Paris Photo - Aperture PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

 

This year’s shortlist selection was made by Vince Aletti, curator, critic, and author who writes photography reviews for the New Yorker; Julien Frydman, director of Paris Photo; Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture book program and of The PhotoBook Review; Mutsuko Ota, editorial director of IMA magazine; and Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The jury felt that a diversity of approaches and styles were represented in this year’s entries, and they spent over ten hours to reach their final decisions. “Both content and form are inextricably partnered,” in the shortlisted photobooks, said Tannenbaum. “The content supports the form, the form supports the content. The design and all the aspects of the book are matched by the quality of the pictures. Both have to be very high.” Aletti summarized the list by noting, “The final selection offers a strong, international mix of genres, styles, and approaches to the photobook. It also represents a particular attention to the book as an object, in which selection of images, sequence, scale, typography, and materials are all carefully considered."

The ten shortlisted titles for PhotoBook of the Year are:

Holy Bible
Photographers: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
Publisher: MACK, London / Archive of Modern Conflict, London

New York Arbor
Photographer: Mitch Epstein
Publisher: Steidl, Göttingen, Germany

Iris Garden
Photographer: William Gedney
Text: John Cage
Publisher: Little Brown Mushroom, Minneapolis

The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950
Photographer: Santu Mofokeng
Publisher: Steidl / The Walther Collection, Göttingen / New York

Surrendered Myself to the Chair of Life
Photographer: Jin Ohashi
Text: Nobuyoshi Araki
Publisher: AKAAKA, Tokyo

A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] — A27 [S | COD.23]
Photographer: Rosângela Rennó
Publisher: RR Edições, Rio de Janeiro

Rasen Kaigan
Photographer: Lieko Shiga
Publisher: AKAAKA, Tokyo

Birds of the West Indies
Photographer: Taryn Simon
Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany

The PIGS
Photographer: Carlos Spottorno
Publisher: Phree and Editorial RM, Madrid

War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath
Photographers: Various
Authors: Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels, with Natalie Zelt
Publisher: Museum of Fine Arts Houston / Yale University Press, New Haven

You can see the twenty shortlisted titles for the First PhotoBook HERE.

PHOTOBOOK AWARD 2013 at the 6th FotoBookFestival, Kassel

The 6th FotoBookFestival presents the Photobook Award 2013, with nominations of the best photobooks from the previous year, selected by a jury of well known photography experts from around the world. Each expert chooses his or her own favourite book. Here are the nominations:

Gerry Badger: Lieko Shiga »Rasen Kaigan«
Daniel Boetker-Smith: Louis Porter »Conflict Resolution«
Iatã Cannabrava: Miguel Rio Branco »Você Está Feliz«
Christophe Crison: Tamiko Nishimura »Eternal Chase«
Julieta Escardó: Raúl Gómez | Rodrigo Gomez-Rovira »Repertoire«
Atsushi Fujiwara: Yoshiichi Hara »Tokoyo no Mushi«
Sawako Fukai: Stephen Gill »Coexistence«
Ángel Luis González: Paul Gaffney »We Make the Path by Walking«
Jacqueline Hassink: Edmund Clark »Control Order House«
Sebastian Arthur Hau: Lieko Shiga »Rasen Kaigan«
Takashi Homma: Ed Ruscha »Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments«
Clément Kauter: Toshithugu Yamawaki »Dual I & II«
Hester Kejser: Paul Kooiker »Heaven«
Erik Kessels: Jan Dirk van der Burg »Censorship Daily. Netherlands – Iran«
Onaka Koji: Hiro Tanaka »Dew Dew, Dew Its«
Russet Lederman: Shomei Tomatsu »Photographs 1951-2000«
Frederic Lezmi: Carlos Spottorno »The Pigs«
Lu Liqing: Ken Kitano »Our Face: Asia«
Satoshi Machiguchi: Daido Moriyama »View from the Laboratory«
Thomas Mailaender: Thomas Sauvin »Silvermine«
Tomoki Matsumoto: Antoine d’Agata »Anticorps«
Alessandra Mauro: Alessandro Imbriaco »The Garden«
Aron Koriech Morel: Antony Cairns »LDN2«
Martin Parr: Max Pinckers »Fourth Wall«
Mark Pearson: Jin Ohashi »Surrended Myself to the Chair of Life«
André Principe: Sakiko Nomura »Nude / A Room / Flowers«
Rui Ribeiral: Mike Brodie »A Period of Juvenile Prosperity«
Markus Schaden: Carlos Spottorno »The Pigs«
Ken Schles: Bryan Graf »Wildlife Analysis«
Mary Virginia Swanson: Michael Berman »Gila«
Aya Takada: Tamiko Nishimura »Eternal Chase«
Olga Yatskevich: Peter Dekens »Touch«
Cäcilia Zöller: Carlos Spottorno »The Pigs«
Wolfgang Zurborn: David Alan Harvey »(based on a true story)«

The 6th FotoBookFestival pays homage to Daido Moriyama with a packed program of events and releases.
Daido Moriyama is one of the most important living photographers and photobook makers of current times. His career began during the sixties in Tokyo, where he became a member of the influential Provoke group that created the most important style of Japanese post-war avantgarde photography. His oeuvre plays a central part in the establishment of Japanese photography as one of the important creative developments in the history of photography. In more than 50 years, Moriyama gained fame through his coarse, contrastrich, partly unfocussed and highly grainy black-and-white photography, in which he deals which urban experiences, especially around the streets of Tokyo. His immense influence on young Japanese artists continues to date. Apart from B+W photography, Moriyama works with color, Polaroid’s, screen-printing, film, texts and installation. His fame is predominantly due to the more than 150 photobooks that he has continuously published—including masterpieces like »Japan—A Photo Theatre« (1968), »Farewell Photography« (1972), »Light & Shadow« (1982) and »Shinjuku« (2002).

The 6th FotoBookFestival runs October 24 to 27 in Kassel, Germany. You can see more HERE.

Ron Jude, book signing at ICP-Bard NYC

For those in New York, Ron Jude will be signing his new book Fires at ICP-Bard MFA studios this Friday at 5pm. Fires seamlessly weaves together the disparate strands of his three-part look at his childhood home of central Idaho. Pulling equal parts from Alpine Star (2006), emmett (2010), and Lick Creek Line (2012), Jude fleshes out the consistent tone and crossover between what appear to be three incongruent projects. An aging fur trapper, a young man on the threshold of adulthood in the early 1980s, and an entire community (as represented by a weekly newspaper) converge through the repeating motif of a woodland landscape.

ICP-Bard MFA Studios are located at at 24–20 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City. Take the E or M to 23rd Street-Ely Avenue, or the 7 or G train to Court Square.

Ron is amongst the group of ten photographers who have responded to the idea - LOST HOME - with a bookwork published by SUPERLABO Japan, to be launched at Paris Photo in November. 

You can check out Ron Jude's website HERE.

MoMA NYC, New Photography 2013

 

Josephine Pryde, Scale V1 2012

The Museum of Modern Art’s 28th annual New Photography exhibition, held from September 14, 2013, through January 6, 2014, features 62 recent works by eight international artists who are redefining photography as a medium of experimentation and intellectual inquiry. Their porous practices—grounded in photographic books, mass media, photomontage, music, film, and science—mark a shift in the understanding of “what a picture could be.” The artists selected for this year’s exhibition are Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Brendan Fowler, Annette Kelm, Lisa Oppenheim, Anna Ostoya, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan. In its expanded discursive field, photography’s relationship to other artistic disciplines is yet unmapped. This expanded understanding of photography leads to images that document, invent, interpret, and invite sustained transformations of their subject. The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. “Underscoring the idea that there has never been just one type of photography,” Roxana Marcoci says, “the artists in this exhibition explore reversals between abstraction and representation, documentary and conceptual processes, the uniquely handmade and the mechanically reproducible, analogue and digital techniques. They turn pictures back into questions, creatively reassessing the meaning of image-making today.”

Anna Ostoya, Lee No. 1. 2013

Mark Power has a new website...

 ...and it's well worth checking out. You can do that HERE.

Mark Power is a photographer whose work I've long admired. His photographs have depth, substance and a remarkable level of seeing.  Mark Power joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2002, and became a full Member in 2007. Meanwhile, in his other life, he is the Professor of photography at the University of Brighton, a city on England's south coast.

Huis Marseille Amsterdam opens, now double in size

 

Hellen van Meene, Untitled (four elements)

With the recent reopening of both the rebuilt and modernized Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam seems to have emerged as the art capital of Europe.

From this last Saturday, Amsterdam's Huis Marseille photography museum opens, double in size. After a year long building project led by LEVS Architecten, the museum is now made up of two adjacent canal-side merchant’s houses linked together by three passageways on different floors. It is possible to stroll through no fewer than fourteen galleries, including a most remarkable period room: one of the very few Louis XIV-style reception rooms to have remained in such original condition in Amsterdam.

The enlarged museum opens with a new show - The Rediscovery of the World - which runs until December 8.
Huis Marseille say this:  What does photography mean today beyond the fact that it is an image-carrying medium? This question is not as odd as it sounds in an age entirely dominated by visual culture. Armed with digital cameras, smartphones, iPads and internet, these days anyone can make a photo and immediately distribute it worldwide. Analogue applications are increasingly being marginalized by a digital climate in which images are everywhere and belong to everyone. What can possibly remain of the artistic value of photography in this context?
Surprisingly enough a large group of Dutch photographers is devoting itself to this very question, with work directed specifically at the nature of photography itself. Renewed emphasis is being given to purely photographic aspects such as disclosure, light, colour, reflection and experiment. The core of the photographic medium itself forms the foundation of this impassioned artistic exploration, and it is ‘the rediscovery of the world’ through photography that forms the fascinating subject of this celebratory opening exhibition.

There will be many new works by fourteen Dutch photographers - Popel Coumou, Elspeth Diederix, Eddo Hartmann, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Juul Kraijer, Tanya Long, Katja Mater, Hellen van Meene, Awoiska van der Molen, Ilona Plaum, Emma van der Put, Viviane Sassen, Scheltens & Abbenes and Simon van Til. The show will be well worth a look.

Juul Kraijer, Untitled, 2013

Sternfeld - photography, the problematic medium

 

Joel Sternfeld, McLean, Virginia, December 1978

In a piece published last year in Forbes online edition writer Jonathon Keats considers Joel Sternfeld's most iconic image, that of a fireman buying a pumpkin from a roadside stall while a building behind is in flames. Of course anybody with a passing knowledge of the mediums history would know that the fire was a training exercise and the fireman was taking a break. Without that information the picture is open to speculation and interpretation. To me that's what all great pictures should do, asks questions, give no answers, and stop time at a critically pivotal point. Think too of André Kertész's wonderful photograph Bridge at Meudon made fifty years before the Sternfeld image.
Sternfeld comments - You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo, he told the Guardian in a 2004 interview. No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

To me it's all about the narrative potential of an image and that's often as as much about what you leave out of the frame as to what is left in. And good photographs are not passive and go beyond just surface. There should be a story lurking in there somewhere and it's over to the viewer to tease it out.

Keats comments in the Forbes piece, Sternfeld’s pictures remind us that, like a camera, our eyes are essentially passive. Like photography, observation is an act of authorship.
Unlike the ultimate viewers of a picture the photographer is the primary author with a particular story to tell. And the photographer works from a privileged position knowing the context and back story behind the work. Everybody else is stuck with a secondary reading with just the information inside the frame to go on. The wonderful thing is that no matter what the photographer might build into an image every reader will potentially come to a completely different conclusion. In my experience so often somebody will see something in one of my photographs, in both form and content, things that I'd never considered or imagined. I love it when that happens. Then it gets really interesting when you start to build a more complex narrative by making an edit and sequence. More speculation, more interpretation. How exciting is that!
You can read the full Forbes piece HERE.

André Kertész, Meudon, 1928

Photography workshop in Cologne in November

 

Lichtblick workshop in Cologne - 2010

I will be conducting a two day workshop in Cologne over the weekend of November 23 and 24 at the Lichtblick School. As well as reviewing portfolios and suggesting ways forward I will be talking about my view of the current image saturated instagram everywhere scene, and how to take advantage of the many positives of the virtual digital world. Photobook making will also be covered, here I will talk about the importance of idea generation, and I will present proven guidelines for editing and sequencing. The workshop is limited to 12 participants.
The Lichtblick workshops are always good fun. Several participants have returned for repeat workshops which for me is a sign that good stuff has gone down. Hope to see you in Cologne. You can see more on the Lichtblick School website HERE.

LOST HOME - my bookwork

The LOST HOME collaborative project, with Japanese publisher SUPER LABO is now in production. Ten photographers -  Harvey Benge, JH Engstrom, Roe Ethridge, Takashi Homma, Ron Jude, Daido Moriyama, Christian Patterson, Slavica Perkovic, Bertien van Manen and Terri Weifenbach - have each responded to a prose poem written by Japanese writer and film maker Nobuyuki Isshiki.
The slip-cased book works will be launched at Paris Photo in the Grand Palais with a book signing at 5pm on Thursday November 14th. And at 5pm, Friday November 15th at colette,  213 rue Saint-Honoré. If you're going to be in Paris, save these dates, see you there.

Here are are few of the double page spreads from my book, you can see all the pages by going to my website HERE.