Michael Dalton - THE GREAT FALLS

THE GREAT FALLS is photographer Michael Dalton's first photobook. Dalton has produced a significant series of quietly heartfelt pictures that speak of human frailty, loss and the truth of impermanence. In this photographic requiem Dalton has found poetry in the abandoned and beauty in the overlooked. Throughout the book the Passaic River and its Great Falls provides a counter balance to man's fallibility and is a metaphor suggesting hope. There is a chance that things will work out in the end. Life continues. 

Michael Dalton grew up in New Jersey and in The Great Falls, he depicts a city – a park, a waterfall, a derelict stadium, a model home, and the people that remain after the industry leaves – with a sense of familiarity and reverence. Dalton’s images include landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits of couples that represent a pride and resilience found in communities that are forced to adapt. The solemn grandeur of the waterfall ennobles Dalton’s work, which explores common American themes of perseverance, reclamation, and escape. 
With his particular use of imagery and sequence, Dalton creates a stage in which he deploys common archetypes found within cities of the Northeastern United States. While the specificity of place is not important to the central themes of the book, the indelible waterfall of Paterson, the constant guardian of the park, remains a reminder of what William Carlos Williams saw as the “catastrophe” in ones life (Book Four, Paterson). The waterfall and the river, in their course to the sea, mash together, become something new, and add to the larger sphere of existence. This is perhaps a reflection on the evolving function of faded industrial cities like Patterson in the modern world. Navigating these themes, The Great Falls is at once a personal record and a social document: an artist’s view of a place that has a fascinating history and social complexity.

Susan Lipper introduced me to Michael Dalton at Paris Photo back in November. Michael showed me THE GREAT FALLS - the book, the work impressed me. Was delighted when a copy showed up in my mail box a day or two ago. Thank you Michael. 

THE GREAT FALLS is a hardcover book, 23.5 x 28.5 cm, 120 pages with 54 photographs.

You can get yourself a copy of THE GREAT FALLS by going HERE. And you can go to Michael Dalton's website HERE. 

It seems photographers are desperate to learn about photobook editing and sequencing!

My blog has just clicked over 1 million pages views. My first post was in May 2007 and I've made 1,338 posts since then. 

The most read post, was published in March 2012. I wrote about my take on photobook editing and sequencing. With 18,232 page views, I thought it worthwhile to reprise...

Here goes:  Anybody who has ever made a photobook has started out with a system, a methodology of going about it. A way of (hopefully) making it brilliant. Much has been said about this subject and guidelines laid down by people who know more than most.  Think Gerry Badger and John Gossage. Yet still, why is it that so many photobooks I look at just don't cut it?

Right now I'm in the process of editing, sequencing and designing a new bookwork so this post is really written to myself, a reminder of things I must remember not to forget. I've written about this before but the fundamentals can bear repeating over and over again...

You can read the complete piece HERE. 

Martin Parr has launched his Foundation in Bristol

Martin Parr is the voice and eyes of British photography. He tends to polarise people, love his work, hate his work. And that's no bad thing. Whatever you think you can't ignore him. I like the fact that Martin calls himself a photographer and not an artist. This reflects his down to earth view of the photographic medium and his focussed support of documentary work. 

Martin and Harvey, Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol

When in Bristol in November I visited The Martin Parr Foundation and Martin gave me a guided tour. We were lured into having a picture made together. You can see that above. It's proof of the fact that the camera does lie, at least the iphone. I appear to be a dwarf besides Martin and that's not the case. At Paris Photo I mentioned this disparity to him. Martin said that, yes he was bigger than me. But he wouldn't go into detail. That brought to mind what my old father used to say - it's not the size that counts it's what you do with it! :-)

The Tate have just made a 7 minute video of The Martin Parr Foundation. It's well worth a look, you can do so HERE. And visit the MPF website HERE.

Below are some stills from the video. 

Tim Carpenter - Local Objects

If I was making a list of my top photobooks for 2017 Tim Carpenter's new bookwork Local Objects would certainly be on the list. With 74 medium format back and white images there is more than a hint of Lewis Baltz's Tract Works and John Gossge's The Pond. What Local Objects has in common with the forementioned is a quiet understated certainty. Carpenter's images are a testament to less being more and intelligence killing cleverness. In many of the images there is something going on that is not quite right, these landscapes are not what the surface suggests. The pictures seem to present an alien world, yet it's achingly familiar too. What's more I'm left wondering what might have just happened and what is about to. Strangeness prevails. I wish I had made many of these pictures. 

Publisher The Ice Plant says this: Borrowing its title from the Wallace Stevens poem in which “little existed for him but the few things / for which a fresh name always occurred,” Tim Carpenter’s Local Objects is a solid yet remarkably unassuming body of work: a calm, steady rhythm of 74 medium format photographs made in the semi-rural American Midwest. While each picture meticulously frames the seemingly random non-activity of a typical ‘street view’ image, Carpenter’s contemplative sequencing allows a surprising harmony of natural and geometric motifs to modulate quietly throughout the book — an interplay of minor chords that draw the viewer into this specific physical place(mostly central Illinois, where he grew up) and the subjective, literary space of the work. Detached from the urgency of current affairs, stripped of all excess, Carpenter’s photographs reflect a poetic attempt to see “the thing in itself,” to make meaning with the barest tools possible.

144 pages / 7.5 x 8.5 in. / Clothbound hardcover / 74 duotone / Edition of 750 copies

You can see more on Tim Carpenter's website HERE and The Ice Plant HERE.

Sean O'Hagan reports in the guardian - the top 10 photography exhibitions of 2017

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1. Ed van der Elsken: Camera in Love - The Stedelijk, Amsterdam

2. Sohrab Hura: The Lost Head and the Bird - The Nines, Peckham 24, London

3. Thomas Ruff: Photographs 1979–2017 - Whitechapel Gallery, London

4. Richard Mosse: Incoming - Barbican Curve Gallery, London

5. Giles Duley: I Can Only Tell You What My Eyes See - Old Truman Brewery, London

6. A Handful of Dust - Whitechapel Gallery, London

7. Swaps: Photographs from the David Hurn Collection - National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

8. The Deutsche Börse photography prize shortlist - The Photographers’ Gallery, London

9. Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 - Tate Modern, London

10. Natalia LL - Roman Road Gallery at Photo London

You can go to the guardian story HERE.

photo-eye, best books of 2017

photo-eye has just announced their best book list for 2017. Each of the contributors were asked to select three photobooks that were  significant to them. 
You can check out the list HERE.

Linn Phyllis Seeger - Life On Mars

Linn Seeger travels almost as much as I do - we meet at Photo London and again at Paris Photo. Linn has been chasing photographs in Ireland, Iceland and most recently in Marfa Texas. Below are some images from her series Life on Mars. I like this work! There is a photobook here waiting to get out. Can't wait to see it...

You can see more of Linn's work on her tumblr account HERE. And more on Linn's website HERE. Check these out, well worth a look.

Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery, London

It was a total pleasure to see the Thomas Ruff show at London's Whitechapel Gallery. I'd expected something rather dry and on the dull side, yes, Ruff dispenses the Dusseldorf look which is let's say, cool and restrained. What blew me away was the depth and extent of Ruff's practice. Ruff experiments with so many different ideas, he's a risk taker and he gets away with it. The work examines the many ways of seeing and expression, yet within disunity there is connection and harmony. The works ask questions - what really are we looking at?  Why are things the way they are? Importantly the pictures somehow subvert the nature of photography, simply because the ideas get in the way. Altogether an outstanding show.

Whitechapel has this to say: Cosmology, suburbia, nudity, utopianism, catastrophe – these are some of the subjects that Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, Germany) addresses in his photographic series, which for almost four decades have investigated the status of the image in contemporary culture. This exhibition will draw from the full range of Ruff’s output: from his acclaimed Portraits – passport-style portraits, reproduced on a huge scale and revealing every surface detail of their subjects, to his most recent press photographs, drawing on newspaper archives from the era of the space race and Hollywood starlets. 
 
Thomas Ruff at Whitechapel Gallery runs until 21 January 2018.
You can see more on the galleries site HERE. 

London next week, week after Paris...

 

Harvey Benge - London, May 2017

I'm going to be in London next week and the week after in Paris for Paris Photo. If any of my photo friends feel like a beer, glass of wine (or 2) or a coffee, get in touch.

Harvey Benge - Paris, May 2017

PARIS PHOTO - book signings

Book signing - Thursday Nov 9, 6pm

Paris Photo opens in the Grand Palais in just under 2 weeks... from Thursday November 9 through until Sunday November 12 there are book signings by all your, all my, favorite photographers.
Here, in no particular order, are just a few that are on my shortlist: Joel Meyerowitz, Guy Tillim, Rinko Kawauchi, Antoine d’Agata, David Lynch, Jim Goldberg, Sophie Calle, John Gossage, Koji Onaka, Susan Meiselas, Todd Hido, Roger Ballen, JH Engström. So many books, so little time!

And last but not least. I'll be signing my latest book - THE LAMENT - at Dewi Lewis stand on Thursday the 9th at 6pm... if you're around come and say hello!

You can check out the full list of signing on the Paris Photo website HERE.

Photography in Paris in November, the BJP reports

 

Lars Tunbjörk - Stock Brokerage, New York, 1997

Simon Bainbridge interviews Paris Photo directors Florence Bourgeois and Christoph Wiesner in the latest on-line offering from the British Journal of Photography. The article gives an in-depth look at the 21st edition of the world's premier photography fair which returns to Paris 9-12 November.
But there is more... The second edition of the Biennial of Photographers of the Contemporary Arab World at M.E.P. and seven other venues across the city. Noémie Goudal’s latest series, Telluris, created last spring in the Californian desert, complete with an on-site installation at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire. Raymond Depardon’s Traverser retrospective at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, Albert Renger Patzsch at the Jeu de Paume, Malick Sidibé’s Mali Twist at Fondation Cartier…

You can read the full story HERE. 

Why Artists' Books Are as Relevant as Ever...

 

NY Art Book Fair. Image via processandskills.com

In a post by on today's Artspace editor-in-chief Loney Adams talks with Printed Matter's Philip Aarons on Why Artist's Books are as relevant as ever in today's digital world. The piece is a must read for anybody who has ever made a bookwork or is contemplating doing so.

In the introduction to Artists Who Make Books, a brand-new release by Phaidon, co-editor Claire Lehmann writes, “At a time when an artist can utilize a wide miscellany of ways and means—a paintbrush, a custom software program, a camera, a CNC router, a found object—it seems worth asking: What does the artist’s book allow, in structure, expression, or reach?” Though artists have been making books for ages, it seems that with the ubiquity of digital media in 2017, artists have a range of democratic means of not only expressing themselves, but disseminating their work to a broad and diverse audience, diminishing the need for artists books and zines. And yet, artists who have developed their careers in a variety of mediums continue to turn to the book as a medium of many—a vehicle for ideas and expressions outside the confines of the white cube and the politics of the art market.

Joining Lehmann in editing Artists Who Make Books, along with Andrew Ross, is Philip Aarons, a die-hard collector of artists’ books who for years has served as the board chair of Printed Matter (a store-front operation started in the '70s by Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard as a headquarters of sorts for all things printed), and is a member of the Museum of Modern Art’s Library and Archive Trustee Committee. His passion for collecting artists’ books is somewhat ironic, considering the inherent exclusivity involved in collecting scarce objects: what excites Aarons’ about books and multiples is their ability to touch the hands of not only wealthy collectors like himself, but also of those who can’t afford to participate in the fine art market—the artist’s friends and peers, young makers, and fans. Artists' books are democratic, tactile, and accessible.

You can read the full article HERE.