101 Billionaires by Rob Hornesta

At the beginning of 2008, the list of richest Russians contained 101 billionaires; a magical number that for the time being will not be matched. The global crisis hit hard in Russia. Exactly a year later, there are only 49 Russians with fortunes of ten figures or more. This drop was behind the decision to publish a second, revised edition of 101 Billionaires, the Crisis Edition.

101 Billionaires shows the other side of modern Russia, the raw reality that lurks behind the façade of the power elite. Rob Hornstra visited the regions to which Moscow has its exorbitant wealth to thank. Here he used his camera to record the fact that the Russian hinterland itself sees little of this prosperity.

The video below is of the original edition. The Crisis Edition has a hard cover and smaller format, but no fold-out pages and is therefore cheaper. The text has been adapted here and there to reflect current events.

Flamboya by Viviane Sassen

In the previous post, I compared the visual flair of the images in the Afronauts to the work of Viviane Sassen. Here's an example of what I  meant.

Viviane Sassen's 2008 book ‘Flamboya’ brings together photographs made in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Ghana. Sassen herself, Dutch and white, lived in Kenya as a little girl. Since 2001 she returns to different parts of the African continent and takes photographs featuring black people and studies of foliage and landscape. This makes some critics anxious. Arguments about colonial legacies and inherent power imbalance raise their heads but, frankly, could be dispelled simply by looking at the pictures. There is too much collaboration here and it just doesn’t feel coercive. One suggestion is that pictures ‘of’ people are not only ‘about’ them. It could also be said that pictures can be ‘with’ someone, when photography is used as a verb. Furthermore, these super-nuanced images do little to reinforce stereotypes as has been argued. I don’t remember seeing anything like this. Eye-popping patterns and dappled shadows merge to conceal and reveal. Bodies engage with one another in unexpected configurations or simply end where ambiguous sinewy lines begin. Real flowers collude with printed ones to trick the viewer. Human forms gesture and articulate a particular, rather than general, presence in the vertical depths of equatorial shadow.

The format of the book is unusual. Between a short story and an essay there are 49 photographs over 40 illustrated pages, 17 of which are narrower, a little over a half of the width of the others. These create new potentials: concealing, revealing and demanding interaction. Tiny formal rhythms are implied. Their scale occasionally seems to be defined by the extent of the 6x7 format which was used in making these pictures. It’s another of Sassen’s playful propositions but in physical format.  -- Jason Evans



Viviane Sassen // Flamboya from haveanicebook on Vimeo.

Mist: Three Gorges Dam by Niels Stomps

Mist: Three Gorges Dam by Niels Stomps

Stomps describes his approach like this:

My photographic work exists of photographic series. The central theme of these projects is the way people behave and respond to major changes in their environment and surroundings. Sociologic or environmental changes so big and prominent that the individual can only adapt. My photographic work deals with the changes that take shape when people are being pushed to adapt their lives around the inevitable.

In the presentation of my work I prefer to use photographs as a string of images and to combine several series in a publication that must expose the subject. With each project I combine several series drifting around the subject.

 In the case of Mist, the book opens with data -- a series of lightly printed page with a dominant number and an explanation of the relevance of the number for Three Gorges Dam. 140, the number of cities that had to be relocated; 700,000 kilos of cement poured into the dam each day; 39,300,000,000 cubic meters of volume for the reservoir. Each photographic series begins with several yellow pages and a written title which literally or metaphorically relates to the photos.