Requiem: From the Cradle to the Flames

Requiem by Goran Bertok is a beautifully packaged affair. It consists of two books called Postmortem and Visitors, both covered in charcoal card, Japanese stab-bound with black thread, the titles cut into the covers.

There's a gatefold sleeve with two little boxes or pouches for the books to go into and it opens and closes quite delightfully.



Open up the books though, and it's not all delightful. Postmortem is a series of images from a post-mortem. They're more focussed on the face and its details; the layering of white mould on the eyes and the skin, the transformation of living skin into something dead and waxy, then something live and consumptive.



The other book is of a cremation. Again, the images are small on the page, very modest and low key as they show the flames of the cremation, at first as a full-bleed flames only image, before breaking into smaller images that show the burning skull as it becomes ever-more skull like and then gradually disintegrates into a ghostly union with the flames. There are intimations of horror and the spiritual here, it's death as a spectacle, and as such I wonder if these pictures, which are quite sinister couldn't be bigger, or if this would be too much of a shock to the system considering all the supernatural and hellfire images that spring to mind.

There's nothing new in the pictures. It's post-mortem work (think Serrano), decay (Sally Mann) and cremation (Sue Fox) , but that doesn't really matter. It's a strong book that has been beautifully made.

Buy Requiem here. 

Photographing the Holocaust, Photographing the Real

I've always wondered about the idea that photographs are not real. I would rather not take the line that photographs lie. They don't. People lie.

Photographs are very real, though beneath those little pixels or grains of the image are contained the realities of how they were made, modified and distributed (the indexicality of the photograph points in multiple directions).

There may very often be some dishonesty involved in all of that making, modification and distribution, but that is all part of the photographic story. It's not just the image that matters. The picture might be staged, or manipulated, or captioned with an untruth, but that dishonesty is still real and it's part of life. It's all real.

Anyway. I don't think there is anything more real than what the pictures on this post show, the way they were made, and the history they are part of. And I think that the story of how these pictures were made, and how other pictures were made during the Second World War, by people on all sides, are brutally revealing of the multiple functions of photography in all its forms - as accusation and evidence and defiance (in these pictures), but as much, much more besides; pseudo-science, identification, propaganda, as a mark of humanity, of inhumanity, as a trophy, a souvenir, and ultimately, and most brutally, as a marker of life or death.

These pictures are some of the secretly taken pictures of bodies being burnt at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 (the crematoria were so busy burning bodies that day that additional pyres were set up outside the ovens), and of women running towards the gas chambers.

The people who took the pictures were sonderkommando, prisoners detailed to work around the crematoria. This is an extract from Janina Struk's Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence.


Somewhere about midway through 1944, we decided to take pictures secretly to record our work… From the very beginning, several prisoners from our Sonderkommando were in on my secret: Szlomo Dragon, his brother Josek Dragon, and Alex, a Greek Jew whose surname I do not remember… Some of us were to guard the person taking the pictures. In other words, we were to keep a careful watch for the approach of anyone who did not know the secret, and above all for any SS men moving about in the area… 

We all gathered at the western entrance leading from the outside to the gas-chamber of Crematorium V… Alex, the Greek Jew, quickly took out his camera, pointed it towards a heap of burning bodies, and pressed the shutter… Another picture was taken from the other side of the building, where women and men were undressing among the trees. They were from a transport that was to be murdered in the gas-chamber of Crematorium V.






Read more here.

Deadline: A Story of newspapers filled with nostalgia, love and sorrow

This is what Will Steacy has to say about his book Deadline, a book (?) that is about the death of a newspaper, the death of the newspaper industry, the death of the family business.

 'It has been a long gut-wrenching journey, but sometimes the hardest pictures to take end up being the most important pictures.'

It's a quote that recognises that, Austin Powers mojo-monkeys beside, great photography is never that simple; it involves difficult choices, hard work, dedication, and a mind that goes directly for the story has some kind of meaning. In the case of Deadline, it's a meaning that connects to family, to work, to a way of life that is dying. So it's very personal.




'When we lose reporters, editors, newsbeats and sections of papers, we lose coverage, information, and  a connection to our cities and our society, and, in the end, we lose ourselves. Without the human investment to provide news content it becomes a zero sum game on the information highway to nowhere. The fibers of the paper and pixels in the screeen are worthless unless the words they are presented on have value.

The newspaper is much more than a business, it is a civic trust.'

Those words are in the lead story of Will Steacy's Deadline, a lament to  'America's fastest shrinking industry', the newspaper business, and is told through the shrinking circulations and lay-offs at The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper that had risen from nowhere to become one of North America's most influential publications.

Will Steacy's father, Tom, worked at the newspaper and for 4 years, from 2009 until the newspaper's closure in 2012 through to 2013, His grandfather was there before him and Steacy photographed both for the newspaper and, as the end loomed near, for this project; the newsrooms, the printrooms,the furniture, the meetings, the announcements, the redundancies, the end!

Deadline is published as a newspaper. It's laid out like a newspaper, and it's filled with type as a newspaper should be. And it's a big newspaper, like a weekend edition that comes in five sections; there's the main section which gives an overview, the Golden Age section (the 1970s - the 'Pulitzer years'), the Family Business section (which features archive material from 3 generations of Steacy involvement with the newspaper), the That's the Press section (how the newspaper is actually printed and made), and the Farewell, Tower of Truth section (the architecture of the ending).

It's full of text by former Inquirer staff. So there are stories on former editors, on turning points in the newspaper industry, of key stories in the paper's history, on how the newspaper is made, how advertising is sold, and how and why the Philadelphia Inquirer ultimately ceased to be.

Interspersed in there are pages of Steacy's pictures; a series on an editor's desk space shows the newsroom around him getting emptier and emptier until finally the newspaper is closed and all we can see is a dead office space denuded of sound, life, inquiry.

Another series shows the production process; the paper, ink and rollers of the printing presses. There are images from the newspaper archives to go with this, along with personal recollections of the days when the paper was printed on site in 'The Tower of Truth', side by side with the newsroom, the production and printing of news co-existing side by side.

The Family Business section is an archive of family photos and documents. It could have been a book in itself It's personal and links Will Steacy to the traditions his family (his family have worked in newspapers for over a century) passed down to him. 'When I began this series in 2009, I never expected to watch my father get laid off,' he writes, 'I never expected the staff and budget cuts to continue as mercilessly as they did... and I never expected my father's career to end when it did.'

I was a bit doubtful when I got Deadline. I love newspapers. I buy them everyday (except Sunday) and have done all my life. Internet news, or social media do not compare. You do not read them the same, and there is something ephemeral about words that appear on the screen that is not the same as those printed on paper. We read them differently and we understand them differently.

Initially I thought the problem with Deadline would be that it's like a Weekend Edition. There are five different sections. And when I think of weekend editions, I think of the initial process of sifting that I go through before I even start to read. It generally goes something like this. Chuck the motoring, the property, and the business (in the UK, but not in other countries) Start with sport, next comes the main, then the mag, and finally the family section and review. Cookery sections are for flicking through and drooling and scoffing at in equal measure.

So I expected there to be a lot of detritus. But there's not. It's all eminently readable. It's a combination of a paean to a great newspaper (old headlines, stories and headlines are reprinted), but also a history of the industry, and a meditation of what the future might look like.

There are many very good photographic works like The Pigs by Carlos Spottorno that mirror some elements of the design of magazines (The Economist in Spottorno's case), but Deadline goes much, much further. He has made something that is text-led but with pictures that serve a purpose too. They blend in with the newspaper format throughout and link the present to the past in a way that is both nostalgic yet contemporary, and with a personal angle. It all makes sense in a way that goes beyond the pragmatic and is filled with nostalgia, love and a deep, deep sorrow.

It's not a photobook in the usual sense (or the sense talked about in this post). There's no point in buying it just for the pictures. That's not what it's about. You have to read it. And you should read it because the stories that are told are fascinating, written with a more personal touch than your usual journalese (though the dramatic overtones do occasionally come through), but dripping with different layers of history; the personal, the political, economic, and family. Deadline has a point to it. It tells a story that is happening now, and it tells it brilliantly!



Buy Deadline here.

Very few photobooks would be missed if they weren't made.

     image by Tony Gentile and the War: A Sicilian Story - the most visually coherent photobook of 2015


So at the same time as doing this blog I am also guest-editing the Photobook Bristol Blog.

This is a post from earlier in the week about the design-thoughts of Ania Nałęcka, one of the speakers at Photobook Bristol 2016.

The bold is what Ania said, so clearly and delightfully, at a lecture I saw her give. The not-bold is a less polite version based on some of the photobooks I've seen over the last year, and some of the frustrations we all sometimes have with photobooks. But it's still polite.


Why Make a Photobook? It's not always the right thing!

Less politely, the vast majority of photobooks should not be made. People make them for all sorts of reasons - but the main one nowadays seems to be to finish a body of work. And just make a book. 

But really? Does it have to be made? Almost certainly not. Very few photobooks would be missed if they weren't made. 


The Relationship between form and content - and getting that right.

Mariela Sancari's Moises is not the best book of 2016, but it does get the form, the content and the way of viewing right. It's just so right to handle.

Similarly, Thomas Sauvin's cigarette book, Till Death do Us Part, is not that great a  book really, is it? 

It's a gift shop book, a novelty book. But I love gift shops, especially when they have great gifts in, and Till Death do Us Part is a great gift. It gets it right and hits all those tactile spots in a way that ties in to the book's theme. Above all a book is something to handle, and if you can handle it nicely, that's better than a book that doesn't, especially if the handling ties so neatly into the idea of what the book is about.

The Importance of People understanding what you are trying to say in your photobook. You have to make them understand. It doesn't happen by accident!

It is the job of the bookmaker, designer, writer, photographer to tell a story. I shouldn't rely on the genius of my pictures to tell the story. Pictures don't tell stories on their own. I shouldn't pretend they do. 

The Book is something that you Construct! It's not an accident of pages that fall together. You have to make it happen.

Cover, binding, paper, smell, touch, editing, sequencing, text, interaction, plot, origami, tone... Basically everything that goes into the construction of a film, a novel, a children's book, can go into a photobook.

So if I'm going to make a photobook, I should be lazy touting my dummy pictures up on Instagram, but I should really think about the possibilities open to me. And then probably reject them all anyway, because I shouldn't be making a photobook in the first place.

How you can work with a Limited Budget. Being Poor forces you to be creative! Maybe?

Expensively printed books can be brilliant, but there might be a better way. And it might be cheaper. With fewer copies. Even if you do have the budget.

The Problem of Repeating yourself. Visually, verbally, in every possible way. Don't do it.

Just because I'm stroking my chin and being philosophical doesn't mean I'm not repeating myself. 

Just because I have use massively complex process doesn't mean I'm not repeating myself. 

Just because my pictures are old doesn't mean I'm not repeating myself.

Repetition comes in many forms. 

The Problem of Being Enigmatic. Clarity and simplicity make for ease of communication. Unless you don't want people to understand you.

There have been alot of metaphysical examinations of the world around us in recent years, and some of them are very good. 

But perhaps the time has come to draw a line under photographic rock, paper, scissors, clouds. 

And the hands holding them. 

Just because it's obscure doesn't make it poetry.

The Problem of Avoiding the Obvious. Communication is about directness and making yourself understood; avoiding the obvious does not help that. At worst it might make you enigmatic or (the close cousin of enigma) incoherent.

Sequencing is not the same as narrative. Sequencing doesn't tell a story. All that happens when picture A has a bird in it and so does picture B, is you have two pictures with birds in. A story is not necessarily told. The best books from last year had clear visual and narrative content. They were about something in other words. They had a narrative in the real sense of telling a story.  Tell a story. An interesting ones.

The Danger of 'Design'. 

Don't get carried away. Don't do the pop-ups unless the pop-ups are required.

Photography Always Comes First! That's why it's a Photobook!

It's not an essay, or a dissertation, or a paper. It's a photobook. It's visual. It's pictures. Because pictures are easy. It shouldn't be a struggle. 

The pictures comes first. 

Except for the times when people decide otherwise. There's always room for the arbitrary. Like I said, it's not that serious. 

The Face of 2016

Well 2016 got off to a bad start.



But what does the future hold? Let's cast around in the magic hard drive and see what it runes up to be the Face of 2016.

Oh no, we are well and truly fucked! All we get is fingers, not even a face. Fuck that! I'm back to bed.  2016 is a write-off in every way. 

Best of 2015

 It's the end of the year and this is my last post for now. The lists are going up and I'll be having a best of list up on Photo Eye sometime soon. But it's not really best of, it's favourites and is really pretty arbitrary in some ways. There are plenty of other books that could be in there too.

So to end the blogging year, here's a few of my other favourites from 2015!

I'll be having a Happy Birthday, Christmas and New Year. And a Happy Whatever you Celebrate to everybody wherever you are!



Best Workshop Venue: Gazebook Sicily 

Best Dogs: Klaus Pichler






Best More than just a Surveillance Project: Lina Hashim







Best Postcard Project: Anastasia Taylor-Lind






Best artistic depiction of a prison cell: Ai Wei Wei 

Best book that shows something that doesn't exist: Missing Buildings by Thom and Beth Atkinson






Best  idea that will get reused again and again: 'Thin Places' - as quoted by Thom and Beth Atkinson. Thin Places are where the physical and the spiritual worlds come close.




Other Best Book that shows something that doesn't exist: YU by Dragana Jurisic

“Where do you come from?

From Yugoslavia.

Is there any such country?

No, but that’s still where I come from.”

Best Black and White book on the Basque Country: Ama Lur by Jon Casenave






Best Black and White book from Brazil: Hart by Laura Del Rey and Alziro Barbosa






Best Ukrainian Book: Chronicle






Best Himalayan Project The Himalayan Project






Best Mad Internet Project: A Work on Jealousy




 Best theme-park based exhibition: Dismaland

.

Best promotion for a photobook festival and Best Golden Shoes: Gazebook and Ricardo Martinez Paz!

Best Cut the crap already: Thank you for standing up and making words count, Aritry Das. 

"It's very Thames and Hudson"

Yang Yi: A Sunken Homeland



I went into my fantastic local bookshop, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights a few months back and Ed who deals with the art and photography section upstairs was telling me how Martin Parr had come in the weekend before. "He looked at the shelves and said to me, "it's very Thames and Hudson, isn't it". Which I wouldn't have minded except that Martin Parr's had books published by Thames and Hudson and he's not complaining then."



This blog is very not Thames and Hudson, painfully so at times. It clings to the margins of the photobook world. What am I saying? The photobook world is the margins. There's nothing inside the margins so of course I cling to the margins. We all do, otherwise we'd fall away and drown in the nothingness of a life without endless discussions on the democracy of the photobook, the machinations of Amazon, the intricacies of editing by colour and shape, and the evils of small editions and artist book pricing. My god, it would be a life barely worth living.



Anyway, if you haven't noticed, this blog is full of self-critical Italian projects, obscure Spanish books and family albums from Prague that have been ripped out off somebody's desktop folders. It's either that or it's all black and white where you can't see what's happening, archive pictures dressed up in an obscurantist present, flooded Edgelands, or weird family projects all put into a book where one page folds into the other and you really don't have a clue what is going on whatsoever. And that's the good stuff and it is!



So to end the blogging year, I thought I'd leave the obscure stuff behind and get a little Thames and Hudson. And what better way to do it than a couple of short reviews of books published by Thames and Hudson.



The first one is An Era Without Memories. This is written by Jiang Jiehong and is about urban transformation in China as seen by Chinese photographers.



I've had a couple of posts on Jane Tormey's book, Cities and Photography here and on eccentric Chinese developments here, but An Era Without Memories adds something to the idea of urban photography.



First and foremost it connects the ideas of destruction and development; something that is very familiar to anyone involved even remotely in heritage, but perhaps more novel in photography. And it connects contemporary development/destruction to that which occurred in earlier times, particularly during the Mao era. And if you didn't know it, the greatest destruction of domestic housing ever occurred during Mao's rule, when, according to Frank Dikotter, one third of all housing was apparently destroyed to make low-grade fertiliser or low grade fuel to make low-grade iron.



In the book, property development in China is connected to both the European examples of urbanisation in the 19th century, but also to Chinese concepts of modernity in architecture which is then exemplified through the photography of Wang Qingsong, Hu Jieming and Miao Xiaochun.

Wang Qingsong: One Hundred Chai



Destruction, development and alienation are the key themes. In the third chapter of the book, An Alienated Home, we see Wang Qingsong's One Hundred Chai - this is a hundred pictures of the Chai sign painted on the walls of Beijing residences. Chai means to demolish, so the alienation message is coming across clear and true.



Rong Rong cranks the alienation up another level by actually photographing his home being damaged after returning from a residency in Australia. 'In the taxi, all the way from Beijing airport back home, the landscape was crumbling away, with many houses and streets disappearing, as if they had experienced an air raid. The minute we saw this had happened to our own home, our hearts sank and we collapsed too.'

Rong Rong

The really enjoyable thing about the book is that the photographic works are given a more personal edge than is customary. In that sense it's also about the connection between modernity, the urban and personal experience. That adds a poignancy to the images that in other places, without the heartbreak or anxiety of contemporary Chinese life being revealed, can seem over-produced. So in the fourth and final chapter, Memories Invented: Reimagining realities lost through environmental transformation, we get Hu Jieming reliving his childhood memories of viewing Shanghai from rooftops - by photographing his son perched on the same rooftops.




The second book is The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Photography. Photography is no longer a single subject, I don't know if it ever was. What's interesting about photography is when it touches on the outside world, when it gets wrapped up in film, literature, politics, when it tells a story that reaches out from a two-dimensional print or page or screen. And then there's the technical side, the processes, the cameras, the printing that helped aid the spread of the photographic image.



The aim of this Dictionary is to bring all these disparate elements together and present a truly global view. This is impossible of course but it does a pretty good job. Entries reach across photographic genres and take in curators, critics, editors and publishers. If you're looking for botanists, there's a section for those two (Anna Atkins and Karl Blossfeldt only I'm afraid),while there is a healthy list for techniques and processes.

Z
welethu Mthethwa: Interiors (one of which is in the Dictionary of Photography)



It's a step up from other dictionaries in terms of detail and the ease of accessing and reading information (not something one should take for granted) and I found myself flicking through it and discovering things that I really didn't know and should know - and will quite soon forget until I flick through the book and learn it again.



It's not as international as it could be (the project was started in 1998, shelved, and then started again in 2010 - with many, many contributors) and some of the entries use odd phrasing (Rineke Dijkstra's Bathers?). But it's a book that you can flick through at leisure that will give you the information you're after far quicker and more pleasurably than a search on the internet.

                           
Yasumasa Morimura: Self-Portrait (Actress)/After Elizabeth Taylor 2, 1996



And it will lead you on to other ideas, genres and artists. It's a fact checking, initial search of a book, but it does draw you in and will tell almost everyone about photographers, places and organisations of which they previously had no idea.



The last detail; it comes with not one but three ribbon page markers. That's a lovely detail. More people should do that. And why stop at three. Have twenty!