Is it Peak Blurry and Grainy Yet

Just when you found about something about Japanese photography and thought that was all you needed to know, along comes something  the Brazilian photographic world view and you realise you haven't got a clue what's going on in the photography world beyond your narrow little corner..

I've reviewed a few books from Brazil including Guilherme Gerais' Galactico and Hart by Laura del Rey, but you get the feeling that there is another huge photographic world beyond this (and that's without even mentioning Salgado, who it's easy to forget is Brazilian).

An example of this is Marcelo Greco and his Sombras Secas. It's a book of black and white images that show the 'second skin' of Sao Paolo, the unconscious block of urban existence that lies a fraction beneath the surface.



It comes in full blurry, grainy black and white and it's very good; a representation that is paranoid, lucid and ever-so opaque. It's Sao Paolo in the picture and by bringing forward different elements Greco creates a city that looms over you with a kind of dull, brutalist concrete menace.



Sometimes there's too much menace and you wonder if it couldn't be reduced even more; 'A Photobook is like a jenga tower' is one of my favourite lines from the lines few weeks. It's something you can always reduce. But take care not to reduce it too much. But that excess is part of the blurred and grainy appeal, the are-bure-bokeh stream of consciousness that so deliciously takes you into the subterranean world that is both grim and somehow glamorous at the same time. They'll be sex and drugs involved in this film noir world but it won't necessarily be good sex and the drugs will be cheap and of dubious parentage; they'll make you see blurry, in black and white too and everything will look kind of worntorn and downtrodden for a while. And can't they tidy those wires up!



There is a whole bunch of blurry, black and white work around and it's getting blacker. I wonder if we aren't reaching peak blackness, or peak blurriness, or peak graininess but I must say I always enjoy it when I see it, despite thinking perhaps I shouldn't. And there are people who are taking it into all sorts of different corners; Paul Gaffney, Awoiska van der Molen, Katrin Koening, Sarker Protick and so on. And that makes things interesting.

Buy Sombras Secas here. 

Versus: Black and White. Where does one end and what does it mean?

There are two books in David Jimenez's Versus; a black book and a white book.

The black book is made up of images where glistens of water, trees, fish, doorways, leaves, clouds, cats, lighting, hands and walls shine though. There's not much shining though. It's all pretty black and difficult to see what is going on.

The white book is made up of images of mud, cloud, sand, grass, doorways, flesh, sky and sea. It's not really clear what is going on. It might even be that the images in the black book are the same as the one's in the white book but inverted (they're not but they could be. Maybe there are duplicates).

So I'll say it again; It's difficult to see what's happening. And that's the point of the book? It's about how we see images when they fall apart, how we put together the tiny fractions of image that still remain and form something from them.

It's a black-white philosophical enquiry then, with the fractions forming a narrative that is 'halfway belong the real and the imaginary... The images explore the limits of visual perception and transport us to an uncertain region in which we only have our intuition to guide us' as it says in the blurb.

It's a puzzle of a book then, one where you have to work to find meaning and the meaning is never conclusive or pinned down. It is about the edges of our perception but provides no answers or framework to consider how those edges work.

But it does take us to those edges and that's where it gets interesting, when you can't easily see what's going on, or when one thing becomes another and for a fraction of a second you're in a no-man's land of seeing; switching between the gears of different parts of the brain. And it is a lovely little package of a book, coming in those two volumes in a kind of slipcase.

Buy the book here.

Alison Rossiter's Lament and Paper Packages

So the basic story of Alison Rossiter's Lament is they are a series of found  and chemically created images made from old papers that Alison bought on ebay.

That is the basic story, but within that story there lies a social, cultural and economic history that has echoes of the technological and aesthetic developments of photography in the first half of the twentieth century.

The story of finding and buying the papers is also fascinating,the packages the papers are contained in so beautiful and evocative of a different time and approach to the production of the photographic print, one that is slower, more considered and in keeping with Alison's background in both conservation and the darkroom, part of a photographic subculture where material, chemistry and tonality take centre stage.

Alison's work will be on show in Arles. Below are some of the paper packages on their way to a show at Marian Goodman in Paris - absolutely beautiful and all bought from ebay.