Trespasser Archives | 1000 Words

Agnieszka Sosnowska

För

Book review by Shana Lopes

Published by Trespasser, Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För, is a coming-of-age story about relocating a remote corner of Iceland, which introduces us to her students, showcases her farm, and captures the passage of time as she and her husband age over two decades. As SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes writes, Sosnowska invites us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home.

Shana Lopes | Book review | 18 July 2024

A reindeer decomposing on the ground; white sheets hanging outside to dry; a man bathing in an outdoor tub: moments of quiet flow through Agnieszka Sosnowska’s pictures in her sumptuous first book, För, recently published by Trespasser. By virtue of their objecthood, all photographs are inherently silent, yet many evoke the sounds of whoever or whatever is pictured. Sosnowska’s vision offers a distinctive sonic experience of blustery winds careening through a rural landscape, bitterly cold water pouring down a cliff face, hushed conversations between people who have known each other for decades. And while many of her photographs point to stillness, the sequencing of the book, though nonlinear, is rhythmic, its cadence at once brooding and hypnotic, rapturous and meditative. Self-portraits form the chorus to this poignant ballad in black and white, bridged by stark, dramatic landscapes, unpretentious domestic still lifes, and pictures of students, friends, and family at ease. We may think we listen only with our ears and look solely with our eyes, yet we also sense with our bodies, and these Icelandic scenes exude the briskness of their unforgiving environment. Even the book’s exterior adds to the overall experience. It is bound in a cool bluish-gray cloth, the colour I imagine Iceland’s sky and water look like. It depicts a world of raw beauty that asks us to be present and attuned with all our senses.

Much of the power of Sosnowska’s photographs, the majority taken with a large-format film camera, resides in their uncluttered simplicity. Clean lines guide our eye, but the scenes are neither immaculate nor pristine. They are lived in, revealing signs of aging, even decay: a rusted car door, the well-worn cushions of a couch, a pile of old, used tires. Every one was captured near the artist’s home in eastern Iceland, where she has lived and worked as an elementary school teacher for more than two decades. Originally from Poland, she immigrated to the United States as a child, then as a young adult visited Iceland on a whim and fell in love there.

The book’s title – För – translates as “trip” in Icelandic, and so signifies a journey and the physical imprints one leaves behind. The word also connotes a vessel that delivers things from one location to another. So, what are these photographs transporting? What kind of trip is Sosnowska taking us on, and what traces has she left behind for us to follow?

This is certainly a journey of belonging, of making a home, and it is raw, authentic, and unpretentious. Sometimes intensely intimate. Consider, for example, the photographs of the artist and her husband. In one, he stands behind her, his hand inside her button-front dress, as she stares unabashedly at the camera. In another sublime moment, they pose before a misty waterscape like a modern Caspar David Friedrich painting, the view so awe-inspiring and powerful that their presence becomes secondary to the terrain. These pictures are not about tourism. Rather, they take us on an expedition of Sosnowska’s life. We meet her students; we see her farm; we watch her and her husband, whom she calls her Viking in the acknowledgments, age over the course of 20 years. I find myself wondering why she is publishing her first photobook now, if she has been shooting for this long and her photographs are this incredible. Indeed, her training harks back to the 1990s, when she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art with professors such as Barbara Bosworth, Nicholas Nixon, Frank Gohlke, and Abe Morell. But that is a story for another time. För centers the artist’s Icelandic journey and asks us to reflect on our own paths and the imprints we leave.

A spellbinding landscape framed by a jigsaw-puzzle web of trees opens the book. Soft grasses line the foreground, and beyond the arboreal lattice we see a seemingly boundless terrain. The photograph is a literal and metaphorical entrance to our trip as well as a portal into Sosnowska’s mind. It is also a landscape shaped by humans, which seems to be a key theme running through the publication: human versus nature, or perhaps more aptly, with nature. The photographs in För often depict coexistence and interaction between humans and the natural environment, highlighting the beauty and fragility of this relationship.

What truly stands out in this beautifully edited grouping (a hallmark of Trespasser’s publications) are the self-portraits. Vulnerable and unapologetically authentic, they function like punctuation, little reminders to pause and remember whose journey this is. Sometimes Sosnowska is alone, other times she is accompanied by her husband. In watching them grow older, we witness them undergoing life’s most humbling experience. The artist’s face and body change, as does her relationship with the camera, as she moves from performing for it to collaborating with it. These self-portraits are a testament to the artist’s personal evolution and its reflection in her work.

Together, the pictures show us what home means to Sosnowska: the people, the place, the architecture, the small details. She notes, ‘By taking these pictures, I belong. I am part of something greater than myself. These photographs are both my myths and truth. They are my love, hopes, fears, and strength.’ Home, for her, is not singular or fixed. We sometimes have the privilege of choosing a new home, and that place changes us. A trip to Iceland more than 20 years ago forever changed Sosnowska’s path, bringing with it a new language, an intense love, a teaching career, and a rural way of life. Ultimately, this book is a vessel detailing one artist’s search for a sense of belonging, inviting us to rethink how labour, heartbreak, death, landscape, and the quotidian contribute to an idea of home. It is a journey that resonates with our own quests for connection. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Trespasser. © Agnieszka Sosnowska

För is published by Trespasser.

—
Shana Lopes is an Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Born and raised in San Francisco, she earned her doctorate in art history from Rutgers University with a focus on the history of photography. Over the past fifteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has curated or co-curated exhibitions such as Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, Sea Change, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and the upcoming 2024 SECA Art Award.

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Bryan Schutmaat

Good Goddamn

Book review by Gerry Badger

I think I am beginning to see a trend amongst a certain group of American photographers, not exactly a runaway trend but at least a tendency. I thought this when I saw Tim Carpenter’s book, Local Objects, which was deservedly praised by John Gossage and also Ron Jude, who is himself part of this tendency, while Gossage is one of its big inspirations. Carpenter’s book was small, shot in black-and-white, restrained in design, and concentrated upon the photography. And crucially, it dealt with non-metropolitan America, the huge heartlands of the country that are so different, and almost diametrically opposed to the coastal conurbations.

Photographers like Ron Jude, Christian Patterson, Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks and others, most of them originally from the heartlands themselves, have been examining America’s interior myths and realities for a number of years, and can be said to constitute the latest generation of photographers, beginning with of course Walker Evans, who have gone in search of – as the French might put it – America profond.

Bryan Schutmaat first came to the photo-world’s attention with a classic of the genre. His Grays the Mountain Sends (2014) was a superb book, a series of portraits and landscapes of small, almost forgotten communities in the Rocky Mountains. It was a lavish, superbly produced book, shot in sumptuous colour, which demonstrated that Schutmaat was not simply a photographer of rare ability – especially in his haunting portraits – but someone who could use photography effectively to build a narrative.

That is the point about Schutmmat and what someone has called – whether kindly or unkindly I’m not sure – the ‘lumberjack’ school of photography. John Gossage recently said that he took up photography because it “allowed me to understand things that were not spoken.” Looking around a lot of today’s photography, it would seem that its makers are suspicious of this dictum, and are distrustful of photography without the crutch of words – or overelaborate design, which can amount to the same thing.

Not so Ron Jude, or Tim Carpenter, or Bryan Schutmaat. Grays the Mountain Sends did not suffer from a surfeit of words, and neither does Good Goddamn, which is modest in size but displays both an assuredness and a quiet ambition. Interestingly, Schutmaat has switched to black and white for this project, which seems to be making a claim for the work’s seriousness. Similarly, the restrained, classical design, like that of many American photobooks, states a certain respect for the integrity of the photographs themselves.

Good Goddamn, published by Trespasser, tells a nominally simple story. Shot over a period of a few days in February 2017, in Leon County, Texas, Good Goddamn documents, in only twenty-seven photographs, the last few days of freedom of Schutmaat’s friend Kris before he went into prison. As this is a book of hints and half-lights, the spaces between the pictures being as important, so to speak, as the pictures themselves, we are not informed of the crime that led to Kris’s incarceration, nor the duration of the sentence. But the fact he was not in custody possibly suggests that the misdemeanour was not serious, although the psychological weight of the book perhaps points to the opposite.

The cast of characters, besides Kris himself and the bleak mid-winter Texan landscape, are an old pickup truck and a hunting rifle with a very business-like telescopic sight. And there is an enigmatic blurred figure in two images at the end who might be Bryan Schutmaat, or a deputy sheriff come to escort Kris to his fate. Kris’ final days of freedom seem to be spent drinking Coors Lite or shooting his gun. So far this is a typically male Texan as we imagine them, tough guys who never cry, but the macho surface image is thoroughly undercut by the book’s elegiac tone and complex emotional mood. There is a general aura of wistfulness, not to say sadness, but also encompassing moments of reflection, uncertainty, loneliness, and bitter reflection, making for a concerto of shifting emotions in which the bare, gloomy landscape pulls the strings. The constant background is the expectation that what will follow will be a life changing experience for Kris, and not, at least in the short term, a good one.

All this is suggested by Schutmaat’s exceedingly well judged photographs – the somewhat indeterminate portraits of Kris drinking, smoking, or cradling his rifle, in nagging juxtaposition with the bleak but beautiful February landscape. One can almost feel the damp. Yet even a bleak, damp landscape will be a great loss when you are behind bars. I call the portraits indeterminate, not because they are soft in focus, but because they have an unsettling quality, which may come from nothing more than the sight of Kris in a short-sleeved tee shirt in a winter landscape – even though we are told that the weather was unseasonably warm during the shoot. Of course, it is more than that, Schutmaat has conveyed the psychology of this moment in Kris’ life unerringly, and makes us feel it too. Little wonder we are disturbed and unsettled.

In the end, Good Goddamn is about the photographs, which is not always the case with photobooks. As he demonstrated in Grays the Mountain Sends, Bryan Schutammt is a photographer with a rare sensibility, the pictures in Good Goddamn are so finely calculated and balanced. I can only compare his talent to that of a superior musician. There are many calling themselves ‘musicians’, but the difference between an ordinary musician and a great one is vast, and yet tiny – a matter of subtlety, the right emphasis, and nuance. It is like this with Schutmaat’s photographs. His images sing, like a well-played piece of music. They are a pleasure to contemplate, and contemplate over and over again for their felicities. They lend the book its visual delights, but also its emotional depths and bitter-sweet tone.

As always in photography, they are pictures of things we have seen before, many times. Ordinary but important things. Yet in themselves they are new, pictures we have not seen before. ♦

—
Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and photography critic of more than 40 years. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and monographs on John Gossage and Stephen Shore, as well as Phaidon’s 55s on Chris Killip (2001) and Eugene Atget (2001). In 2007 he published The Genius of Photography, the book of the BBC television series of the same name, and in 2010 The Pleasures of Good Photographs, an anthology of essays that was awarded the 2011 Infinity Writers’ Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He also co-authored The Photobook: A History, Vol I, II and III with Martin Parr.