Mère et Fils (Mother and Son) by Anne de Gelas is the follow up to her wonderful, but tragic L'Amoureuse. It tells the story of how Anne reconfigured her relationship with her son, and with herself, her lovers and her own body, after the death of her husband (the immediate aftermath of her grief is the subject of L'Amoureuse which you can read about here).

The advantage of video reviews is they will be reasonably quick and I will learn some basic editing by doing it again and again.

The disadvantage is you can't say as much as you can when you write. At some point in this review I  talk in brief about the authenticity of de Gelas's pictures, but also the flaws of her pictures. They are staged, they are a theatre, but somehow that makes them even the more real. The authenticity comes from the drive and intensity of the emotional narrative that she delivers through her pictures, her writing (half of which I don't understand - but it doesn't matter) and her drawings. The authenticity comes from the fact that she has a story to tell, a story she cares about, that is rooted in her mind, her soul, her body and her son. Too often, stories that are based upon staged images have no heart because they are coming from places where the story doesn't really matter, in narratives that don't really have a soul. They sometimes pretend to have a head, and move the focus to the cognitive but really they are empty vessels. . It's a complex story but she tells it beautifully. Mère et Fils isnt' like that. It's a story that matters!


Buy Mère et Fils here.

Best Photobooks in the Last 10 years

The 10th anniversary of this blog is coming up. Yesterday I featured my best post, today, as I write, my favourite photobooks, in the last 10 years that have featured on the blog are:

Anne de Gelas: L'Amoureuse


L'Amoureuse by Anne De Gelas and published by Le Caillou Bleu is a book about loss. It's moving and heartfelt but also has a determination and hardness about it; the determination to confront unexpected and tragic loss, to be angry about it, to hate it, to accept it, to build it into one's life story and be able to move on to a place where the pain and anger is tinged with affection and love.

This is the basic story (rough translation from text above):

There is a never a right way to tell a child about the death of his father.

T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

To face that loss, I plunged myself into the work that I had started more than 10 years ago consisting in writing a personal diary, now focussing on telling about my suffering but also about that surplus energy that burst within me.

Read more in A book that made me cry

Amak Mahmoodian: Shenasnameh


"I didn’t know it could be a book at first. I believe all good books start with some personal stories. It doesn’t matter if they are going to be successful or not, but each person must have a personal reason to create a book.

I started to collect the pictures with my friends and family and then friends of friends, in Tehran and then in other cities. At first I didn’t ask other women because I didn’t know if I had the right to ask other women.

As I collected them, I started to notice how different they were, especially in their look. It was really emotional for me, because in many cases I had their photograph but I had never met the woman. I would imagine her voice and her smile, her eyes, her life.  And then I would go and meet the woman and when I knocked at the door, it was like I was going to meet a photograph.



Sometimes I was really shocked because the woman was so different from the portrait I had imagined from the photograph. So each woman was different from another and then each woman was different from her photograph."

Read more about it here.

Ivars Gravlejs: Early works

"I'm from Latvia. It is normal there when you are in a strange place to ask if you can stay the night. So I am in Vienna. It's a strange place, yes, and I asked this Lithuanian guy if I can stay the night. And he says yes. So I get to his place and then he picks up my tablet. It's an Asus, just a cheap one. And he throws it against the wall. Look, it's smashed. And then he gets me by the neck and he's killing me. But I am lucky and I can get out. So I get out and go somewhere else. Then I see him today and he remembers nothing. I hope he will pay for a new tablet."

That's what Ivars Gravlejs said when I met him in Vienna. I was at a table with Michael Mack who called him over to show his new book, Early Works. And then I saw Early Works and the world has never been quite the same since. 

Ignacio Navas: Yolanda

Yolanda by Ignacio Navas is a modest book (Navas calls it a fanzine). It's about a woman called Yolanda, and it tells her story and that of her boyfriend, Gabriel. This is how the story ends:

She died December 6th, 1995. 

I already didn't like Christmas much, so from that year on, I haven't been able to stand it. 

It was hard, very hard. I was 25, very young. It was a mess.

- MY UNCLE GABRIEL

Read more about Yolanda here





Vincent Ferrané: Milky Way

This hasn't featured on the blog but it's marvellous!

You can read about it here.



This is just a small selection of favourites based on what resonates with me at the moment, the books that popped into my mind when I thought about what I remembered, what went deep into my core in some way. There could be so many, many more books in here because everything that has featured on the blog has value, has a story, shows people expressing themselves through words, images and the book form in all its glory.

Thank you to everybody who I have spoken to about books, who has made books, who is working on books, who publishes books, who sells books. Thank you for all the books and thank you for your work and thank you for talking to  me about your work. It is a marvellous form of visual storytelling. There have been so many brilliant books in the last 10 years and there are still brilliant books now. Long may the book form continue.

Anne de Gelas and the Recovery of Self

So there are people who aren't written about and one of the pleasures of this site is I can write about them and hopefully more people get to see their work.

One of the least-written about artists is Anne de Gelas. I wrote about her beautiful but tragic L'Amoureuse five years ago. This told the story of Anne's search for herself following the death of her husband on a day out at the beach.


T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

So the book's about the search for herself - which comes after the loss of self, the loss of multiple selves in fact, and the strategies employed to reconnect, to disconnect, or simply to evade the question.

It really is a most beautiful book and (even though it is in French) I find it hard to fathom that nobody else has written about it in the English language. Perhaps it's time for an English language edition.




Now de Gelas has a new book out. It's called Mère Et Fils (Mother and Son) and it's about how de Gelas's relationship with her son has changed, how her son has changed, the intensity that has become upon him since he became a teenager, since the death of his father. 

It's also about de Gelas herself, and the return to femininity and a desire that disappeared with the death of her partner. 

So it's a collaborative project, one of shifting identities, one that deals with the most difficult challenges that life can throw at us in a thoughtful and very moving way. Again, it helps if you speak French, but the depth of the work comes through no matter what the language. This is work that confronts life. 

See more images here. 

See the limited edition artist's book here

Grief, Gish and Three Days in Tharoul

I saw the 1927 silent classic, The Wind at the weekend. It was showing as part of the Bath Film Festival and came with a wonderful live accompaniment by Lola Perrin. It was tremendously intense, the piano carrying us through the screen into the faces of the characters; the troubed Letty, the heartbroken Lige and the predatory Wirt. There was such momentum in the playing that it made it a real journey into the desperate heart of Letty who was played by Lillian Gish.

In Bath, we don't often get the chance to see silent classics on the big screen (maybe the Bath Film Festival is the only time), so this was a real treat, especially with the fantastic score. What was also noticeable was how strong the female character was. Or maybe strong isn't the right word. She had a personality, let's put it that way.

The film essentially tells the story of Letty's departure from Virginia to forge a new life, to find love and fulfilment in the windswept badlands of the prairies. But instead of love, she comes up against hardship, jealousy and cruelty, with the maddening howl of the prairie wind the only accompaniment.

So Letty is going mad with the wind and she's going mad in her love life. The man she thinks she loves, Wirt, proves to be a scoundrel who is married. She is hearbroken and disappointed. When she is forced out of the home she is living in, she marries another man, Lige, out of desperation. Lige is truly in love with her. But she is not in love with him, as he finds out on their wedding night. When his love is unquenched, he is disappointed but honourable. He pledges that he will save her,that her happiness is his only wish.

And so he goes off to earn her ticket home. Letty is left to her own devices, and feels herself going mad with the howl of the wind. She is alone, but then the rapacious Wirt finds and violates her. In the morning she kills him and buries her body in the shifting sands of the prairies.

I won't give away the ending. At the Bath Film Festival, the projector broke just before the climax. But instead of seeing the Hollywood ending, Lola Perrin the pianist explained told us the ending that Lillan Gish had campaigned for - the one that belonged to the original novel, the ending where Letty walks out of the house into the howling wind, ending her life on her own terms, beholden to no man, able to be herself at last to confront her own mortality.

It was the right ending, the one that doesn't pull any punches, in which the woman determines her own destiny. Sadly, Gish was over-ruled by some Hollywood no-nothings and we got a different ending. Still great but Letty comes over as very much less independent.



Funnily enough, I saw another film about a woman lost in a wilderness at the weekend. Yes, it's Gravity. But here, the protagonist Ryan is a lily-livered soul who owes her life to Matt (played by George Clooney). Oh, what a sad apology of a character Ryan is. Her personality revolves around the MacGuffin of her dead daughter (continuing in the Bambi tradition: a dead male would have been too heartbreaking) and she is limited in all kinds of ways, including the spiritual. There is even a line where she moans that she can't pray, because she was never taught to pray, as if God had anything to do with it. This is from my wife's scathing review: 

Gravity is an inherently conservative, conventional Hollywood film dressed up as cutting edge. Personally, I feel insulted by that. It's like being promised Beef Wellington, then being given a sausage roll instead. The effects may be spectacular, but character and story-wise it feels like we've gone back in time. Ryan is no Ripley: she is a rather dull heroine who never seems to move beyond an emotional monotone: fear and lack of confidence. She is a vehicle for the plot, a body in a spacesuit. Personally, I didn't really care whether she made it or not.

So there we have it: female characterisation 1927 v female characterisation 2013. Lillian Gish monsters Sandra Bullock and George Clooney should just be embarrassed the dimensions he's plunging too.

So I was wondering about women in photobooks and it brought me back to Anne de Gelas. Rob Hornstra does a thing on photobooks,  the madness of the end-of-year lists (I love them!) and how to get on them. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek but alot of it looks like good advice to me. I'm not sure it's entirely meant to be.



picture by Nausicaa Giulia Bianchi

One of the things he talks about is the most neglected photobook.

Anne de Gelas's L'Amoureuse is my most neglected photobook. It's a story of grief where the message is never diluted, where the determination of a grief-stricken destiny is the absolute core of the boom. Very often, photography is used to dilute a message.People remove the story in the name of mystery, ethics or a skewed sense of balance. l'Amoureuse doesn't do this. It has the courage of its convictions.

The basic message sets the tone:

'There is a never a right way to tell a child about the death of his father.'

This is from the book:

T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.


To face that loss, I plunged myself into the work that I had started more than 10 years ago consisting in writing a personal diary, now focussing on telling about my suffering but also about that surplus energy that burst within me.

And this is from my original review. 

It's a story about family, childhood and being a woman who is suddenly plunged into a morass of solitude. How does that feel for you, for your family, for your future. What are the little things that will be missed, the little things that make a father and lover irreplaceable in a family's life.

It is also about physical and emotional love, and what it means to have that ripped away from you. What it means as a woman. There's a confrontation with both the immediacy of that loneliness, but also the wider void that threatens.

L'Amoureuse doesn't have a happy ending, because there's no happy ending to be had, but there is a resolution in the sense that life shifts, love changes and new beings are born out of tragedy.

So it's a book with a real character with a real life and all-too real problems. But then I wonder. It might not be that the book is neglected. I don't think it is. It's simply the fact that it is only in French and it's not that neglected in French-speaking land. I wonder how it would be 'neglected' if it were in English as well.

Maybe I should ask, why don't you do an English version.

The book was published by Fabrice Wagner at Le Caillou Bleu. He makes beautiful, thoughtful books. Every year he also runs a programme called Three days in Tharoul.

He invites people over to make a book. As in one book. The book is made and it stays in the house where it is made. A library accumulates. Slowly. It's slow photography.

Last year he invited Pino Musi, Remi Coignet and others. This year it's Paul Gaffney, Pierre Liebaert and myself. I have no idea what is going to happen but I'm sure it will be lovely.

So there will be a break from the blog for a week or so. And I'll be sure to ask Fabrice about an English version of L'Amoreuse.

Photobook Gimmick of the Year (Joint ) Winner

Right, let's get the gimmick over with first because it's a top gimmick. In fact if there were a Photobook Prize for Gimmick of the Year, this book would win it (jointly with Melinda Gibson's Smell-O-Rama Fire Experience).

The book is everything will be ok by Alberto Lizaralde (co-edited by Cristina de Middel ) and the gimmick is a thermodynamic cover that changes colour when you touch it. Press your hot little fingers on the matt black cover and it bruises, it is marked. The black turns to white. It's like charcoal turning to ash, death in its physical form fading into something ethereal and immaterial.

That fits the idea of the book which is called everything is ok. It is a fact/fiction book that is crystallised through a little end quote: 'I made these pictures between 2009 - 2013. Jorge died in 2010.'



That gets you thinking and so do the pictures of tears that run throughout the book. They are real tears, real grief, and they make the book. A theme of absence, loss and acute violence runs throughout the book. Abstract images of holes in the ground, gaping fish mouths and concrete blocks in the sea are familiar but still  provide a feeling of disorientation, but it is the grief that tells you that something is wrong; the exhausted face of a woman spent through waping, the reddened face of the (same?) woman stuck in the depths of grief. Who was Jorge and how did he die? And who is this woman that grieves for him so? Or is she not grieving for him?



The book ends on a high note with fireworks, waves and celebration; the material becomes immaterial, loss loses its immediacy and the sky is bright with freed spirits. Which is the cover again though on the cover the loss of pain is only temporary granted by human touch, warmth and emotion. And perhaps that's the same real grief. It only goes away when you touch it.



Buy the book here.

The book is up for the Paris Photo first book award. See it here with the other contenders. It's a great list .

This is the story of the book from Lizaralde's website.


'In life we all go through good times and bad times over and over, tirelessly. I went through one of these cycles and transformed it into this book. It was my story but very well could it be yours.

"everything will be ok" is the chronicle of a magical journey that starts with the emotional collapse that comes after falling into the hole and ends, through a long healing walk, with the assumption that after all, and whatever happens, life is always worth the struggle and it can actually be pretty funny.

Through photographs taken over five years, the book is set up to form as a classical narrative structure in three acts that continuously crosses the line between documentary and imaginary together with the line between the personal and the unfamiliar.

The ink in the book cover, reacts to temperature so it changes color whenever it is touched, leaving the fingerprints of the reader visible for some time. It is, in a way, a living book that mutates and adapts according to the viewer whose warmth and contact heals the darkness.


And this is Anne de Gelas' great book on grief, L'Amoreuse, in which sorrow and heartbreak is made concrete and personal. It is fact full stop.

Anne de Gelas: A book that made me cry

all pictures by Anne De Gelas

L'Amoureuse by Anne De Gelas and published by Le Caillou Bleu is a book about loss. It's moving and heartfelt but also has a determination and hardness about it; the determination to confront unexpected and tragic loss, to be angry about it, to hate it, to accept it, to build it into one's life story and be able to move on to a place where the pain and anger is tinged with affection and love.



This is the basic story (rough translation from text above):

There is a never a right way to tell a child about the death of his father.

T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

To face that loss, I plunged myself into the work that I had started more than 10 years ago consisting in writing a personal diary, now focussing on telling about my suffering but also about that surplus energy that burst within me.




Most of it was in French which I'm not terribly good at reading French, but the message still comes across. It's a story about family, childhood and being a woman who is suddenly plunged into a morass of solitude. How does that feel for you, for your family, for your future. What are the little things that will be missed, the little things that make a father and lover irreplaceable in a family's life.

It is also about physical and emotional love, and what it means to have that ripped away from you. What it means as a woman. There's a confrontation with both the immediacy of that loneliness, but also the wider void that threatens.

L'Amoureuse doesn't have a happy ending, because there's no happy ending to be had, but there is a resolution in the sense that life shifts, love changes and new beings are born out of tragedy. It's body focussed and seems almost therapeutic in feel - so has a touch of Jo Spence about it, but mixed with the nostalgia and joyfulness of Bertien van Manen's lovely Easter and Oak Trees; a book that reveals new layers with each viewing.

On the cover is a extended poem of De Gelas's last day at the beach with her son Max and her partner T. This brought tears to my eyes. It made me cry. I cry for films and songs and fiction, but photobooks?

The poem's called An (almost) perfect day - 4th April 2010.

This is how the poem ends...

I take your face between my hands, 
I still feel your lips on mine
That sweet, mutual movemnet of union
you say 'I'm cold'
I answer 'go straight home and get a coat'
I turn round to pick up my spade
out of the corner of my eye I see
your dark shape falling
I turn you over in the soft sand
they said 'diagnosis of the vital signs is very bad'
I spent the night telling you I loved you
kissing you
crying
looking at you and smiling
still happy to be at your side
impossible to comprehend death
ever