Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson

One of the most notable photobooks of 2011, currently available in the second edition, Redheaded Peckerwood was nominated for a variety of prizes and was awarded the prestigious Recontres d'Arles Author Book Award.

The publisher's blurb nicely describes the project and the way it integrated diverse elements into an integrated whole.

Redheaded Peckerwood is a work with a tragic underlying narrative – the story of 19 year old Charles Starkweather and 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate who murdered ten people, including Fugate’s family, during a three day killing spree across Nebraska to the point of their capture in Douglas, Wyoming. The images record places and things central to the story, depict ideas inspired by it, and capture other moments and discoveries along the way.

From a technical perspective, the photographs incorporate and reference the techniques of photojournalism, forensic photography, image appropriation, reenactment and documentary landscape photography. On a conceptual level, they deal with a charged landscape and play with a photographic representation and truth as the work deconstructs a pre-existing narrative.

Redheaded Peckerwood also utilizes and plays with a pre-existing archive of material, deliberately mixing fact and fiction, past and present, myth and reality as it presents, expands and re-presents the various facts and theories surrounding this story.

While photographs are the heart of this work, they are the complemented and informed by documents and objects that belonged to the killers and their victims – including a map, poem, confession letter, stuffed animal, hood ornament and various other items, in several cases, these materials are discoveries first made by the artists and presented here for the first time.

In book form, the work is presented as a sort of visual crime dossier, including pieces of paper which are inserted into the book. The many individual pieces included serve as cues and clues within the visual puzzle. In this way, there are connections that are left to the viewer to be made and mysteries that are left to be solved.

 Joel Colberg's video review of Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson (available here):

Aperture First Book Award Nominees, Part III

The final installment in our three part look at the 20 books nominated for the Aperture / Paris Photo First Book Prize. Part II, and a link to Part I, are here.

15) Singular Beauty by Cara Phillips

Not yet released. Preorder here. (UPDATE: Now available for order here). For a closer sense of the book, see the video from her successful Kickstarter campaign.

16) Dive Dark, Dream Slow by Melissa Catanese

Just released at the beginning of October. The publisher describes the book as follows:

Photographer and bookseller Melissa Catanese has recently been editing the vernacular photography collection of Peter J. Cohen, helping to organize this massive curated archive (a trove of 20,000+ prints) into a series of single-theme catalogues. Along the way, she has pursued an alternate reading of the collection, drifting away from simple typology into something more personal, intuitive, and openly poetic. Her magical new artist book, Dive Dark Dream Slow, is rooted in the mystery and delight of the 'found' image and the 'snapshot' aesthetic, but pushes beneath the nostalgic surface of these pictures, re-reading them as luminous transmissions of anticipation, fear, and desire. Like an album of pop songs about a girl (or a civilization) hovering on the verge of transformation, the book cycles through overlapping themes and counter-themes—moon/ocean; violence/tenderness; innocence/experience; masks/nakedness—that sparkle with psychic longing and apocalyptic comedy.

A few of the images along with a 30 minute interview between Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar is here. More about Peter Cohen's collection of vernacular images.

17) A Natural Order by Lucas Foglia

Lucas Foglia's depiction of life off the grid in the southeastern US.



Lucas Foglia - A Natural Order from PhotoBookStore.co.uk on Vimeo.

And a poetic interpretation of the images which make up the book.



A Natural Order from Forrest Gander on Vimeo.


18) Interrogations by Donald Weber

The Canadian entry (yeah!) on the list. Special collector's edition, with sliding price scale related to size of the original print that is included, available direct from Weber. Interestingly, the prints are images not in the book, but from earlier, related projects. A meditation on state power.


Interrogations from Donald Weber on Vimeo.


19) 7 Rooms by Rafal Milach has already been reviewed on this blog.

20) Ama by Nina Poppe

The book centres on a particular community of women abalone divers on the island of Ise-shima in Japan. Ama takes its title from the Japanese word given to these female divers.

"If I had to choose a single word to describe Nina Poppe’s book Ama it would be ‘modest.’ It is not a ‘clever’ book, nor a powerful one. It is quiet and does little to promote itself (the book’s open spine design which does not allow for text guarantees that it will be all but forgotten on a bookshelf). This modesty runs throughout every aspect of the book, from the subject matter to Poppe’s photographic approach to her subject, and even to the book’s size and design. In many ways it is a very ordinary photobook: a simple, straightforward documentation of the life of a small community. These unassuming, unfussy qualities could make it easy to overlook, and yet I think they are what make Ama one of the better recent photobooks of its kind."
 
Mrs. Deane provides a nice description of the book's production values. Photos of the book are here, the remainder of the EyeCurious review quoted above is here.

Aperture First Book nominees, Part II

Part I, reviewing the first 8 of the 20 nominated books, is here.

9) Cette Montagne, C’est Moi by Witho Worms

In January 2006 Witho Worms started to photograph terrils or slagheaps in Belgium and France. These mountains are the visual remnants of the coal mining industry. In Europe these black pyramids are the symbols of a vanishing era that began with the industrial revolution and has now evolved into an age dominated by binary code.

There is a sense of ambiguity about these heaps. The steep slopes and dark tones give them a unnatural appearance. In his photographs of the terrils, one can imagine the harsh living conditions of the workers, who once constructed the mountains, as well from the pioneering plants and trees who are now conquering a new territory. He shows a fascinating play of the changing relationship between man and his environment. What once was perceived as wasteland have become centres for leisure and natural parks.

In 2007 he expanded his work to Germany and Wales and in 2008 to Poland.                                   -- Withro Worms

The book provides an interesting conceptual take on the relation between image and reproduction, Cette Montagne, C'est Moi consists of photographs of slag heaps of coal reproduced as carbon prints using coal from the various heaps as a component of the process. As such, the images literally contain materials taken from the objects they represent. Here is Joel Coberg's video review. As he notes, the book looks considerably better in person than it does in the video. For a better sense of the images themselves, look here.



10) The Wrong Side: Living on the Mexican Border by Jérôme Sessini

One of the most traditional looking of the photobooks on the list. What it lacks in conceptual novelty, the book makes up for with beautiful, often haunting images. In 2006, the Mexican government declared war on its country's drug gangs. The result? Mexico has become a battleground, with 60,000 civilians, police and drug lords already dead. Magnum photographer Jerome Sessini recalls the two years he spent on the narcotics frontline in this article.

A small, but representative, sample of the page spreads from the book is available here.



 11) Hired Hand by Stuart Bailes, Bea Fremderman, Ingo Mittelstaedt, Athena Torri

Who, precisely, authored this book? Typically, a photobook is the product of the photographer. In this case, Flemming Ove Bech and Johan Rosenmunthe (designers / editors / publishers) took the elegant landscapes and still lifes of the listed photographs and re-appropreated them – collaging, juxtaposing and presenting them alongside internet stock photographs to make up a softspoken picture poem in which brute force and a slight caress suggest an undefined plot.


Hired Hand by Vandret Publications from Johan Rosenmunthe on Vimeo.

12) Celebrity by  Kenji Hirasawa

Released in September of 2011, this book made several best of the year lists last year. Here is the publisher's description which explains the origins of these unique and visually arresting images.

Both a documentary analysis and a conceptual deliberation, Celebrity is a visually exciting criticism on the social impact of idolisation and capricious desires. Who are these people we admire so much, what role do they play in our lives, and what absurdities do they evoke from us?

Photographing wax work models at Madame Tussauds of supposedly aspirational figures, Hirasawa presents us with social relationships both separated and intensified by these lifeless figures we call celebrities, ingeniously creating metaphors of themselves, as existential intimations which we can never actually be close to.

The images themselves are taken with a thermographic camera, recording heat emitted from visitors’ bodies, where the lifeless wax work models are barely seen... each pixel records specific temperature information. As one moves through the book, various emotions and interactions take place; humour, aggression, playfulness, regret and reverie...

13) Cruising by Chad States

The comparisons with Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park (video flipthrough here) are both inevitable and apt. However, the images in Cruising are typically less explicit, taken at a greater distance, and in color rather than with infrared film. This results in a 'you are there' sensibility that rarely descends into the overt voyerism of The Park.

From the publisher:

“Cruising” has always been a part of gay culture; the word itself is a code, innocuous to outsiders, but representing an incognito hunt for sexual partners to those in the know. Over the years, men with particular desires found spaces—certain parks, public restrooms, and roadside wooded groves—out of sight and yet in plain view, where they could meet, and with the use of silent signals and cues, pair off for intimate encounters. It is these spots, nationwide, and the men making use of them, that Chad States photographs in Cruising.

With an oblique focus on hidden clearings, forest-lined parking lots, and the well-trodden paths where these encounters occur, States gradually began to include the men far off in the distance within his lush, dense landscapes. These are the beautiful and surreal spaces where forbidden fantasies come to life. From the Pacific Northwest back east to Pennsylvania and New York, States obscures his subjects in the foliage of the woods and blends the various locations into one sensuous visual representation of this necessary, yet transgressive act. Cruising exposes this time-honored, gay tradition, dragging it out of the woods and into the light of the public eye.

Cruising Flipthrough from powerHouse Books on Vimeo.

14) C.E.N.S.U.R.A. by Julián Barón

Another interesting conceptual project. Photographs are made with light. In Censura, however, an abundance of light is used to wash out and obliterate (or censor) the object from view. Couple this process with the subject matter (Spanish politics) and one discovers yet another layer to the work -- as a commentary on the way that politicians manipulate images / reality for their own ends.Extremely affordable, self-published, and picked by Martin Parr as one of the best books of last year. What's not to like?


Julián Barón - CENSURA from librosfotografia on Vimeo.

Reviewing the Aperture First Book Award Nominees, Part I

Aperture / Paris Photo recently announced a short list of twenty books currently under consideration for the First Book prize to be announced at Paris Photo in November. Here is an alphabetically ordered run down of the first third of those books with comments and videos where available.We'll cover the remainder in future posts.

1) Marc Asnin's Uncle Charlie has not been released. It can be preordered here. Images from the series are here.

2) We already previewed Cristina De Middel's Afronauts in an earlier post on the blog

3) David Galjaard's Concresco is a strong self-published work which uses the fascinating visual of Albanian concrete bunkers as a metaphor for the country's condition. Here is Galjaard's description of the project:

Concresco is more than a visual witness to the ravages of communism; it’s almost a wistful ode to the 750,000 bunkers marring the Albanian landscape, anchored deeper in the history and collective unconscious of the country than in its land itself. Unadorned and probably unretouched, taken from the distance of an outside observer, David Galjaard’s photos perspire the bleakness of the fall out of a 50 year long dictatorship.
Instead of self-pitying portraits, Galjaard turned his lens towards passing scenes of daily life – almost as if taken from a car window, on his way to a better place. Close-ups on dirt, trash and plastic somehow say more than disillusioned faces and cliches on poverty. A suffering land is just as expressive as a suffering people – Galjaard may not have purposefully chosen the allegory, but it definitely works.

You guess at the beauty of certain landscapes, pockmarked by the concrete protuberances like a skin scarred by a bad acne; fields and shores and mountains, wishing they were naked. Every shot exudes the dreariness of a past that has leaked into and tarnished hopes for the future. Concresco in latin means “stuck, congealed, coagulated”: the apt description of a people desperately trying to recover from decades of propaganda-fed ostracisation and socio-economical destruction.

The text inserts with testimonials from local journalists, professors and construction workers give a voice to that history and those dashed hopes in a very compelling, lively, non-textbook way; throats close and chests hurt, reading about the regrets of some, the pride of others, and the fear of all.

4) Michael Jang describes his book, Summer Weather, as follows: “In 1983, a local TV station held a contest for anyone who wanted a chance at reporting the weather. My role was to take head shots of contestants after each screen test. Five winners were chosen out of nearly one hundred applicants. The pictures were never used, but I developed the negatives anyway (without proofing them). These images had been lost until recently and I am seeing them for the very first time.” Each image, shot against a blank backdrop, appears full on the page. The individual images are quite arresting, in part because the 80's was such a weird time for fashion and hair. Moreover, they are nicely paired. The image on the left often shares a common visual element -- the shape of the mouth, the flow of hair over the head, the way the contestant looks at the camera -- which ties the two images together in a manner that also draws attention to the differences between the two images / individuals. Viewed as a whole, the images also capture the range of professionalism among the contestants. Where some of the images look like publicity stills that the individual would happily use, others capture the contestants in unflattering, near Arbus-like, poses.

5) Fifteen pages of Watching by N&D can be previewed on the Blurb website.Without access to the whole book it is hard to review. However, the images of sleeping subway passengers, from what we can see, aren't nearly as strong as, for example, Michael Wolf's examination of subway passengers in Tokyo Compression.

6) Jeddah Diary by Olivia Arthur is a fascinating attempt to photograph things that can't be shown. Specifically, Magnum photographer went to Saudi Arabia to teach photography and the book documents the lives of the young women that she met as a result. Arthur uses a variety of techniques to conceal the faces of the women in order to follow local cultural conventions and minimize any negative impact on the women from their participation in the project. In addition to the obvious strategies (shooting the women in traditional clothing, from the rear, or with an object covering their face) Arthur also employs a number of innovative techniques (such as the flash reflection used in the photo to the right) to accomplish this aim.  The Telegraph has published a number of the images here.

7) Swiss photographer Anne Golaz describes Metsästä (From the Woods) as follows:

Metsästä invites the viewer to meet with a suggested world vacillating between a common and extraordinary context related to finish culture and its connection to forest and nature. It is a work partly autobiographic, fictional and documentary, a story both chilling and amazing, where men are hunting missing preys, devoting themselves to magic and decadent rituals, while female carachters become fascinating and timeless icons.
Without any conclusive intention the photographs serve an emotional expression rather than a documentary process. They question the photographic genres with a central interest in the use of light as a powerful tool for dramatization and fictionalization.
Realized mainly in Finland this work became little by little the personnal exploration of my new territory. An initiation. While the context of the woods lost all rationalism with images that seem to have been dreamed rather than found. Eventually, this series is aimed at reconsidering fundamental and essential notions, such as the desire for authenticity towards an idealized and admire Nature - consumed, abused and dreamed of.

Golaz posted the following promotional video. It doesn't do much to show off the book itself, but it does nicely capture the book's spirit.


Metsästä / Book project From The Woods from anne golaz on Vimeo.

8) If you're interested in works that stretch the boundaries of the traditional photobook, then Sans titre, M. Bertillon by Stéphanie Solinas should be high on your list. For those who don't know, Alfonse Bertillon (the M Bertillion of the title) was a 19th century French police officer who invented the mug shot and used photography as a mechanism to identify criminals. The video below shows why the work is so interesting.


"Sans Titre, M. Bertillon" by Stéphanie Solinas from RVB BOOKS on Vimeo.