you couldn’t tell a party from an opening from a happening.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the creative polymath John Cohen was very much in tune with this place and time when music, art and literature all seemed to merge and explode.

A film-maker, musicologist and prominent folk revival musician, Cohen is also an accomplished and at times original photographer. Here, Cohen paints a broad picture of the buzzing downtown art scene centred around ‘the block’ in 10th Street over half a century ago. Many of his grainy, available-light photographs of laughter and camaraderie taken in the bars and the galleries mirror their subjects’ artistic authenticity and consummately capture the atmosphere: Franz Kline’s snigger and Grace Hartigan’s laugh are almost infectious to look at.

Cohen’s often fine documentary photographs are supplemented by more lyrical ones. One image of a middle-aged man smiling down on two children is both warming (his paternalistic care) and disturbing (they pass “unfortunate homeless winos laying out on the sidewalks”). It has so much poetry it could have been taken by Roy DeCarava if it weren’t so unconventional. Another poetic picture – of a shadowy woman floating in a 10th Street window – is at least as lonely as Robert Adams’ famous silhouetted figure in her Colorado Springs tract house, and is just as skillful an evocation of melancholy.

Cohen’s portraits, by contrast, are wonderfully warm, but the one of Mary Frank’s husband Robert is edgy and unsettling. Robert Frank is just as intense in the photographs of him making his now legendary film Pull My Daisy, even if his collaborators Ginsberg, Kerouac and others seem more relaxed. And as Cohen underlines with an inventive Rauschenberg-esque assemblage of prints (of Robert Rauschenberg), Cheap Rents is primarily an artistic record of a place and a time when people were truly alive, very much in the world, living for art, and pushing ideas to their limits – together.

From the increasingly online, isolated and comparatively innovation-free present, this all seems very distant. “There is nothing like it today,” notes Cohen. Unfortunately, he’s right. ♦

– Simon Bowcock

All images courtesy of Steidl. © John Cohen

Top 10

Photobooks of 2016

Selected by Tim Clark

An annual tribute to the most exceptional photobook releases from the year that was – selected by our Editor in Chief.

1. Gregory Halpern: ZZYZX
MACK

Once the hype subsides, and you let Gregory Halpern’s images bathe you in glorious California sunlight, it’s clear to see why ZZYZX was named Photobook of the Year at The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. MACK’s production is sumptuous and as far as photography goes Halpern’s is of the highest order.

The book takes us on a journey, starting at the desert east of Los Angeles, across the city and up to the Pacific Ocean but seen through the filter of Halpern’s ineffable vision, it is in fact more akin to somnambulation. Images depict odd characters and quiet moments – things observed, rendered through description and suggestion – which on accumulation build up a picture of a sort of Babylon on the brink of collapse. With an untold narrative, contained but concealed, we slowly feel the burning desire for a place; a dreamed-of place since, as Italo Calvino one wrote, “desires are already memories”.

2. Edmund Clark and Crofton Black: Negative Publicity
Aperture/Magnum Foundation

Part research document, part exhibition catalogue and part dossier, Negative Publicity presents a complex and multi-layered reflection on the CIA’s programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’. Clark has turned his camera to spaces and surfaces that contain a hidden, violent tension, those which stand in for the countless people who have disappeared into a mysterious prison network – the vanishing point for the law. Yet no drama is pictured here, just the drama of a picture. Collaborating with counter-terrorism expert Crofton Black, he has paired images and redacted documents to interrogate the nature of contemporary warfare and invisible mechanisms of state control. A book that really matters.

3. Sara-Lena Maierhofer: Dear Clark; Portrait of a Con Man
Drittel Books

Sara-Lena Maierhofer has made it her business to tell the tale of a real-life imposter who went by the name of Clark Rockefeller, among other personas, having passed himself off as a scion of the wealthy family. Dear Clark pieces together remnants of his life, through material such as birth certificates, brain scans and family photographs alongside images that speak to key themes of multiplicity and transformation. The book’s material qualities are almost akin to installation with design touches like tipped-in images that perfectly heighten the searching quality of the project. Reality and fantasy, fact and fiction are masterfully at play here as Maierhofer makes tremendous art out of deception and the corrosive effects of lies.

4. Michael Hoppen Gallery: Evidence Case File
Guiding Light

This richly illustrated, cleverly designed book offers a small but brilliant insight into the collection of reknown photography dealer Michael Hoppen. In parallel to The Image as Question: An Exhibition of Evidential Photography, recently on display at the eponymous London gallery, it sets out to disturb the big claims of photography as ‘record’ or ‘proof’. A judicious selection of works harks back to the medium’s 19th century origins and also includes images from 20th century stalwarts as well as contemporary artists. The book empties images of their original evidential function and reconceptualises them in a new context and in a new time. Questioning what a ‘fact’ is a well-trodden area of investigation yet the presentation, editing, sequence and paper choices are very well-measured and all equally important to the publication as various parts separately. Rewards the curious.

5. Laia Abril: Lobismuller
Editorial RM/Images Vevey

Laia Abril is continually on the up and the photobook has always been an essential part of her output. Just recently-released, Lobismuller sees the Catalan artist produce a meditation in photography and text upon Spain’s first documented serial killer. The Werewolf of Allariz, known as Manuel Blanco Romasanta was originally named Manuela since it was initially believed he was a woman. This central figure was also dubbed the ‘Soapmaker’, owing to his habit of using the fat of victims to produce high-quality soap. Gender issues, psychology, landscape, mythology and folklore… the mesmerising story is wrapped upon layer of exquisite literary narrative. Between each image and each piece of text, a creepy affinity can be established, demonstrating Abril’s fluidity between medium and genre, which has come to characterise her practice.

6. Todd Hido: Intimate Distance
Aperture

This is a lavish monograph befitting one of the most influential US photographers. Todd Hido’s unique brand of cinematic spectatorship is surveyed en masse in Intimate Distance, bringing together twenty-five years of photographs full of substance and thickness of atmosphere. The book tracks the development of a career via Hido’s overlapping motifs and preoccupations: disarming nudes, smudged landscapes and interiors or housing lit up as if glowing chambers, inviting us to consider his world-as-image and rethink his oeuvre from a fresh perspective. The need to know oneself and the fear of self-knowing find their beautiful expression here. His is an art of longing.

7. Francesca Catastini: The Modern Spirit is Vivisective
AnzenbergerEDITION

“Knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting,” reads the Michel Foucault quote that appears in the postscript to Francesca Catastini’s The Modern Spirit is Vivisective. It serves as a useful coda for considering the work. True to its title, this handsome book is an investigation into the process of studying human anatomy, combining the artist’s own photographs with vernacular images of old anatomy lessons, illustrations from Renaissance manuals, complemented with scientific, literary, and philosophical texts. Using chapters as its organising system – On Looking, On Canon Lust, On Touching, On Cutting, On Discovering – the book reveals a great capacity for sequencing images, and the possibility to conceive of them as a form of literature.

8. David Fahti: Wolfgang
Skinnerboox

Gathered on the pages of David Fahti’s Wolfgang are black and white photographs sprinkled with quotations from Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics also held responsible for a large number of unexplainable failures of equipment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Countless accidents, surprises and flashes of unlikely beauty and absurd humour work to conjure up Pauli’s omnipresence despite his absence in the images. Skinnerboox enlisted celebrated book designer Ramon Pez to step in and around the project and the production is all the better for it. A sum of its wonders; art, design, photography, science and history collide and fuse together to powerful effect.

9. Tito Mouraz: The House of The Seven Women
Dewi Lewis Publishing

Misty forests, bemused animals, brooding portraits and delipidated out-houses are just some of the gothic-infused imagery on display in Tito Mouraz’s The House of The Seven Women. They are visual elements invoked to give material form to a myth of the Beira-Alta region of Portugal, where the photographer was born and raised – that of a house believed to be haunted by the ghosts of seven sisters, including one witch. Strange happenings were said to occur on the occasion of a full moon, namely the women would fly from their balcony to a tree opposite and seduce passers by. An eerie and enigmatic mood piece, the work translates brilliantly to book form, classical and full of craft.

10. Adam Golfer: A House Without a Roof
Booklyn Press

The complicated histories of founding the state of Israel and the subsequent violence and displacement of Palestinians as a result of military occupation serve as the subject for this debut book from photographer Adam Golfer. A House Without a Roof draws on his own personal past and familial connections to the place to form an interesting, first person perspective while foregoing any conclusion about its troubled present. This is not easily reducible or categorisable work and Golfer deftly blends Internet-sourced imagery, archival material and extensive use of text with his photographs of the ongoing conflict, as seen at ground level. At least, it transmits the disorienting sense of an outsider locating oneself within a historic ‘home’, constructed through both real and imagined narratives. ♦

—
Tim Clark is a curator, writer and editor. Since 2008 he has been Editor in Chief and Director at 1000 Words Photography Magazine. Previously Associate Curator at Media Space, The Science Museum in London, exhibitions he worked on included Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy (2015) and Gathered Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth (2015-2018), a major, mid-career touring retrospective. He has also organised many exhibitions independently, most recently Peter Watkins: The Unforgetting at Webber Gallery (2017) and Rebecoming: The Other European Travellers at Flowers Gallery (2014), featuring works he commissioned by Tereza Zelenkova, Virgilio Ferreira, Lucy Levene and Henrik Malmstrom. Together with Greg Hobson he has curated Photo Oxford 2017, which featured numerous solo presentations by artists such as Edgar Martins, Mariken Wessels, Martin Parr and Sergei Vasiliev and Arkady Bronnikov from The Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive among others. His writing has appeared in FOAM, TIME Lightbox, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Photoworks and The British Journal of Photography, as well as in exhibition catalogues and photobooks. He is also a visiting lecturer on the MA in Photography at NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano.

Gerard Petrus Fieret

Gerard Petrus Fieret

Éditions Xavier Barral/Le Bal

Chaotic and unpredictable, the Dutch artist, poet and photographer Gerard Petrus Fieret passed away in poverty in 2009 at the age of 85. This near-600-page book coincides with a recent retrospective at Paris’ Le Bal of Fieret the photographer, who took most of his pictures between 1965 and 1975.

The mini skirt loomed large in Fieret’s photographic lexicon, and young women were his favourite subjects. But Fieret was no peeping Tom in the Miroslav Tichý mode, and his complicit collaborators always look comfortable, even in consistently insalubrious surroundings. The resulting photographs are intimate without being explicit, sexy but never smutty.

Stylistically, the work is highly ‘lo-fi’: all grainy black and white; often out of focus, overexposed, or even solarised; and usually covered in cack or otherwise maltreated. All this complements the slightly sordid subject matter, and also lends an accelerated decrepitude, making the pictures look ancient. Fieret, who was reputedly paranoid about his work being appropriated by rivals, also liked to stamp and/or sign his prints across the images themselves, often multiple times, completing their idiosyncratic look.

Despite containing many hundreds of photographs, with lots of blurred faces, self-portraits, crossed knees and many other parts of the female anatomy, the book seldom feels repetitive. You can see right through the thin paper stock to the images on adjoining pages, and this can bring out surprising relationships between the pictures, or help reinforce a brief narrative.

We frequently get a sense of zooming in, getting closer and closer, more and more intimate. But even though the photographs gradually become a bit more naughty, they always remain playful and suggestive, implicit rather than explicit. This helps keep the book compelling throughout, and the overriding mood is one of levity, or even joy. But the joy in these photographs is the joy of the distant past. And there are also pictures of decaying walls, clapped-out doors, crumbling faces, old people and old photographs, also covered in the crap of the darkroom and the patina of post-production neglect.

So what does it all mean? Perhaps this: Beauty fades, everything decays – and quickly. So live and love – and do it now. ♦

— Simon Bowcock

All images courtesy of Éditions Xavier Barral. © Gerard Petrus Fieret

Karen Knorr

Gentlemen

STANLEY/BARKER

Karen Knorr’s Gentlemen is a series of 26 photographs anchored by short texts, taken inside the exclusive private members clubs that dominate the area of London just north of St. James Park. Photographed between 1981 and 1983, the series is overshadowed by the Falklands War, the last death throes of an empire of which these clubs formed part of a privileged ruling nucleus.

These photographs, which Knorr describes as a ‘documentary fiction’, depict the club interiors, its members, and on several conspicuous occasions also the staff who serve within. The texts in turn are drawn from conversations, parliamentary records, and contemporary news reports, and paired with each image they serve to draw a viewer to particular visual details and juxtapositions to reflect on notions of patriarchy, gender and class.

It is an interesting thing when a series from an earlier era re-emerges again to consider what feels fresh and unchanged and what is less so. Despite a renewed interest in the possibilities of image-text pairings, it is still perhaps this very strategy that dates Gentlemen most immediately. It instantly calls to mind a particular moment of art production concerned with cultural theory, and recalls work by both Knorr’s contemporaries and predecessors; for example Victor Burgin’s photo-texts or, earlier still, the photo-epigrams of Bertolt Brecht.

More noteworthy is that which does not really age Gentlemen at all, that being what is shown in the photographs themselves. Despite the fact that they are photographed during the abyssal depths of the Thatcher era we now find ourselves three decades later in a situation that feels little different, in a society which remains hierarchical, and fixated on distinctions like class, gender, and increasingly, of course, also on foreignness.

If the recent European referendum can be read as the last gasp of sections of the United Kingdom desperately seeking a return to an impossibly lost past, the timing of Karen Knorr’s latest publication is apt to say the least. Apt, but it also begs a question; where are the photographers documenting the ‘gentlemen’ of today?

—Lewis Bush

All images courtesy of STANLEY/BARKER. © Karen Knorr