Paper Work

I like paper. How much? Let’s put it this way, I just bought a book made up almost entirely of photographs of envelopes. It’s not even as if there is a wide variety of envelopes, they generally are all standard Japanese style envelopes. The difference is that each envelope is hand made from a variety of paper. Grandfather’s Envelopes is a sampling of the work of Kouzaki Hiromu’s twilight years. From the age of eighty to ninety-five this retired master builder made envelopes for no other purpose than to pass the time and practice a craft. Both the book and the envelopes within are beautiful in their simplicity.

Book Browsing: Ueda Yoshihiko

On the final day of a trip to New York City last week I stopped in at Dashwood Books to peruse their excellent selection of photo books from Japan. I picked up a copy of hi mi tsu ki chi by Nishimiya Daisaku which I first heard about here on Little Brown Mushrooms. I also saw a couple of interesting volumes from University of Tokyo Press. What caught my attention about these two books was the design of the covers, full bleed images of items floating on black backgrounds with areas cut out creating a lower level for type. I later found that art direction for these books was provided by Hara Kenya, a well know designer and design philosopher (White, Designing Design) with photography by Ueda Yoshihiko. The subject of each book is museum specimens, one of birds from the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology and one of stone implements from the University of Tokyo Museum.

BIOSOPHIA of BIRDS, the larger of the two volumes 168 A4 (28 x 20.4 cm) pages, contains specimens of birds in various stages of unpacking. Some of the birds are on stands as if ready to be displayed, but most look like they have just been taken from storage, some bound and tagged, some still in their boxes. All are photographed on the same black background.

BIOSOPHIA of BIRDS

spreads from BIOSOPHIA of BIRDS

ONE HUNDRED STONEWARES, closer to square in format (24.2 x 23.4 cm) and a bit thicker at 186 pages, is a collection of stone tools photographed in a similar manner.

ONE HUNDRED STONEWARES

spreads from ONE HUNDRED STONEWARES

Both books were published in 2008 and in trying to find out more about them I came across what seems to be the first in the series, CHAMBER of CURIOSITIES, published two years earlier. Sadly I haven’t seen this one in person because it looks the most interesting. Rather than a typology of a single subject (birds or stone tools) it’s a collection of oddities from bones to butterflies.

CHAMBER of CURIOSITIES

Ueda Yoshihiko from CHAMBER of CURIOSITIES

The books I saw at Dashwood are beautifully produced and priced to match, but if you’re fond of museum collections or typologies they’re worth taking a look at given the chance. Also, to see more images from Ueda Yoshihiko’s other work, go here and here (text in Japanese).

Travelogue(s)

Telling a story is both easier and more difficult than it has ever been before. Easier because there are any number of ways to get your story out in front of a large audience. More difficult because the number of stories out there is so great that it’s easy for yours to get lost. So whether you’re telling a tale of illegally crossing the border into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan or taking a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate your 40th birthday it has to be well told.

In 1986 the photographer Didier Lefèvre went into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan for the first time while covering a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) mission. Of the four thousand frames he exposed only six images were initially published. Thirteen years later his friend Emmanuel Guibert suggested they collaborate on publishing the story of Lefèvre’s journey and, with the help of Frédéric Lemercier, Le Photographe was published in France in three volumes between 2003 and 2006. In 2009 the English version, The Photographer, was published in one large volume by First Second.

The Photographer, p. 74

Being based on actual events I don’t know if you would call it a graphic novel, but the illustration drives the bulk of the narrative with Lefèvre’s photographs working as accents. It’s similar to, though not quite as powerful as, the film Waltz with Bashir and its shift from animation to photographic images. In the film’s case, the change takes place at the end to maximize impact while in The Photographer Lefèvre’s images are sprinkled throughout allowing the viewer places to rest and contemplate. I also enjoyed how, in many places, we’re given the equivalent of a contact sheet where we can see a sequence of shots and the one that has been selected (or discarded). Seeing the contact sheets sometimes gives you a better idea of what the photographer is looking for. Another example that comes to mind is the Diane Arbus shot of the boy with the toy hand grenade in Central Park. Looking at the contact sheet the boy looks fairly normal in most of the shots, but the in the image she chose the boy looks mentally unbalanced. I don’t pretend to know why Arbus chose that particular shot, but, for me, seeing the shots she didn’t choose make that image all the more interesting.

Diane Arbus contact sheet

To be perfectly honest, I doubt I’d like The Photographer as much if it were just Lefèvre’s photographs. There is something about the combination of photos and illustration, and even the size and heft of the book (11.7 by 9.4 in., an inch thick, and over 2 lbs.), that makes it appealing. Though the line work is heavier and looser, the drawing style strikes me as Tintinesque. There’s a similar use of color and sense of adventure. Add to this Afghanistan being in the news a lot lately and I found myself devouring it in large chunks.

Finally, the use of the black and white reportage reminded me of something from Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury. He (or his character) found it curious that black and white photography, “the most unreal of processes,” now stood for “realism, integrity and art”. That may have been true when Rushdie originally wrote those words, or when Lefèvre shot the photos, but I wonder if today the ubiquity of color photography hasn’t left black and white photography seeming dated or, at the very least, self-consciously arty.

On a lighter note, Alec Soth’s slideshow of a trip to Las Vegas for his 40th birthday is another example of the flexibility of story telling media. People are more willing to experiment with ways of telling a story. In this case Soth, normally a still photographer, is experimenting with an A/V presentation.

One of the great things about Soth’s slideshow (other than the actual images) is how self-contained and almost circular the narrative is. It begins with him wanting to buy a limited edition of Bukowski poetry. He can’t afford the book, so being in Vegas, he tries gambling to raise the money. You can probably guess how that turns out. But don’t despair, he turns the experience into a piece of art that references both Vegas and a bit of poetry from the unattainable volume which he then sells for the price of said volume. Genius.

Dollar Signs

If you were wondering how the recession has changed the art world, judging from the $43.7 million payed at auction for a Warhol painting (fittingly a painting of money) the answer is not very much. At least not at the top end of the market where, like any other part of the economy, the people with money still have money and are looking to consolidate or expand their holdings. This is the world that Sarah Thornton is largely dealing with in her book Seven Days in the Art World, an entertaining introduction into various facets of a very insular world. Anyone looking for an expose will most likely come away disappointed. It’s not that kind of book. Instead you’ll get snapshots of a Christie’s auction, a crit at CalArts, the “feeding frenzy” at Art Basel, the presentation of the Turner Prize, the workings at Artforum, Takashi Murakami’s studio, and the Venice Biennale which end up showing how small and connected the art world is at the very top.

Most of the research for this book took place before the bottom fell out of the economy. The auction she covers was in 2004 and the most recent entries (the studio visit and the Biennale) are based on events in 2007 so reading it now adds an interesting twist. One point made in the book was that the most recent boom in the art market was fueled largely the work of living artists, the Damien Hirsts and Jeff Koons’ of the world. And that, like other sectors of the economy, there was a lot of speculation. Like the housing market, the art market was distorted by the huge amounts of money flowing into it. The money had to find a place to go and, with the fixed number of Monets and Van Goghs in the world, it flowed into living artists and the search for the next big thing. With the downturn I imagine there will be a return to the blue chip artists like Warhol. As a side note I also recently saw the documentary Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?, a film about one woman’s quest to sell what she believes to be a Jackson Pollock painting that she bought in a thrift store for five dollars. As you may imagine, this film portrays the art world in a somewhat different light.

On a completely different scale, it’ll be interesting to what kind of economic indicator SF Camerawork’s benefit auction (Saturday, December 5, 1 pm) will be this year. Will it be positive like the Sotheby’s auction, an indication that there are still people willing to spend money on art? Or will it be another grim reminder that the next boom is still a long way off? Let’s hope it’s the former.

Verbal Vivisection

Brian Dettmer, Amerigo, 2007

On the front of the Week in Review section of this week’s NY Times, illustrating an article on National Book Award nominations, was a photo of a book with part of the cover removed revealing a latticework of words and images carved into the interior. The work, Modern Progress by the artist Brian Dettmer,  gives the impression of  a body with the skin peeled away laying bare the veins, bones, tendons and organs hidden within. It also reminded me of some of the pieces from a Maya Lin show where she carved topographies into old atlases. A quick search led to more book works as well as modified maps and sculptures made from old audio and video tapes. There’s a great selection of images on Toomey Tourell’s site where I also learned that I missed his September show. Rats.

Free-range

As with many residents of the United States last week my thoughts turned to food. The most obvious reason being Thanksgiving, but there was also the audio version of Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma on the long drive to and from our meal in Southern California. In hindsight it may not have been the best choice as it had me calculating the corn content of the Thanksgiving dinner between bites. For those who haven’t read or listened to the book, Pollan traces four meals from their origin to his table and in the first section (the one we listened to on the drive) the path he takes is through the industrial food system which centers around corn, a path that ends at the pinnacle (or nadir depending on your point of view) of the industrial food system, the fast food meal.

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

It’s seems like more than a coincidence that the latest issue of Daylight Magazine, which I picked up before the trip, also focuses on agriculture. In it Peter Menzel’s images of feed lots and turkeys in California are compelling and related perfectly to the season, the location (driving through huge monocultures), and themes in Pollan’s book, but it was Tessa Bunney‘s work in the Romanian Carpathian mountains that I keep coming back to. I think they play into the same pastoral ideal that Pollan discusses that, even though I grew up on a small farm, I can’t help being seduced by. The idea of an idyllic life of simplicity lived in harmony with nature that conveniently leaves out all the work that’s involved and the nearly impossible situations the small farmer faces in the modern consumer culture.

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

Sebald and Sabra

Waltz with Bashir film still

The connection between photography and memory is a facile one. Who doesn’t have a photograph of a time or place that they would like to remember? The school photo, the vacation snapshot, the wedding photograph all verify, more concretely than memory, that a certain moment occurred. Or do they? Even before digital manipulation, photography has had, at best, a loose relationship with reality. On the one hand, we are taught to consider photographs as representations of the real when they appear in newspapers, court rooms, scientific publications, etc. But even these images are produced by way of any number of subjective decisions which determine the “reality” of what is portrayed.

So what put me on this line of thought? First, I’m currently reading The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald which is a combination of reminiscence by the narrator and his chronicling of the lives and travels of the four emigrants of the title. Though the narrator is never identified, I can’t help thinking it’s Sebald himself. It’s a thought that’s at odds with the book being a work of fiction. This tension between document and fiction is strengthened by photographs placed throughout the text as if they have been collected from various shoe boxes and albums of the characters. The images, though they appear to relate to the text, could very well be a collection of unrelated images around which the author created his story. The book has me wondering, as if I were watching a movie “based on a true story,” how much is remembrance and how much is pure fabrication.

In contrast to Sebald construction of fiction from “real” representations of the world (i.e. photographs), Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir uses a stylized form of representation (animation) to portray real events. It’s an animated documentary. Here the animation enhances the subjectiveness of memory as Folman, a former Israeli soldier, tries to recall the events of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The film moves back and forth between past and present as Folman interviews various people involved trying to uncover the memories he himself has blocked out. Slowly things come to light as his memory returns culminating in a final denouement which I will leave a surprise. The film is a powerful contemplation on war and memory.

Mark Lombardi

Mark Lombardi Global Neworks , book cover

The upheaval in the US financial markets over the past couple months, its effect on the international markets, and the baroque interconnectedness of it all has had me thinking about what Mark Lombardi would have thought of all this. I’ve long been a fan of Lombardi’s extensively researched and delicately drawn maps of connections and was thrilled to find a copy of Global Networks at Green Apple a couple weeks ago. Sadly, Lombari’s brief career as an artist ended with his death in 2000. If you are not familiar with his work, Lombardi drew maps of the relationships between the players in various networks of power be they criminal, financial or political. He drew maps of Iran-Contra, the Savings and Loan meltdown, the Chicago mob, and the Pope and his bankers. He mapped out the connections around Osama bin Laden and his brother-in-law Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, so thoroughly in the work BCCI-ICIC & FAB that in the aftermath of 9/11 the FBI contacted the Whitney and requested a copy of it.

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of Lombardi’s work is that it doesn’t reproduce very well in books or on the web. You end up with either a view of the entirety where you can’t make out any detail or a detail that lacks context. Even seeing them in person requires the viewer to have a huge amount of information to understand the full implications of the connections. Is it this lack of easy readability that makes the work art and not information design? I don’t want to get into a big discussion of what is art here, but Lombardi’s work has certainly raised some questions for me. Do they become art because they are aesthetically pleasing? Is it because they show the hand of the artist, i.e. would they be the same if they had been done on a computer? Is it art because the creator says it is and some gallery owner agreed with him? Or is it the combination of all these things? Whether it is art or not (I think it is), I would have loved to see Lombardi’s take on the current crisis.

Memory Palace

Last Monday I had the opportunity to see two editions of Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei (alternately titled Killed by Roses or Ordeal by Roses). The 1963 original, designed by Sugiura Kohei was under glass so I wasn’t able to see more that one spread and the slipcase, but I did get to see the 1971 version that was re-edited by Mishima Yukio, the writer and model for the series, and designed and illustrated by Yokoo Tadanori. Supposedly the whole project was done as a memorial for Mishima who committed ritual suicide shortly before the book’s release.

The book is phenomenal. First of all, it is big, 15 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. (38.735 x 53.975 cm) and unfolding the 4 panels of the case reveals the black velvet bound volume resting on the torso of Yokoo’s colorful saint-like representation of Mishima impaled by roses which, in turn, overlaps a vaguely Indian deity. The process definitely has religious overtones which were amplified by the fact that, to see the book, I had to visit a library’s special collection and the book was placed on a kind of foam pedastal for viewing.

The whole experience got me thinking about my last post about libraries and how I can recall various libraries and books that I found there, experiences that I consider important. In contrast, I can’t recall being in awe (as I was looking at Barakei) with anything I have seen on a computer screen. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen a lot of interesting things, but there is something about the mediation of the screen, or the elimination of some senses (touch and smell) that keeps the experience from reaching the same level. On some level I’m just predisposed to treating books with more reverence than computers even though at the most basic level they are both carriers of information.

Reverence is also a word I would use to describe Höfer’s images of libraries both in terms of how Höfer treats the spaces and how the builders originally constructed them. For the most part, the buildings shown are not just storehouses for inanimate objects, these are palaces build to house and celebrate knowledge. Thinking of palaces of knowledge, in turn, took me back Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, a book that also touches on the idea of storing knowledge though the difference is the spaces Ricci creates are conceptual rather than physical. Ricci was a 16th century Jesuit missionary who used mnemonic strategies to both learn Chinese and spread the teachings of the Catholic church in China. The gist of the system is to create a space in your mind and fill it with objects/images that will help you remember a specific bits of information. The more specific and distinct the space is the easier it will be to remember the desired information. There is an interesting thread here of the movement from the internal to the external in terms of storage of information which also includes the subset of analog to digital, but that’s another discussion entirely. One thing I will say, however, is that I agree with Umberto Eco in his introduction to Höfer’s book, there is something to be said for browsing the stacks of a library.

Now what’s so important about the problem of access to the shelves? One of the misunderstandings that dominate the concept of libraries is that you go into one to look for a book whose title you already know. In reality it often happens that you do go to a library because you want a book whose title you know, but the principle function of the library, at least the function of the library in my house and of that of any friend we may chance to visit, is to discover books whose existence we never suspected, only to discover that they are of extreme importance to us. Of course, it’s true that this discovery can be made by leafing through a catalog, but there’s nothing more revealing and exciting than exploring the shelves that contain a collection of books on a certain subject–something that you wouldn’t be able to discover in a catalogue ordered by authors’ names–and to find another book beside the book you went to find, one that you weren’t looking for but that emerges as being of fundamental importance.

As Eco wrote about libraries he liked to visit in Toronto and at Yale I though back to some of the libraries I have visited and books that I relate to those specific times in my life. The library I frequented most growing up was the old West Tisbury library on Music Street a small two-story building where you had to climb a narrow stairway to get to the children’s section. The books that I can remember borrowing multiple times include Bulfinch’s Mythology and David McCauley’s Pyramid. The Vineyard Haven library was more modern and though I don’t remember any specific books there I do recall a quilt they had hanging on display. The quilt had panels done by different people, each depicting a different local scene. One of the panels was done by my grandmother and in the scene were sailboats with the initials representing me and my brothers. The Vineyard Haven library was also where I first encountered the kind of computerized index that would eventually replace card catalogues. As you may have guessed I loved the card catalogue as well as the sign out cards that used to be in books. You could look in the back of a book and see the last person to take it out and it’s history stamped in ink.

College opened up new libraries that were both broader and more specific. I studied among the stacks at Middlebury taking breaks to browse the aisles at random. Senior year I had my own carrel. The book that best represents those days is Nelson’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary. The RISD library (the old one on Benefit Street, not the new Fleet library which I have yet to visited) was a great example of what a library reading room, a large open room, but not too large, high ceilings, long tables, books all around including a on a mezzanine level reached by short spiral staircases around the room. Off of the main reading room was a section of the stacks that included design and photography books. That’s where, during a random bit of browsing, I first got to know the work of Josef Koudelka in his book Exiles. Most recently the cozy SFAI library perched atop one of the city’s many hills is a place I like to visit and I’m just beginning to acquaint myself with the libraries at Stanford University which is where I saw both volumes of Barakei.

Thinking of all these places, I question whether a completely digital archive can reproduce the library experience. Maybe I’m clinging to the past. I don’t dispute the fact that there are things a digital archive can do that a physical library cannot. On the subject of access alone there is no questioning the value of being able to make information available to a larger audience. But until it can recreate the serendipity of finding the thing you didn’t know you were looking for and the experience of seeing a book like Barakei in person there is still a place for the library.

Books, Libraries, and Photography

The following post was started quite some time ago, but sat waiting to be finished as life intervened and my focus shifted from talking about and making art to paying my rent. Now that I’ve regained a semblance of normalcy, it’s time to return to my much neglected blog.

A while back a writer friend of mine suggested I should read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, a book about the experiences in reading and, by extension books. It had come up as part of a discussion of our mutual, if slightly differing, love of books. To use Fadiman’s terms my friend’s love of books tends towards the carnal, consuming both their soul (the words and ideas) and their body (annotating pages, breaking spines) while mine tends toward a courtly love where, in addition to appreciating the words, the book as an object is something to be venerated. As with most things, the middle ground is more populous than either extreme and though I may choose to copy passages of interest into a notebook rather than marking the original text I’m sure Ms. Fadiman would be pleased to know that a copy of her book lies spine up, pages splayed on my desk, paused in the reading, rather than stopped.

Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Lengua Madrid, Candida Höfer

The point I am gradually coming to is that there is something about the book as an object that appeals to me. So much so that I have tried to capture, with limited success, this fascination on film (see group 04 in the photography section of the main website). Many of the photos were shot at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, a place created in defense of the activity of browsing. For those interested, an article on the library appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s and was accompanied by images by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin. If you appreciate a good library, you should also check out the series of library photographs by Candida Höfer (though her images tend to be more about the spaces than the books).

Thought Book, 2001, Abelardo Morell

When considering books as a subject for photography many people reference Abelardo Morell. I have to admit I also associated Morell with his Book of Books (which I finally picked up at Green Apple Books recently) and his camera obscura work. I also thought of him as working exclusively in black and white. In January, however, I saw him speak and was surprised to see a range of work from early street photography to his most recent experiments with making camera-less images and even shooting in color.

Upshot, 2003, Thomas M. Allen

One of the reasons people probably photograph books is that they are so convenient, they’re everywhere. It was probably a rainy day and Thomas M. Allen first started cutting up and photographing the pulp novels that ended up in his book Uncovered. There is also something romantic about books, the accumulation of knowledge they symbolizes or the possible worlds and stories they hold between their covers. Their influence reaches beyond their pages, shaping the way people see the world. Interacting with books from an early age can leave a lasting impression as I imagine it did with Marc Joseph. His series New and Used, a series of used book and record shops, shows a love for these objects, the search for and collection of them, and the life they lead when their original owners have given them up.

Something caused all these artists to consider either the book itself or the life of books. So, though many have proclaimed the death of print, books still seem to hold some cultural resonance. Will there ever be a time when people will look at these varied portrayals and not recognize books? It seems more likely that images of books will become quaint, like pictures of rotary phones, but I doubt they will ever be unreadable.