Book Archives | Page 5 of 8

Gregory Halpern

ZZYZX

MACK

There is a place deep within the Mojave Desert, around 100 miles southwest of Las Vegas, called Zzyzx. The name was coined in the 1940s by Curtis Howe Springer – a radio evangelist and self-affirmed doctor who opened a health spa of the same name on the land. Springer – who liked to refer to himself as an “old-time medicine man” while others felt that “quack” was more fitting – was a regular chancer. Bottling water from nearby springs and knocking together potions that were really nothing more than celery and parsley juices, he claimed they were cures for any number of ailments. Zzyzx began in Springer’s mind, and journeyed into a real place over time. He named a road leading to the resort ‘The Boulevard of Dreams’.

Something about the story of Zzyzx conjures up images of a young Sissy Spacek, arriving at a mysterious health spa in a small, dusty Californian desert town in 3 Women. Interestingly, beyond it’s setting, 3 Women is a film that is said to have come to its director, Robert Altman, in a dream, and he chose to pursue it without ever fully understanding what it was. Dreams, then, are a recurring theme, as Gregory Halpern’s own ZZYZX comes from a similar place, and he too saw a version of the bizarre dystopia we see in this book, fragmented in his dreams through time. Piecing together images of real people, and real scenes he reconstructed the place that had existed only in his mind. A fiction that made it’s way into reality.

ZZYZX traces a path that begins in the desert east of Los Angeles, moves through the city and ends up at the Pacific. Halpern uses the iconic idea of the journey West – embarked upon by countless artists and writers before him – as the symbol of a voyage to a better life, and a new start. California, in all of its sublime, inconceivable beauty is often seen as the embodiment of the American Dream – a brilliant, psychedelic, intensely dazzling place. But the brighter the light, the deeper the shadow. Los Angeles is also a fractured, profoundly devastating place. Where there is Hollywood there is skid row not so far away. Halpern’s LA makes your head swirl, oscillating somewhere between the two.

The book opens with the image of a hand with stars drawn upon it, reaching out of the darkness, palm illuminated to the sky. This image sets the chimerical tone of the book: sometimes the scenes we see are scorched in the blinding midday sun, while at other times we survey the city from the shadows. People, places and animals eclipse in and out of vision. The individuals who appear in Halpern’s photographs are often those who exist on the edges of society, and the view we are given as the reader reflects that. Almost always, the subject of the photograph is out of reach, seen from a distance, and obscured by branches or fences. Halpern’s portrayals of the people he meets are touching and very human – a particularly resonant photograph depicts a laughing woman, resting her head in the hands of another.

In the colophon, Halpern thanks Jason Fulford for his formative edit of the work, and that makes a lot of sense, as the images speak to each other in ways that are, at times, quietly reminiscent of Fulford’s own brand of image-editing. Subtle connections based on form and colour and symbol emerge between scenes. A cluster of criss-crossing branches gives way to the intersecting lines of a stairwell. A man, jaw agape and front teeth missing, appears opposite a shattered windscreen, it’s arch echoing the curve of his mouth. Everything leads from one thing to another.

There is a constant sense of movement in ZZYZX, and the book carries us forward at an uneasy pace. With flashes of characters and quiet moments, it’s something akin to somnambulation. As Halpern sweeps across the city, things seem to get bigger – a small fire as a book burns on the beach later gives way to a forest blaze, pushing plumes of smoke across the sky. It always seems to be teetering on the brink here. Are things about to collapse? Halpern has recently said that in LA it feels like the world is always, slowly ending. Pathways, freeways and stairs recur throughout the book – ways in and ways up. Furthermore, Halpern wanted for there to be something biblical about this project, and certainly it feels like his pilgrimage. His attempt to distill Los Angeles – this terrifying, awful, beautiful, sprawling, almost mythical city – and everything that goes on inside of its parameters is exquisite and at times, painful. Towards the end of the book, Halpern moves back out, across sea and land. The penultimate image he offers us is phantasmagoric, of two overlapping squares of light falling across the sand. The place we saw, if only for a while, disappears, shimmering in the evening light. ♦

– Joanna Cresswell

All images courtesy of MACK. © Gregory Halpern

Steffi Klenz

He only feels the black and white of it, Berlin Wall, 14-07-1973

Morel Books

It is as though the pages of Steffi Klenz’s new book, He only feels the black and white of it, Berlin Wall, 14-07-1973 contain a continuum of time all their own – one that exists in tandem with that which is outside of it, but differently.

Like cells from a malfunctioning cinema projector, we are presented with a repeating yet different image of the Berlin Wall being reconstructed, one after another. They have been ruptured – some melting, fluid and organic; others shattered, jagged and engineered. The text that underscores them presents recollected fragments from an interconnected cluster of lives from behind the wall. Their power is aggregated; built through the fractured context of their preceding pages, in a narrative structure reminiscent of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s book We. Similarly, the pace for Klenz’s writing snowballs; the speed at which one can read becomes increasingly insufficient to keep up with the growing voracity the written words demand as they compound one another.

A similar maniacal reading manner is evoked from the crudely screen-printed images, their style not so much lackadaisical as furious and energised. When I have discussed the photograph used here with Klenz in the past, it has been one of few things to visibly enrage her. It is this passion that I see pulled and scraped across the prints in the book, not the careful and loving hand of an artisan, but the impassioned hand of a victim. It is as though through this printing she has tried to erase and understand the image – to simultaneously rupture yet piece it together.

Paired with the text, these images present a multiplicitous representation of time in relation to the notion of the pivotal moment. While the cultures of the wider world progress within the texts – with time-anchors such as “Adam Quinn, an American Bagpipes player, is born” along with newspaper headlines and number one songs – the image only shifts in appearance, its reappearance page after page as painfully sedentary as the wall itself. “Time, Wolfgang says, unfolds differently on this side of the wall.” ♦

—Oliver Gapper

All images courtesy of the artist. © Steffi Klenz

Luigi Ghirri

The Complete Essays 1973-1991

MACK

Written in the first person, this collection of essays by Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, published by MACK and introduced by Francesco Zanot, is rich, personal and encyclopaedic in its contents. Ghirri tells us in his 1973 essay Atlas: “An atlas is the book, a place where all the features of the Earth, from the natural to the cultural, are conveniently represented: mountains, lakes, pyramids, oceans, villages, stars and islands. In this expanse of words and descriptions, we might locate the place where we live, or where we want to go, and the path to follow”. As the atlas described here is all-encompassing, so too are the subjects Ghirri examines. Ghirri the writer, with clarity and simplicity, muses on diverse elements of his public and private life as well as of course the history and theory of photography. He does so with sharp and informal detail, using anecdotal exordium to connect the personal to the profound in his essays. As Francesco Zanot tell us in his introduction to the book: “each page is pervaded by the echo of his intimate and visceral attachment to his subject.”

Many of the essays are short, a page or two, and this is Ghirri’s strength as a writer – so much encapsulated in so few words. Dispersed evenly but carefully through the book is a collection of photographs serving to illustrate the essays. They seem to do more than simply that though, transforming Ghirri’s references to novels, paintings and other matters cultural into metaphors and complex visual analogies. Ghirri’s photography is a history of sensations, a word he uses to describe the technological impact of the photographic image on the historical canon in his short, typewritten 1989 essay History of Photography. Another essay from the same year, The Doing of Things, sees Ghirri describing the work of photographer Antonio Contiero in a manner that might serve well as the Ghirrian conception of photography par excellence: “for it is not simply a combination of different techniques and materials… nor is it simply an exercise in interference and influence; rather [photography] concerns the deep layering of image and perception, which have always accompanied the ‘doing of things’.”

Perhaps, contrary to popular opinion, Ghirri – as both writer and photographer – is a man of action and movement, not one for getting trapped in the stillness of the deadpan aesthetic with which he is so often associated. ♦

—Daniel C Blight

All images courtesy of MACK. © Luigi Ghirri

Alejandro Cartagena

Santa Barbara return jobs back to Us

Skinnerboox

Encountering a book for the first time it is sometimes surprising what element of it lands the first blow. With Alejandro Cartagena’s Santa Barbara return jobs back to Us it was the smell, the sharp scent of ink mingling with something musty, like a long dry landscape after a much needed scattering of rain. This seems apt. Predominantly photographed in the titular city while Cartagena undertook a residency there, other images come from cities of the same name scattered across Latin America – in Mexico, Venezuela, and Chile.

Cartagena is a prolific photographer but for most he will be best known for his self-published book Carpoolers. This is a classic a typological study, photographs taken from on high of the open backs of speeding pickup trucks, wherein migrant workers huddle for warmth enroute to day jobs in the grey economy of the southern United States. Santa Barbara is very different, both in its physical form, narrative structure, and photography. It also, however, feels very much like a continuation of Cartagena’s interest in the United State’s fraught relationship with its southern neighbours, in particular his native Mexico.

In contrast to the strict typology of Carpoolers, the photographs in Santa Barbara are a series of vignettes and snapshots, where themes reoccur organically and unpredictably, making the narrative feel like a solitary walk through an unwelcoming suburban sprawl. These vignettes are typically American, perhaps to the extent of cliché. Gun violence, film noir, suburban houses, highways, mug shots, cheerleaders, late night stores, and a bumper sticker from which the book’s title is taken, albeit recast less as a request or demand than as a simple statement.

Through this narrative Cartagena conjures the sense of a place, which has the air of an ambiguous borderland, a porous place where culture and people flow. Whether it is between north or south, or past and present, is difficult to say. It is a place where the idea of concrete identities, nationalities and strictly delineated borders seem like a nostalgic dream or a relicfrom the past superseded by a new and very different reality – a place where the topography is treacherous, the present uncertain, and the future, even more so. ♦

— Lewis Bush

All images courtesy of Skinnerboox. © Alejandro Cartagena

Bertien van Manen

Beyond Maps and Atlases

MACK

The rapacious threat of darkness was rapidly consuming the last glimmers of that day’s light, as crystalised raindrops penetrated every fibre of my impotent clothing. I was alone, clambering through the savage bracken of Ireland’s West Coast, in a desperate and hopeless scrabble to locate the refuge of my misplaced lodgings.

Some two decades have passed, but as I turn the pages of Bertien van Manen’s Beyond Maps and Atlases, I revisit the labyrinth of that day’s memory – thrust into the intersection between the forgotten, fragmented details of the tangible and the clouded folly of the imagined.

Beyond Maps and Atlases is a reflective journey through an unknown, mythical, rain-sodden landscape to a place that lies beyond the physical; a place that oscillates between the extinct and extant, between the circumstantial and the metaphorical, between life and death. Battered by wind, and largely smothered by the heavy gloom of an Irish night, it is a landscape inhabited by the mortal and the inevitability of our final consignment to its earthly vault.

In the wake of her husband’s death, Bertien van Manen embarked on a number of journeys to this ancient place, guided by the works of Seamus Heaney and propelled to explore an ‘elsewhere world’. Water is the dominant element, laminating the images with an inescapable layer of moisture: rain, rivers, lakes and seas, at once life-giving, choke the dialogue, a battleground of survival between the landscape and its inhabitants. The raw brutality of nature is potent, and the landscape is littered with the debris of mortality – an eviscerated carcass of a lamb, lying gutless and ravaged by scavengers, offering no consolations, just the prevailing silence of death.

Beyond Maps and Atlases is shackled to the final redundancy of life, tormented by loss and the vacuum that is left behind. This is a work embedded with a poignant mystery, from an artist who consistently discovers a poetic beauty in the intuitive and unremarkable. Here, nature is eternal and the characters that intervene in its narrative are fleeting and pass with little trace. This is a landscape haunted by ghosts and the finality of the last whispered goodbye. ♦

—Tom Claxton

All images courtesy of MACK. © Bertien van Manen

Morten Andersen

Now, I Wanna Be Your Dog

MÉDIA IMMÉDIAT

Despite its dinky size, this book-cum-booklet strives to reveal something larger about two respected photographers: Antoine D’Agata and his partner in crime, Morten Andersen. Taken in New York back in the early nineties while both were students at the ICP, these black and white images offer a glimpse of the early incarnation of D’Agata before he was known as a darkly subjective and challenging artist. The book’s title, scratched in yellow, is lifted, unabashed, from the title of a song by The Stooges. One can imagine that Now, I Wanna Be Your Dog was the appropriately crazed, sensual sound track for the dérive of these would-be photographers. The title is accompanied humorously on the front cover by D’Agata’s yellowed eyes, symbolic evidence of mad participation in smoke-hazed parties and perhaps a joke known only to the protagonists.

The serious and existential D’Agata is not really in evidence here but the image of a fresh-faced man with a full head of hair is revealed as a playful and carefree young man: pulling faces, sleeping on someone’s floor or crossing the street arm in arm with a woman. Today, D’Agata has experience written all over his face; in these photographs his face is open to those experiences.

When we consider, in hindsight, the oeuvre of D’Agata, we come to understand that from the moment these photographs were taken he embarked henceforth on an extreme lifestyle, drawing understanding from his experience and developing the structure to give meaning to his life through aesthetic representation. His award-winning books and exhibitions are testament to society’s growing acceptance of difficult yet honest work dealing with the taboos of sex and drugs. D’Agata’s experience in New York was instrumental in this process, during which time he was taught by the likes of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, who guided the young man to make personal documentations of great intimacy and distance.

Morten Andersen’s photographs are proof that collecting dust someplace in our own archives may be little gems that tell a story. And this mini narrative is certainly evidence of the two friends’ complicity and bonding, living for the moment but with an eye still on the future. ♦

—Michael Grieve

All images courtesy of the artist. © Morten Andersen

Thomas Albdorf

I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before

Lodret Vandret

The normal instinct of a photographer, particularly a fine art photographer, is to steer clear of any subject which has been photographed before, and all the more so when that subject is so well-worn as to have become cliché. Picturesque mountains might be high on the verboten list given that they have appeared in countless visual platitudes from romantic painting to contemporary tourist photos. However, as Thomas Albdorf demonstrates in his book I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before, even the most egregious cliché can become interesting when viewed in the right way.

Albdorf probes the snowcapped mountains of his native Austria, visually exploring them much like the first climbers explored them spatially. He employs a battery of techniques including straight photography, appropriation as well as studio photographs of strange constructions, overlaid across photographic prints. Each approach brings with it its own language, and each of those languages carry different connotations of their use to reinterpret and reframe the meaning of the mountains, from picturesque art and photography, to Austrian and Hollywood cinema, and from tourist advertising to political propaganda. That idea of visual specifics is reflected even in the design of the book which is extremely simple: mostly white apart from the photographs of the script, the title of which is gothic, both quintessentially Germanic, like those mountains, but also a script with a history of very mixed meanings and use.

The same photographs reappear in different forms, sometimes abstracted, reshaped, pixelated, altered, and sometimes introducing new notions of what an image of such a familiar subject might actually mean. In the process, the work tests the expectations the viewer might have for a topic as hackneyed as mountains, and hints at the politics that underlie the framing of subjects and the aesthetic choices made in their representation, however banal both these things might at first seem. ♦

—Lewis Bush

Daniel Stier

Ways of Knowing

YES Editions

The language of science has frequently been appropriated to lend credibility and authority to questionable endeavours, not least in the history of photography. The serial repetitions and gridded backdrops of Eadweard Muybridge’s locomotion studies, for example, belie the fact that these images were often of dubious investigative value. In Ways of Knowing Daniel Stier plays on this tendency by blending images of genuine scientific experiments with photographs that appear to be elaborate hoaxes.

Opening the blue plastic dust jacket of Ways of Knowing, you are in fact confronted by two books facing each other across a false spine. The first consists of a series of seductive photographs of test subjects taking part in complex experiments at research institutions across Europe and America. These scenes are invariably bizarre, and some more readily suggest byzantine forms of torture rather than a genuine search for knowledge. There is little to give away the true purpose of each experiment but captions at the back of the book reveal investigations into fields like neurology, psychology, and physiology.

The second book consists of a series of still lives, which resemble details extracted from bigger experiments. These include an orange nestling in a curved grid of wire mesh, a man lifting a stool while pressing his head against a wall, and a wine bottle and umbrella balancing obstinately on a piece of string. Where the technical complexity of the contraptions in the first book seem to leave little doubt about their genuine scientific purpose, the modest strangeness of many of the arrangements in the second make these somehow seem less credible, and indeed many are constructions of Stier’s own making, albeit ones which are designed to illustrate genuine scientific phenomena.

In short, Ways of Knowing is a smart, engaging book, which neatly takes advantage of the way we have been culturally conditioned to accept the authority of certain types of inquiry, while doubting others. ♦

— Lewis Bush

Boris Mikhailov

Diary

Walther König

It is bitter irony that the Soviet system essentially created Boris Mikhailov. Fired from his job as an engineer in a weapons factory on accusations of publishing ‘pornography’ – after developing and printing some nude photos of his partner in the company darkroom – he was drawn into the local underground alternative arts scene. Since his beginnings in the 1960s, Mikhailov has been removing the artificial “mask of beauty” on the region, its politics and his society as brilliantly presented in his new book Diary from Walther König.

Do not mistake this book as a retrospective, nor as its title states, strictly as a diary either. A diary implies a chronologic chain of events and this book is anything but. Made up from his favourite outtakes and variants of his different series, Diary skips back and forth through time and subject as fluidly as Mikhailov tests, experiments and dismantles the medium. His prints – presented here as objects taped to pages sketchbook style – are unprecious, imperfect, torn, and fogged. Their surfaces reminding you of the physicality of the photograph while the images themselves reveal his championing of the anti-hero, the imperfection, the error, and the corrosion of ideology.

If, as it was once said, that man thinks of sex every seven seconds, in Diary it is implied every seven pages. Mikhailov happily exposes his private sexual world and fantasy to the public sphere. That which enabled his artistic leap, ‘the pornographic’, is his undeniable muse. Francesco Zanot writes in his accompanying essay, “…without hypocrisy or shame, Mikhailov fills his frames with a wide range of sexual acts, from masturbation to orgasms. The result is a collective orgy which… becomes a new utopia.”

Structured into four sections, this densely thick 400-plus page opus with more than 900 images, Diary is not a book for a single sitting. Taking in small chunks of Mikhailov’s method, mockery and irreverent theatrics that tackle the history and crash of one former empire, one might start to wonder what Vladimir Putin might think of having a deviant like Mikhailov around to piss on his Ukrainian dream. ♦

— Jeffrey Ladd

Daniel Blaufuks

This Business of Living

Pierre von Kleist Editions

“The only joy in the world is to begin,” wrote the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese in his diaries. “When this sensation is lacking – as when one is in prison, or ill, or stupid, or when living has become a habit – one might as well be dead.”

Anyone who is busy will attest that it is all too easy for life to become a habit, or a business. Daniel Blaufuks’ latest book This Business of Living, is inspired by and shares its title with Pavese’s diaries, and does what many of us fail to take time to do. It takes a look backwards, or perhaps sideways, at those days that have an alarming tendency to slide by so easily and unremarkably.

The imagery is suitably domestic and diary-like and, as in much of Blaufuks’ work, it is possible to trace loose connections and themes from one photograph to the next. Often this is indirect and akin to the functioning of a memory while at other times straightforward and even a little mechanical. One image shows a book open at a reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, followed by a photograph of the photographer’s hand open on a table, as if awaiting the doctor’s blade. Another spread shows two facing photographs of the same clock, but fifteen minutes apart.

As much as anything, diaries are like an attempt to hold on to time just a little, to catch a feel of a day or a week or a month as it passes. They are also perhaps one of the great examples of epic, silent labour. Samuel Pepys’ diary, for example, spanned a tumultuous decade and was over a million words long. This book, however, felt a little short, as if the themes that Blaufuks is exploring still had some distance to go and ended, like so many days, before we are quite ready. ♦

—Lewis Bush