Rest in peace Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Heartbreaking. And such a great, great loss of talent. (read, read)

Driven Snow.

Driven Snow. By Andy Mattern. Andy Mattern, 2013. 50 pp., illustrated throughout, 5,25x8,25". Edition of 100 copies.

Book description:

"During the Minnesota winter, grit and snow gradually accumulate in the wheel wells of moving cars. Layer upon layer, these materials fuse into icy formations, conforming to the contours of the host vehicle.

Regular snowfall and the persistent cold encourage these parasitic travelers to grow so dense and large that they interfere with steering. But as the season wears on, they inevitably dislodge or are kicked off vehicles into streets, driveways, and parking lots where they are crushed or eventually melted.

These photographs represent a collection of 22 of these objects found in the winter of 2010-2011, the fifth snowiest on record."

Today

© SE.

Today (strange happenings out the window).

Between the Shell.

Between the Shell. By Paul Salveson. MACK, 2013. 76 pp., illustrated throughout, 19x26cm. Images from here.

Book description:

"Paul Salveson’s photographs were born in New York and Virginia between 2006 and 2011.

Constructing images in domestic environments from items found in arm’s reach, the results are absurdist constructions in which commonplace objects are jocosely rendered in polychromatic puzzles.

Salveson describes his photographic process as 'unfolding like a private performance in an empty house, or after everyone falls asleep... my engagement emerges from a perspective that precedes familiarity, disregarding the functions and cultural associations that objects are assigned. I try to process my surroundings with an alien mind.' "

Happy New Year

Source.

Wishing you peace, light and serenity for the new year ahead.

2014 marks two hundred years of peace in Sweden - remarkable and thought-worthy in many respects (and with what influence one might ponder)...

God Jul, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!

Source.

A corpse for Christmas [and other covers]

Source, source, source.

Stargazing at Sokcho.

Stargazing at Sokcho. By Boomoon. Nazraeli Press, 2006. 24 pp., illustrated throughout, 32,5x42,5cm. Images from here.

Book description:

"'Stargazing' is a record of hours enchanted by the night sky more than a literary approach to the starts.

Constellations are continuously moving but they are permanent indicators of time and season fort everything on earth.

Boomoon was often absorbed in gazing stars anywhere he found a clear night sky. He composed a monumental 'Stargazing' measuring 250x840cm with 60 images shot in various places in Korea, Europe and North Africa.

'Stargazing at Sokcho' published by Nazraeli Press (Tuscon, 2006) contains 19 early works of the series."

The Weather and a Place to Live.

The Weather and a Place to Live. Photographs of the Suburban West. By Steven B. Smith, essay by Maria Morris Hambourg. Duke University Press, 2005. 128 pp., illustrated throughout, 10x9". Images from here.

Book description:

"In compelling, often stunning black-and-white photographs, 'The Weather and a Place to Live' portrays the manmade landscape of the western United States.

Here we come face to face with the surreal intersection of the American appetite for suburban development and the resistant, rolling, arid country of the desert West. Steven B. Smith’s extraordinary photographs take us into the contemporary reality of sprawling suburbs reconfiguring what was once vast, unpopulated territory.

With arresting concision and an unblinking eye, Smith shows how a new frontier is being won, and suggests too how it may be lost in its very emergence."

The Question of Hope.

The Question of Hope. By Robert Adams. Nazraeli Press in association with Portland Art Museum, 2013. 56 pp., illustrated throughout, 8,5x9,5". Images from here.

Book description:

"The question of hope is especially urgent because of environmental threats.

One such peril, deforestation, is the subject of the first half of this book, where pictures of it suggest a war zone.

The subject of the second half of the book, light on the sea, might initially seem disconnected from the first, but in combination they have about them what Samuel Johnson once called "the stability of truth", in this case a recognizable balance of harsh facts and dateless, mysterious consolation.

Robert Adams has studied both elements - our failed stewardship and the promise implied by beauty - across much of the American West. He has over the years also photographed them near where he lives on the Oregon coast, and it is this local caring that gives 'The Question of Hope' much of its intensity."

Prayers in an American Church.

Prayers in an American Church. By Robert Adams. Nazraeli Press, 2012. 40 pp., illustrated throughout, 6x9". Limited edition of 1000 copies. Images from here.

Book description:

" 'Each of us welcomes quiet. As a private person, a citizen, and a photographer, these are some of the words I find myself remembering and repeating'. —— (Robert Adams)

This small volume, with just 12 quoted prayers and 17 photographs by the artist, is among the most personal of Robert Adams’s books.

'It is an old man’s book', he says, 'and reflects my conviction that art and religion come from the same sense of dependence'.

Rest in Peace Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela.

Today we mourn a great loss for humanity, an enduring peace symbol.

Down These Mean Streets.

Down These Mean Streets. By Will Steacy. b. frank books, 2012. 112 pp., illustrated throughout, 9,5x12". Edition of 400 copies. Images from here.

Book description:

"Amidst the noise and rhetoric of the 2012 US presidential campaign comes a sobering visual account of politics, capitalism, social priorities and the collapse of the American Dream.

b.frank books presents 'Down These Mean Streets', the first monograph by the Philadelphia-raised, artist and writer, Will Steacy.

In combining his own celebrated photographs of America’s inner cities with journal entries, maps, and a preponderance of text and imagery from newspapers and magazines, Steacy presents an imposing collage depicting the downward spiral of the American economy in which 30 years of misguided economic policies have transferred a nation’s wealth and power to a privileged few at the expense of the middle and working class.

Rich with iconic imagery of American culture layered with carefully edited clippings from national and regional media, he presents the portrait of a changing nation struggling to adapt to a 21st Century post-industrialist global economy."

The House That Burns Every Day.

The House That Burns Every Day. By Marina Gadonneix. Text by Christian Milovanoff. RVB Books, 2012. 32 pp., illustrated throughout, 28x35cm. Edition of 900 copies.

Book description:

"Marina Gadonneix’s work weaves a complex link between documentary and fiction through photographs of places given over to temporary neglect.

'The House That Burns Everyday' recalls a fable whose story, in ashes, would no longer reach us.

Marina Gadonneix has chosen to haunt a dummy house used by firemen to become familiar with fire and fighting it. In short, a room of fiction. Fire has raged, soon it will flare up again.

In this interstice, Gadonneix collects these artificial ruins. From a distance, the spectator can cope with the worst. The worst, in this work, is always yet to come."

Alla helgons dag

Image source.

Family is very important to me, and this is an important day.

"In Western Christian theology, the day commemorates all those who have attained the beatific vision in Heaven. It is a national holiday in many historically Catholic countries.

[...]

Other Christian traditions define, remember and respond to the saints in different ways."

In many European countries, including Sweden, the tradition is to light candles and visit the graves of deceased relatives.

Read more here or here for example.

Quote from here.

River Phoenix

River Phoenix reading.

I can't believe it - 20 years ago...

Winona

Winona reading.

Lou Reed reading//Rest in Peace

Lou Reed reading.

Sadden by the news that the legendary Lou Reed has passed away - the inspiration he's given me and put out into the world will forever live on - Rest in Peace.

Read more here and here for example.

The River Winter.

The River Winter. By Jem Southam. Essay by Richard Hamblyn. MACK, 2012. 96 pp., illustrated throughout, 33x27,7cm. Images from here.

Book description:

" 'Winters, like ice ages, are Janus faced, for after the freeze comes thaw and flood, as water is returned to life and movement.

Freeze, thaw, flood: the great climatic cycles that created the topography of the northern hemisphere, and which continue to shape the idea of winter that lies deep in our cultural imagination'. - Richard Hamblyn


In November 2010, after a photographic lull of half a year, Jem Southam took a photograph which became the first in this series, 'The River Winter' and which spurred him to make one of the most concentrated bodies of work in his career.

From late autumn through to the earliest signs of spring, along the banks of the river Exe in Devon, Southam chose locations and took photographs, returning at regular intervals.

This pattern continued for the next five months with Southam documenting the subtle agencies of change transforming the landscape. By the end of January 2011 he realized this had become a new work, one that caught the effects of the Earth’s turn on film, one which followed the passage of a single winter.

The shift in seasons is presented through a sequence of ten by eight colour contact prints, with which an essay by Richard Hamblyn explores how, since the last ice-age, winter has embedded itself into our cultural psyche."

Lick Creek Line.

Lick Creek Line. By Ron Jude. MACK, 2012. 112 pp., illustrated throughout, 25,7x29,2cm. Images from here.

Book description:

"Ron Jude’s new book, 'Lick Creek Line', extends and amplifies his ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, and the gray area between documentation and fiction.

In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence and beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States.

Through converging pictures of landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community, and the solitary, secretive process of trapping pine marten for their pelts, 'Lick Creek Line' underscores the murky and culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique.

With an undercurrent of mystery and melancholy that echoes Jude’s previous two books about his childhood home of Central Idaho, 'Lick Creek Line' serves as the lynchpin in a multi-faceted, three-part look at the incomprehensibility of self and place through photographic narrative."