Mary Hamill's Tulips

When we were judging the dummies for Photobook Bristol/Gazebook Sicily, there was a really high standard.

Despite that, there were only two books that we all instantly said  yes to.

One of them was Mary Hamill's Semper Augustus.

'Semper Augustus is an inquiry into one woman’s understanding of her body and its cultural and historical significance' is what the artist's statement says.

The book a record of Hamill's periods as measured through tampons which are then upended to look like tulips, hence the title. It's very simple. It's very direct. Not many people would do it. Hamill did. It works.

Buy Semper Augustus here.

Why, Oh Why is Nothing Simple Anymore?

A short story by Thomas Boivin from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.


A Short Story by Thomas Boivin is a lovely book. It's a poetic affair, that tells the story of a relationship - from meeting across a table, to the beginning of passion, the apex, the highs and lows of a long distance relationship, final petering out into asymetrical falling out of love, separation, heartbreak and desolation.

It's a universal story, and the words are universal in a way. They are not pinned down in some ways, and they are certainly not pinned to the pictures which have a floaty, nebulous feel to them. So it's dreamlike. Sadly it's one of those books that is printed in a tiny edition (100) when it could sell more. How many more is the question, but I hope he prints a second edition (of more than 100).

A Short Story is a really strong example of text and image working together and it's probably (along with Yolanda by Ignacio Navas, The Spook Light Chronicles by Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley, Yu by Dragana Jurisic, Early Works by Ivars Gravlejs, Love on the Left Bank by Ed Van der Elsken, etc etc) one of my favourites.

But so many people are using supplementary elements to tell the story. At Photobook Bristol, Mark Power launched Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment ( a collaboration with poet Dan Cockrill and designer Dominic Brookman). This is an exploration of England which comes complete with poetry written by Cockrill, and delivered by Cockrill in Power's presentation, to accompany Mark's bang-on images of our soiled and faded nation.



More conventional forms of writing came courtesy of Murray Ballard's The Prospect of Immortality. This, together with Matthieu Asselin's Monsanto (winner of the Kassel Dummy Award), is one of the outstanding examples of a long-term documentary project finding its full expression in book form. In his book, Ballard looks at Cryonics and 'the quest to overcome the ‘problem of death’. Ballard is working with the text in a more considered and reduced form than is often the case in such a documentary subject, so making the story pack a punch and serves the images, rather than simply fills space.

On the Tipi table (which is a sight to behold), Andrea Copetti was showing Anne de Gelas' quite brilliant Mere et Fils and L'Amoureuse projects - both of which used extremely personal diaristic entries combined with sketches of heartbreak, loss and rediscovered passion. It really is quite beautiful.



Other books on the Tipi table showed the book form developing as object. Antonio Jiminez's Elite Controllers being one example of this.This is also an example of the merging of bookseller, publisher, gallerist and curator, a role that Martin Amis of Photobookstore has also taken on.



That is pretty much what Yumi Goto is as well. She talked about and then showed examples of work made through her Reminders Project Stronghold workshops. Again, text figured large in punching through extremely personal stories, but so did extremely intricate and beautiful design. Both Hajime Kimura (who brought his beautiful Snowflakes, Dog, Man book) and Hiroshi Okamoto (who brought his intricate and tragic Recruit book - runner up in the Kassel Dummy Awards) are examples of this.




The Reminders books are done brilliantly because ultimately there is Yumi Goto lurking in the background making sure that, design details notwithstanding, it's the story that matters. There's clarity there in other words,

But something can be good without that clarity. A case in point is the puzzle that is Eamonn Doyle's new book, End.. This comes with music, thirteen inserts, a glassine poster, a yellow cellophane wrapping that over-intrigued me (you can read all about it my review on Photo Eye next week)... Actually even reading the contents confuses me and gives me a headache. But I like it and it works and it's coming from a very different direction from just about everything.

End. is a set of 13 sections all brought together in a white leatherette slipcase, with black-embossed drawings and tip-in title sheet, wrapped in yellow cellophane.

Each section is folded to 200 x 280 mm, portrait.

Featuring 273 photographs, 20 ink drawings and a 7” vinyl sound work, these 13 Dublin “moments” comprise:

One yellow book, thread sewn, printed in black duotone with screen-printed drawings.

Two black books, thread sewn, printed with silver inks.

Three full-colour books, thread sewn, with screen-printed drawings.

Four concertina-folded double-sided diptychs in full-colour with screen-printed drawings.

One large full-colour double-sided folded map.

One 7” vinyl record tucked inside a printed and folded glassine poster.

At the centre of the work is a concertina-folded double-sided full-colour triptych.

So everything is getting more involved, personal and generally difficult. Which is a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing because when it's done badly, the design becomes redundant and all you are left with is a mulch of inserts, pull-outs and shabby stitching that can't disguise the crapness of the content.




So it was refreshing to see Hoxton Mini Press's books. These are beautifully made and presented books that are a kind of an upscale variation on the Cafe Royal Model with a nod towards the Useful Photography brand of content. The books cost £12 and the special editions (which look fantastic) cost £40. So there's accessibility in pricing. And the content is great. My favourite was Ronni Campana's Badly Repaired Cars.

It's simple but it's pushing the book form in a different way. Photographers, designers, publishers, booksellers, everybody's pushing the book form in a different way, and those ways are not always in the same direction. There's a lot going on. What it all means is, as always, another question that neither I nor anybody else seems to have an answer to.

An Interview with Amak Mahmoodian

I've just finished posting on the Photobook Bristol Blog. Here here are some of the best posts from the blog.

The first is an interview with Amak Mahmoodian who talked at the festival and launched her beautiful, beautiful book Shenasnameh there over the weekend (and it's the first publication of Alejandro Acin and his IC Visual Labs).

I'm biased because I was involved in its making, but when Yumi Goto, Susan Meiselas and Andrea Copetti are buying your book, you know you're making something special, something that is personal, political and ultimately loving. And it works perfectly as a book.

An Interview with Amak Mahmoodian

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  the whole interview with Amak Mahmoodian here.

Buy Shenasnameh here.

Farewell Photobook Bristol 2016.

As Creative Director (together with Alejandro Acin) of Photobook Bristol  I've been a little absent from this blog for the last few months taking care of Photobook Bristol Business, including running content on the PBB blog (some of which I'll highlight on this blog as a way of slowly getting it in gear before shutting it down for the summer).

The final post on the the Photobook Bristol gave a twitterfied overview of the festival, but maybe didn't quite capture the spirit of the event possibly because it was virtually unreadable due to all the typos.

And it was the spirit of the event that made it so special. Because it was special. That's what I felt, and that's what even the most cynical, bitter, and hardened photobook festival attendees in the audience felt. Photobook Bristol is very much based in the community; the volunteers, the people who host the speakers, the venue, the food, are all Bristol based. That makes a difference.

Tied in with that sense of localness is an outward looking philosophy. So there were speakers from five continents; in addition to the European speakers, there was Mariela Sancari from Central America, David Solo and Susan Meiselas from North America, James Barnor and Laura El-Tantawy from Africa, and Amak Mahmoodian and Yumi Goto from Asia. Photobook Bristol may be local but it's not parochial.

It's also a festival, not a conference or a symposium. So it's a bit of a pow-wow of photography and photobook types. At the same, it ultimately strips down to a bunch of people involved in photobooks, art, publishing or photography listening to a bunch of other people involved in photobooks, publishing or photography talking. For three days straight.

If this were a conference, this might be a painful thing involving lots of attempts to stop the eyelids from drooping, but what became increasingly apparent this year was that nearly all those speakers involved in photobooks, publishing or photography didn't actually talk that much about photobooks, publishing or photography - mainly because it's not that interesting beyond a certain threshold.

Instead they talked about other things that were much more interesting; like what it is to suddenly find yourself without a home, or the hatred needed to scratch penmarks across the face and eyes of a passport photograph, or the reactions you get when you show art lovers pornography at a gallery opening.

It was entertaining and the talks came with music, with singing, with poetry, with literature, with film. The main intent was to be interesting, to be entertaining even! Deeply serious content was in there as well - but it was secondary to the story. The story exemplified the content and so made it accessible, and not dry.

That indicates an increasing openness of thinking, of a fluidity of ideas and how you can combine images with text, with music, with sound, with sculpture to tell a story, to nail an idea. So it's photobooks going beyond the printed page.

I don't really give a monkeys about discussions on how the photobook will take over, or how to grow the market, or edition sizes, or whether it's a vanity object or not (and there are a bunch of articles on this blog that talk about this). To me it's a niche market of enthusiasts who have passion for what they do, what they make and who they communicate with, and are seeking new ways to do all of these things.

I don't think the photobook market will grow or go mainstream. But I think a lot of the ideas being developed from photobooks will develop and be used in different forms. That's where it will have weight.

Tied in with that openness in the way of working, there is a large shift in the way of talking about work. There is a willingness to experiment and try new things, and in accompaniment with that there is a recognition that not everything always works, that people don't necessarily know how things work. There is a kind of confidence in this lack of knowledge; a confidence in having a lack of confidence. And that was recognised by the audience, and respected and appreciated, So there is a kindness and a generosity in there on the part of the audience. That's very important.

There is also an understanding that an unneccessary opacity and the tendency to linger on points that exaggerrate the importance and voice of the photographer and her/his influence in the world - are arrogant, pointless and ultimately tedious.

You need to be interesting in other words. You need to tell a story. The loosening up of documentary practice has led to a loosening up of the way people make work - and talk about work. It has led to a greater degree of uncertainty in their work, and people seem to recognise this quite readily. And this has led to a loosening up of the way people listen about work.

So instead of an endless stream of questions on the ethics of this or that, or the politics of representation, the questions asked by the audience came more from an equal footing, an attempt to try to understand the how and why of the work. Embedded in these attempts were all the usual questions on ethics and politics. But these things weren't front loaded and so the effect was more of a search for answers rather than an attack dog mentality.

It seems that everybody is trying to understand how images work - on their own, in books, in installations, with music, with text - and there's a recognition that nobody is quite certain. That makes for a discussion and atmosphere that is both invigorating, democratic and, ultimately, interesting.

And I think that is part of what made this year such a success.

In any case, here are a few prize nuggets from the weekend, along with some images.

Dragana Jurisic: "Nationalism is for stupid people”

Sonia Berger of @dalpinebooks . It’s better to have an excess of books than too few books

Ivars Gravlejs: Being a photographer at a newspaper is “like a taxi driver profession.”

Ken Grant: “My dad never told me I could get arrested for driving the transit van to the timber yard when I was 12.”

James Barnor: “When you take pictures of babies you have to be patient and you have to be alert”

Martin Parr: “If you ask most curators, they don’t know who Krass Clement is.”

Krass Clement: “I love the modern world but I can’t support it.”

Krass Clement: “You can’t live without humour and at the end of your life you die. That’s what you’re sure of in life.”

Ania Nalecka on photobook design: “The first rule of design. There are no rules, there are only consequences.”

Ania Nalecka: “A Photobook gives you dots to connect, not drawing the lines. The question is how far you put the dots apart.”

Mariela Sancari: “It might sound corny but I do believe in the healing power of art, both for the artist and the viewer.”

Laura El-Tantawy: “After photographing one, two, three protests, you’re basically done.” 

Laura El-Tantawy: “The narrative around the Revolution has been fragmented, and manipulated in every way.”

Mark Power: "What can a foreigner bring, or see in another country that people in that country can’t see."
Dan Cockrill: “Let me shit upon Avon and piss on Shakespeare’s grave.”

And the stand out? There were many stand outs, but Martin Parr in conversation with Krass Clement was something I will never forget.

It's Wrong and It's Bad

Hans Bellmer: Wrong and Good

My not-very-alter-ego wrote this on the Photobook Bristol Blog yesterday in reference to photobooks and what can go wrong. It's actually quite a short list, but here goes.

You get books where the cover is wrong, where the title is wrong, where the typeface is wrong, where the text is wrong, where the edit is wrong, where the paper is wrong, where the pictures are wrong, where the story is wrong or there is no story. You even get books where everything is right and then you come to the last picture – and they’ve saved it to the last possible moment to make a mess of it all. Goddamn it, the last picture is wrong.

The idea of photobooks being wrong did touch a nerve, with many people expressing the idea that it's not a matter of wrongness, but a matter of subjectivity. It all depends on what you like or you dislike, it's all a matter of taste.

Maybe so, and in certain circumstances (in education, child-rearing, while hostage negotiating) the word wrong might be the, er, wrong word.

When I do book reviews on this blog, I don't use the word wrong or bad. The reviews are gentle and understanding and try to ascertain what the photographer is trying to do.

Perhaps the reviews are too gentle. Because of course there are books that are wrong. Of course there are books that are bad. Everybody who has gone through the process of making a really good book knows that. They have been there. I have been there.

Sometimes you don't know what is wrong about your book because you're learning how to make it, how to communicate it. So the wrongness is based on ignorance. Just because you are not aware that it's wrong doesn't mean it's not wrong. Learning how to make a book is a process and mistakes are something you need to go through along the way. That, as was mentioned yesterday, is why people like Kazuma Obara, go through 16 dummies before getting at the most effective one.

Chairman Mao: Wrong and Bad

This doesn't mean there is such a thing as a perfect book, or an ideal book. There are an infinite number of possibiliteies of possibilities for a book and there is no absolute right one. There are many more wrong ones and generally they come about because people are taking short cuts, being lazy, are unaware of the errors of their ways, or are judging themself by standards lower than those with which they judge others. 

I have done all of those things, everyone I know has done all of those things - including the people who make really great books (or really-good anything else for that matter). Innoculating myself against my essential laziness and self indulgence is part of the process of actually getting round to making something really good. I hope to get there soon.

Dentists: Right and Bad

Anyway, enough of books, what about food. I remember making a Steak and Guinness pie when I was living in Queens Court in Bristol. It was the first time I'd ever made one and I did it without a recipe. I got the idea that the more Guiness you had the better it would be, so I added a couple of cans and then reduced it to a thick sauce.

I still remember that pie. I didn't eat much of it but I remember the taste.

And this year, just a few months ago, my wife made a dessert for us. It was a chocolate and avocado mousse (chocolate and avocado is a thing). She didn't tell us about the avocados though. We thought it was a chocolate mousse.

We still remember that mousse. We didn't eat much of it but we remember the taste.

Freudian Slippers: Right and Good

Like the Steak and Guinness Pie, it was wrong. And it was bad. And we should embrace that wrongness and that badness so that we never make the same mistakes again.

So perhaps in describing the original paragraph should be rephrased. Perhaps it was too gentle. I think this reads better:

You get books where the cover is wrong and bad, where the title is wrong and bad, where the typeface is wrong and bad, where the text is wrong and bad, where the edit is wrong and bad, where the paper is wrong and bad, where the pictures are wrong and bad, where the story is wrong and bad or there is no story. You even get books where everything is right and then you come to the last picture – and they’ve saved it to the last possible moment to make a mess of it all. Goddamn it, the last picture is wrong and bad.

Silence is the Ultimate Weapon of Power

Indeed. I love it. These are by Angus Carlyle who works with image and sound - and how the one changes the other. And how silence operates, both within the image and without!

Angus is talking tomorrow at Sound, Word and Landscape in Bristol. If you're interested in how to communicate with images to bring in word, sound, music and more, come to this. It will be brilliant.

The full schedule and other information is below.

Buy Tickets here

RUNNING ORDER
Doors open 12pm for 12.30 start

1st session

Introduction by Jesse Alexander
12:30 – 1:15 Angus Carlyle
1:15 – 2:00 Beth and Thom
2:00 – 2:40 Max Houghton

2:40 – 3:20 Break – and signings

2nd Session
3:20 – 4:05 Jem Southam
4:05 – 4:50 Paul Gaffney – followed by Stray: book launch and order taking

4:50 – 5:20 Break

3rd Session

5:20 - 6:05 Ester Vonplon
6:05 – 6:50 Susan Derges
6:50 – 7:20 Panel Discussion/Q and A: Jesse and Max Chair: Susan, Angus, Jem, Paul, Ester, Beth and Thom

8:00 Dinner

BUFFET DINNER
Dinner after the event is at 8pm and will be a buffet prepared by Chandos Deli (If you’ve been to a Photobook Bristol event before, you might know how great this food is). This costs £10 and you can pay on the day in cash, but we need to know numbers in advance, so please email us back ASAP and let us know if you would like to be fed. Thanks.

GETTING THERE
The SouthBank Club is on Dean Lane, Bedminster, Bristol BS3 1DB - From the centre take the second left off Coronation Rd., running along the south side of the river. The venue is down the hill on the bend. There is no off road parking at the venue.

On foot

The Southbank is 15 minute walk from Bristol Temple Meads Train Station.

Take the swing bridge by the Arnolfini and the pedestrian footbridge over the river. Straight across is Dean Lane. Its 10 mins walk from the Arnolfini & 5 mins walk from Asda car park.

TICKETS
All your names are on the door. No physical tickets needed.

FREEBIES
All advance ticket holders get the choice between a £5 voucher to spend on the day at the RRB stall, or a free copy of Fulton’s Walking Artist. Claim your preferred option when you arrive.

BOOKSHOP
Will be open all day with a large selection of photobooks on offer.

SNACKS
Will be available to buy from the venue throughout the day.

See you there on Saturday.

This Saturday 7th November: Come and See - Sound, Word and Landscape

This is the schedule for Sound, Word and Landscape (my prejudice keeps on changing it to Word, Sound and Landscape) taking place in Bristol this Saturday November 7th. 

It's landscape but there's sound, music, word, biography, walking, geology, meditation, maps and bombs thrown in - so it's more about how you think about, make and show work. Landscape is not just landscape in other words.

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be second-launching their fabulous book, Missing Buildings, and Paul Gaffney will be launching his new book Stray. You'll be able to see, feel and smell a copy - and you'll be able to order one too. They're handmade so there's only 50 of them and they will go very fast. 

Tickets are £25 full price, £18 for students. You get a free £5 book voucher for spending at the bookshop on the day. And there is a fabulous buffet dinner (and it is fabulous) for £10 at the end of the talks (you need to book before for this). 

If you're in the area, or even if you're not, don't miss it. 

Sound, Word and Landscape Schedule

 12:00 – Doors Open

12:20 Introduction by Jesse Alexander

12:30 – 1:15 Angus Carlyle 

1:15 – 2:00 Beth and Thom Atkinson 

2:00 – 2:40 Max Houghton 

3:20 – 4:05 Jem Southam 

4:05 – 4:50 Paul Gaffney 

5:20  - 6:05 Ester Vonplon 

6:05 – 6:50 Susan Derges 

6:50 – 7:20 Panel Q and A: Jesse and  Max Chair:  Susan, Angus, Jem, Paul, Ester, Beth and Thom

8:00 Dinner

Landscape is an Exhausted Medium! Oh Yeah! We'll Prove it Isn't!

'Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode  of artistic expression. Like life, landscape is boring; we must not say so.'

That's from W.J.T. Mitchell's Landscape and Power.

But it's not. As all the speakers at Word, Sound and Landscape in Bristol on November 7th will be evidence of. Landscape isn't just landscape; it's biography, it's the environment, it's word, it's music, it's the entirety of our being.

But still, it's a question that Jesse Alexander, author of Perspectives of Place, will be raising during the day.

If you're remotely interested in how to think about, make or exhibit landscape work in moving and thought provoking ways, come to Sound, Word and Landscape.

Bristol, November 7th

Buy Tickets Here. They are going fast.

(And feel free to replace 'landscape' with any other word that takes your fancy. 'Art', 'Fashion', 'Photojournalism', 'Documentary' 'The Photobook' 'Academia' 'The Magazine' or anything you care to mention. See if it has a ring to it or not.



Here are Mitchell's Theses on Landscape (see more here)

1. Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.

2. Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other. As such, it is like money: good for nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless reserve of value.

3 Like money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. It does so by naturalizing its conventions and conventionalizing its nature.

4 Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package.

5 Landscape is a medium found in all cultures.

6 Landscape is a particular historical fonnation associated with European imperialism.

7 Theses 5 and 6 do not contradict one another.

8 Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression. Like life, landscape is boring; we must not say so.

9The landscape referned to in Thesis 8 is the same as that of Thesis 6.

Bristol Landscape Day: Visit Richard Long on the Way

Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

When you come to Sound, Word, Landscape on November 7th, be sure to stop in at the Arnolfini - which is a 10 minute walk from the Southbank (and exactly halfway between Bristol Bus Station/Bristol Temple Meads train station and the venue).

Richard Long is on show there with Time and Space. his Walks made into Textworks (see the examples above), his art made walking, photographs of sculptures made along the way, and his mud painting - made from mud from the River Avon. If you don't know about Avon mud, it's quite a thing and best seen from another 15 minute walk up to the mouth of Bristol's Floating Harbour where you'll also get the best view of Britain's most beautiful bridge.

As an added bonus, you can see his new sculpture made from Cornish Slate - which you're not allowed to walk on. 


Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Lines, Paths and Lives Made by Walking

picture by Paul Gaffney

Paul Gaffney will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here




Titles are important. They can say alot or they can say nothing. 

For me, the best-titled book of the last few years is Paul Gaffney's We Make the Path by Walking. 

It's a title that sucks you in. It's abstract but concrete, instantly comprehensible, an idea that we have all had but not quite followed through. And it's philosophical as well, in a very Buddhist kind of way. We make our lives by how we live them. We should live according to the right path, behaving towards others how we want them to behave to us, with charity and kindness, but with a backbone to stand up to injustice when we see it. We make the path by walking. Indeed.

And of course the title has a more basic meaning, which is even more profound. We understand the title through the lives we lead, the paths we walk, the world we live in. The path makes the world. You can see it written into fields, pastures and hillsides, in the lanes, roads and highways that we walk, ride, and drive along. 

A Line Made by Walking - by Richard Long, 1967

We Make the Path by Walking describes the world around us, how we see it, how we experience it, how we live it. It also describes the history of land art. In that geographical and biographical respect, it ties in with the work of Jem Southam and Susan Derges (also speaking in Bristol on November 7th). It's a title that is influenced by and personifies the work of Hamish Fulton or Richard Long (and you can see Richard Long's exhibition at the Arnolifini in Bristol till November 15th), it summarises the ideas of psychogeography and the basic ways in which we map the world. 

And then there's the pictures in the book. They were made during Gaffney's multiple hikes of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. But they are not so much monuments to the landmarks and people he met on the walks, as a meditation on how we interact with the land when we walk, how we forget the land by being part of it. 

It's meditation and it's pilgrimage and it's terribly effective. Gaffney is a photographer whose work is mystifying. People like it but they are never quite sure why. He's a photographer who articulates the ideas that we have all had, and does it with a depth that most people never reach. 

Paul Gaffney will be talking about these things in Bristol on November 7th. He will also be talking about his new work Stray. It's difficult to make a follow up book to work that is as strong as We Make the Path by Walking. But from the dummy, Stray looks like it will hit the spot. Is the book going to be ready for November? I hope so. 

Paul Gaffney will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Photobook Bristol: The Man with the Golden Shoes

Ah, Photobook Bristol!

Well, it's photobook luvvie time, but it is over and it really was such a wonderful and open event with great speakers that went from the beautiful photography of Tom Wood, the intensity of Laia Abril, to the soulfulness of Carolyn Drake, the domestic delights of Anna Fox, the invention and wit of Erik Kessels and the charm and insight of Catherine Balet.

 It was a privilege to be able to have a drink, listen to and talk with some of the most innovative,  dynamic, sociable, funny, soulful, considerate, caring and above all, creative people in photography, publishing, teaching and design, as well as see new work and students getting in the photobook mix. And that's what makes it such a unique festival - it's small size and it's openness. It's a feelgood festival despite being in England which isn't really a feelgood kind of place,

Three great books were launched. Peter Mitchell's Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody, Laura El Tantawy's The People, and Mariela Sancari's Moises, more of which before the summer break.

And Ricardo Martinez Paz was there with Catherine Balet (who you will hear much, much more of when her new book is published) and his golden shoes. And that was delightful.  And very, very cool. Cool and open. There's a good combination!

So that's my symbol for the weekend: The Man with the Golden Shoes. Click Click and off we go...

See an album here.

The Problem is Photobook World is not Incestuous Enough

picture by Eamonn Doyle

So the blog will take a short break for Photobook Bristol and Vienna Photobook Festival, both of which I'm looking forward to immensely

In Vienna I'll be talking about narrative and my German Family Album. And at Photobook Bristol I'll be on a panel with

Eamonn Doyle, Kate Nolan and Kazuma Obara

talking about their first photobooks, all of which are massively interesting, engaging and challenging in different ways and have featured on this blog. As well as talking about what went right and what went wrong with their books (and what they would do differently), I think the question of why publish a book in the first place will come up.



picture by Kate Nolan

It's a question that came up on the Photobooks Facebook page where questions were asked on the business model of photobook-land, its incestuousness and all the other usual questions that we repeatedly ask of photobookery.

Well of course Photobook World can be small and it can be an echo-chamber. But it's not really that incestuous. If something is incestuous then the group is closed. If anything, Photobook World is not incestuous enough. I think that is what people are really objecting to.

Sure, you do get the same voices popping up again and again, and you get cliques, but at the same time if you have something that is good and you want to be seen or heard, it's relatively easy. It's a very open world. And the more open you are and the more engaged and engaging you are, the easier it gets. The world of the Photobook is far more open than the equivalent photographic worlds in academia, art or commerce.



picture by Kazuma Obara

Look at the end of year best lists and you'll see names that  were completely unknown a few years earlier. On the 2014 list from Photo-Eye. you had people like Laia Abril, Nicolo Degiorgis, Max Pinckers, Andy Rochelli, Alejandro Cartagena, Momo Okabe, Awoiska van der Molen. 

Go back a year to 2013 and you can see Pierre Liebaert, Lorenzo Vitturi, Oscar Monzon, Carlos Spottorno, Mike Brodie, Carolyn Drake and Paul Gaffney. 

Go to 2015 and 2016 and you'll get people on there who are still students now. Guaranteed.

These are people who have popped up out of nowhere (or almost nowhere) simply because they made something interesting, int he same way that Doyle, Nolan and Obara made something interesting. So you can make it 'big' in photobook world, make an interesting book. It's that simple. 

Of course very few people have heard of these people outside photobook land, but that's because if you're going spend £20 on a book of pictures, you have to be really interested in photography and books. Not many people are. There are other things to spend one's money on. 

But the openness I do not doubt. And if you worry about the world being limited by a handful of tastemakers, the answer is also simple. Write a blog, start a magazine, have an opinion and get busy. 

So sometimes when people talk about photobook world being too closed, I sometimes get the feeling they mean the opposite; that it's too open.

Slow Photography: Beyond the Visual Landscape

from Angus Carlyle: The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice

So we've had slow TV, how about slow photography? Most photography is pretty slow, some of it by accident, and some of it quite intentionally.

    picture by Susan Derges

This November, together with Max Houghton and Jesse Alexander, I'm organising a day of events titled Beyond the Visual Landscape. It's a day of sound and word and image and how they all tie together, a day where we go beyond photography to understand what it is that makes a place look, sound and feel the way it does, and how we can use these ideas to represent the landscape and the way we walk, sense and remember it. It's a day of intentionally slow work taking place in a slow venue filled with slow loveliness.



picture by Paul Gaffney

The line-up is:

Angus Carlyle
Susan Derges
Paul Gaffney
Jem Southam 

Which is a great line-up (and we have additions to make) of thought provoking artists who put the psychological, emotional, biographical and physical at the heart of their work. So put the date in your diary. It's taking place at the Southbank Centre (the spiritual home of Photobook Bristol) on Saturday November 7th. Tickets will be available in July/August.



picture by Jem Southam