Happy New Year!

Betty Blythe (image source unknown) - about here.

A Very Happy New Year - and happy new decade - to one and all!
(Just another 10 years to the roaring 20s - let's hope!)

God Jul, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays

Photographs by me.

Today the Nordic countries celebrate Christmas, so wishing you all God Jul! A Very Merry Christmas for tomorrow and Happy Holidays to all!

Walking Through the World.

Walking Through the World. Photographs by Sandi Haber Fifield. Text by Arthur Ollman, Tom O'Connor. Charta, 2009. 96 pp., 188 color illustrations, 12x9½".

" 'Walking through the World' includes Sandi Haber Fifield’s photographs from 2003 to the present.

Her grids, diptychs, and installations stretch the boundaries of the traditional frame to mirror the ways in which we gather information visually. The work is born of collisions and alignments that are made as she navigates the world and reinterprets what is in front of her lens.

The textured layering of images is suggestive, not definitive, and the work encourages the viewer to examine connections between images as well as the empty spaces linking them.

As Richard Klein of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has said, 'Sandi Haber Fifield’s haunting and quietly beautiful work with multiple images is extremely pertinent to this moment in photography’s continuing evolution. Her approach forces the viewer to slow down and consider the relationship between images. Never bombastic or sensational, the artist’s work is both a corollary to our current visual environment as well as its antidote.'

'In Walking through the World Sandi Haber Fifield addresses aspects of human vision that few have explored with such dedication. She seems to be floating through a world that is familiar to us and yet we have never seen it this way before . . . Like memories, these images drift in and out of focus, messages from the edges of her vision, woven together with eloquent threads. They wander elusively in the mind, dissolving one into the others, identifying her surroundings and her experience. Here is the artist’s realization of everything coming together.'

- Arthur Ollman, Founding Director, The Museum of Photographic Arts. "

Bauhaus 1919-1933. Workshops for Modernity.

Bauhaus 1919-1933. Workshops for Modernity. By Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman. 2009. 328pp., 475 illustrations, 12x9.5".

" 'Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity', published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art’s first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938.

It offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century’s most influential experiment in artistic education, and examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school’s products.

Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen outside of Germany.

Featuring approximately 400 full-color plates richly complemented by a range of documentary images, Bauhaus 1919–1933 includes two overarching essays by the exhibition’s curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman; shorter object-specific essays by more than twenty leading scholars; and an illustrated, narrative chronology that provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus’s lived history."


The MoMA exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity is on until January 25, 2010.


PS. Another laps in postings - apologies, will do better!

New Topographics.

New Topographics. Text by Britt Salvesen, Alison Nordström. Steidl & Partners, 2009. 256 pp., Illustrated throughout, 11¾x9½".

" 'The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape' was one of those rare exhibitions that permanently alters how an art form is perceived.

Held at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, in January 1975, it was curated by William Jenkins, who brought together ten contemporary photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and HenryWessel, Jr.

Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the show effectively gave a name to a movement or style, although even today, the term 'New Topographics' - more a conceptual gist than a precise adjective - is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held.

Although the exhibit’s ambitions were hardly so grand, New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift, for the show occurred just as photography ceased to be an isolated, self-defined practice and took its place within the contemporary art world.

Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first Photoconceptual style. In different ways, the artists thoughtfully engaged with their medium and its history, while simultaneously absorbing such issues as environmentalism, capitalism and national identity.

In this vital reassessment of the genre, essays by Britt Salvesen and Alison Nordström accompany illustrations of selected works from the 1975 exhibition, with installation views and contextual comparisons, to demonstrate both the historical significance of New Topographics and its continued relevance today.

The book also includes an illustrated checklist of the 1975 exhibition and an extensive bibliography."

Certain Places.

Certain Places. Photographs and Introduction by William Clift. William Clift Editions, Santa Fe, 1987. 44 pp., twenty-two tritone illustrations, 12¼x11¼".

"At the age of fifteen, Boston-born William Clift took his first photography workshop with Paul Caponigro.

With Walter Chappell and Caponigro, Clift became a charter member of the Association of Heliographers, New York, which supported photographers concerned with expressing experience or ideas beyond the factual documentation of scenes and occurrences.

In 1970, Clift was commissioned by the Massachusettes Council on the Arts to photograph the vacant Boston City Hall, a project in which he strove to capture the latent presence of its former occupants.

His other projects included documenting the nation's courthouses, the New York State Capitol in Albany, and the Hudson River Valley. He also is known for his New Mexico landscapes and images of Mont Saint Michel."

source

Two William Clift books in a row, but I thought they were quite different, even though the quiet melodiousness is similar.

A Hudson Landscape.

A Hudson Landscape. Photographs by William Clift. Text by Paul Kane. William Clift Editions, Santa Fe, 1993. 86 pp., five-impression, dry-trap reproductions, 11½x10¼".

"This book by William Clift is a visual journey which takes us north, up the Hudson River from just above New York.

A gorgeous edition, this self-published monograph includes a prose companion by Paul Kane.

Clift's photographs evoke the still vibrant and fecund natural landscape of the Hudson Valley at all times of day - the fog of morning, the gentle breeze of afternoon, the haze of evening."

Beautiful Losers.

Beautiful Losers. Edited by Aaron Rose and Christian Strike. D.A.P. & Iconoclast, 2009. 288 pp., 220 color and 200 black & white illustrations, 8½x11".

"The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it.

In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led.

Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation.
Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics.

Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinness, KAWS and Geoff McFetridge.

Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start.

This paperback reprint includes more pages, more images, an exhibition checklist, installation shots from a variety of exhibitions and an interview with Beautiful Losers advocate Agnes B."


(If you want to view the trailer and info for the film 'Beautiful Losers' you can do that here).

Portraits of Silence.

Portraits of Silence. Photographs by Hisashi Shimizu. Kodansha, 2009. 114 pp., Color illustration throughout, 8¼x7¼".

From the artist statement:

"A mother sits at her garden table and silently talks to her son. Another wears her son’s dog tag, wishing for another hug. A father keeps his son’s bicycle in the garage. Another mother hears her son’s cheerful voice. Then she wakes; it was only a dream.

Since the Iraq War started in 2003, many soldiers have died. Every one of these soldiers was somebody’s child.

As I shot these images, I was touched by the parents’ love and by the family ties that still bind them to their children, who have passed on. While the soldiers themselves do not appear in the photographs, their presence has been captured.

I am hoping these photographs convey the profound desire of these parents to keep the memory of their children alive."


PS. Many apologies for the weeks of no posts!

The Complex of All of These.

Video of the making of The Complex of All of These by Abigail Uhteg. Found via Coccinellidae's twitter.

The video comprises a collection of about 3000 photographs. 35 books were handmade over a period of two months at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY.


About the book:

"In a poetic language the author contemplates the world around her.

Images and words become parallel languages, where the distinction between ground and sky, past and present collapses.

One conceit after another feels its way over the tiny words before sinking deep into the dark of the etching ink to linger, trembling."

Frank O´Hara reads 'Having a coke with you'

Frank O´Hara reads his poem 'Having a coke with you' in his New York flat, shortly before his death in 1966. Found via litherland's twitter.

"Frank O´Hara reading his poem 'Having a coke with you' in his flat in New York in 1966, shortly before his accidental death.

Taken from - 'USA: Poetry: Frank O'Hara' produced and directed by Richard Moore, for KQED and WNET. Originally aired on September 1, 1966."

More videos can be viewed here.


"Francis Russell O'Hara (March 27, 1926 - July 25, 1966) was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch, was a key member of the New York School of poetry.

[...]

O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, much of it based on observations on what is happening to him in the moment.

Donald Allen says in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 'That Frank O’Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work'.

O'Hara discusses this aspect of his poetry in a statement for Donald Allen's New American Poetry: 'What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else, they are just there in whatever form I can find them'. He goes on to say, 'My formal 'stance' is found at the crossroads where what I know and can't get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred'. He then says, 'It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time'.

[...]

O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art.

He was also friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.

He died following an accident on Fire Island in which he was struck and injured by a man speeding in a beach vehicle during the early morning hours of July 24, 1966. He died the next day of a ruptured liver at the age of 40 and was buried in the Green River Cemetery on Long Island."

-- read further here.

Lee Friedlander: Self-Portrait.

Self-Portrait. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Haywire Press, New York, 1970. Unpaged. Small quarto. Black-and-white reproductions printed by Meriden Gravure. First edition currently auctioned at photo-eye. (Top image: cover of re-print, bottom: cover of first edition).

"Lee Friedlander's surreal sensibility is on full display in this set of photographs, originally published in 1970.

Here Friedlander focuses on how his physical presence impacts his photographs.

Known for capturing subjects outside of himself - nudes, landscapes - Friedlander writes: 'At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings'.

Readers can witness this progression through the images here as Friedlander appears in shadow, reflected in windows and mirrors, and, only occasionally, fully visible through his own camera.

In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect - elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair.

These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind."


The book details above are of the first edition. The re-print is published by Distributed Art Publishers, has a dimension of 10.1 x 9.4 x 0.4" and comprises 96 pages. It has 50 duotone images, and includes an afterword about the work written by John Szarkowski.

Optics. Compression. Propaganda..

Optics. Compression. Propaganda.. By Sean Snyder, edited by Silvia Sgualdini. Distributed Art Publishers, 2008. 96 pp., 88 color illustrations., 9x11".

"The words 'optics', 'compression' and 'propaganda' form the subtext for this monograph by Sean Snyder, who lives between Kiev and Berlin.

Using archival and media resources, as well historical cinema, photography and art references, Snyder is engaged in ongoing experiments concerning the malleability of images and the mechanics of their production."


Read Sean Snyder's piece on 'Optics. Compression. Propaganda.' in Art & Research journal.

Transitions: The Dresden Project.

Transitions. The Dresden Project. Photographs by Fredrik Marsh. Essays by Andreas Krase, Rod Slemmons and Holger Starke. Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden, 2009. 104 pp., 72 color and black & white illustrations, 12x9".

"American photographer Fredrik Marsh’s images tell the story of the great societal upheaval at the end of the twentieth century from an unusual perspective. The project deals in general with the passing of time and with change.

Marsh came to Dresden for the first time in 2002 and the idea for the 'Transitions: The Dresden Project', which would not be finally completed until 2006, came to the photographer in a process that can only be described as possessing its own momentum.

Marsh had started to focus on German history in a downright unconventional manner. He developed quite a distinct and unusual interest in the remnants of recent, specifically East German history as well as in the changes wrought by the rebuilding and the renewal of Dresden following the peaceful revolution of 1989.

He concentrated on the overlapping of different historical layers which he discovered in empty factory buildings, barracks and deserted old historic Dresden residences. He proceeded like an archaeologist who enters a new territory and secures evidence of former life without influencing it in any way.

With his pictures, Fredrik Marsh pays reverence to the important, but also tragic past of this city.

Marsh received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Transitions: The Dresden Project."


Deluxe Limited Edition:

"The Deluxe Limited Edition of 'Transitions: The Dresden Project' comes with a choice of one of four archival pigment prints and a signed book.

All prints made by the artist are from scans of his original negatives.

Three options are 9 x 11 inches in image size, printed on an 11 x 14 sheet of 300 gsm, 100% cotton & acid-free paper. Prints are mounted on 2-ply archival board and matted in a 14 x 17 inch 4-ply archival window matte. The fourth option measure 5 1/2 x 14 inches in image size, printed on a 8 x 17 inch sheet of 300 gsm, 100% cotton & acid-free paper. Prints are mounted on 2-ply archival board and matted in a 12 x 20 inch 4-ply archival window matte.

The prints are numbered, signed, and dated on verso. This edition is limited to 15 copies per image - 60 in total."

Snowbound.

Snowbound. Photographs by Lisa M. Robinson. Text by Mark Strand. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2007. 112 pp., 50 color illustrations, 11¾x9¾".

"Five winters long, the young American photographer Lisa M. Robinson took pictures in the snow. Snowbound shows landscapes in which everyday objects - alienated and sunken in snow - civilize the natural surroundings.

Traces of human existence set accents in the white landscape, delimiting it and often popping up in an amusing or incongruous way. A lonely hammock, a trampoline or a swimming pool are both echoes of the summer past and of personal memories. But Lisa M. Robinson is not interested in showing the obvious; instead, the photographer makes use of the many aggregate states of water - ice, snow, fog, water - as metaphors for life and transience."


About the Limited Edition:

"Limited to 75 signed and numbered copies. A custom white full cloth binding is the ground for an original tipped in photograph of 'Wish.' This limited edition book cover beautifully complements that of the trade edition.

The book is Presented in a hand-made white clamshell box with a blue ultrasuede interior, and is accompanied by an original signed 8 x 10 c-print by the artist."


Only on a gloriously sunny day like today could I post a book like this!


UPDATE: Also available through Klompching Gallery as they kindly told me, where you can also read more about Lisa M. Robinson as well as view more of her work.

Other Nature.

Other Nature. Photography by Ron Jude. The Ice Plant, 2008. 80 pp., 39 color illustrations., 10½x7¾". Signed copies available from photo-eye.

"In his previous book, Alpine Star, photographer and publisher Ron Jude appropriated and recast a collection of his hometown newspaper photographs as a cryptically humorous meditation on the grey area between personal history and collective memory. Jude’s latest series of photographs, Other Nature, adds a more intimate, diaristic strain to this line of inquiry.

In this handsome volume, two separate sets of his own 4 x 5 color pictures (made between 2001 and 2008) combine to create a subtle and uncanny instance of what Jude has called the 'slippery threshold of narrative' in still images.

Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude’s accounts of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be mistaken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to merge, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and the things hovering just outside our physical perception."

Liquid Chain Into the Vapor Wall.

Liquid Chain Into the Vapor Wall. The Fall. By FOS (alias Thomas Poulsen); Pernille Albrethsen, ed.; Text by Cecilie Ostergaard Hogsboro, Claus Heinberg, Claus Emmeche, Jason Dodge. Distributed Art Publishers, 2008. 207 pp., 234 color, 13 duotone and 60 black & white illustrations., 6¾x9¾".

"This artist's book is based on the concept of 'social design' developed by the artist FOS (alias Thomas Poulsen) since 1999.

It is an environmental tool that can be used to examine the character and potential of the physical space of contemporary exhibitions and more permanent redesigns of public space."


For more information read here about the exhibition of the same name.

Detour - Moleskine art project

Neasden Control Centre notebook from the Detour project of Moleskines. Found via Michael Nobbs' twitter.

"Detour is a Moleskine project dedicated to culture and creativity worldwide that features internationally recognized artists, architects, film directors, graphic designers, illustrators, and writers.

Detour is a small piece of the Moleskine journey, where interlacing stories merge. The travelling group show Detour, curated by Raffaella Guidobono, invites authors to compile and illustrate Moleskine notebooks with experienced knowledge insider tips for adventure hungry nomads. All of them deliver an intimate insight into the artists' creative process.

Amongst the notebooks some works contain extensive stories; others are turned into pieces of contemporary art and design.

Detour events have already taken place in London (2006), New York (2007), Paris (Spring 2008), Berlin (Fall 2008), Istanbul (Spring 2009), Tokyo (Fall 2009).

Detour supports lettera27, a non-profit Foundation."


"Neasden Control Centre is an innovative graphic design collective based in London, UK.

[...]

The group's edgy, sometimes child-like illustration has brought them to the attention of graphic design enthusiasts across the world and in 2003 they were the subject of a book produced by the prestigious publisher Die Gestalten Verlag."


The Detour project comprises of a range of exciting and prestigious artists. To view the artist videos and learn more about them go to Detour's video gallery or to the moleskine youtube channel.

Visual installation

Visual installation by Bjørnar Pedersen and Andreas Knag-Danielsen.

"Visual instalations for the EKKO festival in Bergen 2009 by Central Saint Martin graphic design student Bjørnar Pedersen in collaboration with Andreas Knag-Danielsen.

Music: Ekko mixtape by The Work."


This video of work by Bjørnar Pedersen and Andreas Knag-Danielsen I found via the excellent FILE magazine.

Even though I don't mind the music as such I found it pretty interesting how meditative the installation felt if you switched off the sound.

Almost like an entirely different piece, you could appreciated the graphic shapes and the colour quality that much more.

It definitely added another dimension to it for me. Try!


For more of Bjørnar Pedersen's excellent work go here.

Grasslands/Separating Species.

Grasslands/Separating Species. Photographs by Michael P. Berman, Krista Elrick, Dana Fritz, David Taylor and Jo Whaley. Radius Books, 2009. 48 pp., 24 duotone and four-color illustrations, 9x12½".

"This catalog documents a two-part exhibition that has sprung from the work of Michael Berman, a current Guggenheim Fellow, who is both esteemed in the contemporary art world and a longtime activist with several environmental organizations.

Berman’s current series of photographs, titled 'Grasslands', is about the endangered Chihuahuan Desert grasslands in New Mexico, Texas and the northern border of Mexico, where he has wandered into the desert without a compass to, in his words, 'live deliberately'.

He believes that how you see the land comes down to what you value. 'I believe art has a greater potential for meaning when it serves some purpose. People have started to recognize these lands as significant and this is something art can help along. If anything, my work is to generate small symbols that reveal the greater complexity of things'.

Inspired by his 'Grasslands' series, guest curator Mary Anne Redding has assembled a concurrent exhibition, 'Separating Species', that includes a remarkable group of artists, all of whom delve into land in diverse ways that illuminate our relationship to our fragile ecosystems, highlighting our interconnectedness with the environment and non-human species.

Krista Elrick examines North American birds; Dana Fritz looks at plants and animals in engineered indoor landscape environments; Jo Whaley creates theatrical still life images of insects and humans; and David Taylor’s images of border monuments along the US/Mexico border explore the effect of border control on both humans and animals."

Even in the End.

Even in the End. Photographs by Peter Sutherland. Gottlund Verlag, 2009. 24 pp., black & white illustrations throughout, 6x9".

"Peter Sutherland and Gottlund Verlag are excited to announce a new collaboration in print - Even in the End.

A slim edition of black and white images printed by hand from photo engraved copperplates.

The rugged nature of the book matches the wild and epic scale of the images.

We have allowed in the printing and binding for any inconsistencies to present themselves as evidence of the process."

Transitional States.

Transitional States. Parcours Muséologique Revisité. Photography by Robert Polidori. Steidl, 2008. 240 pp., 160 color illustrations., 13x13".

"In 'Transitional States' Robert Polidori delivers a sublime photographic tract on architectural revisionism by charting the decades-long conservation project at Versailles.

One of the world’s largest palaces, and a symbol of absolute monarchy in France, Versailles is a supremely apropos building through which to address matters of revisionism, having been subjected to four building campaigns (between 1664 and 1697) by Louis XIV alone, and several modifications since.

So what does restoring a room really entail? Does restoration intend the precise recreation of what once was? And if so, how much 'creativity' goes into determining a room’s original condition?

The curatorial decisions steering this project inevitably betray political and aesthetic affiliations that have morphed over the course of the restoration, and Polidori has been in attendance to record them. Photographed over a period of 25 years, the ever-evolving phases of Versaille’s grandeur are here laid bare for the reader to decode and admire."


The photographs in this book are just absolutely sensational. A beautiful, interesting piece of work.

Summer Nights, Walking.

Summer Nights, Walking. Photographs by Robert Adams. Aperture/Yale University Art Galler, New York, 2009. 84 pp., 70 tritone illustrations, 8¾x8½".

"In this exquisitely produced book, the influential American photographer Robert Adams revisits the classic collection of nocturnal landscapes that he began making in the mid-1970s near his former home in Longmont, Colorado.

Originally published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights, this new edition has been carefully reedited and resequenced by the photographer, who has added 39 previously unpublished images.

Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, the houses, roads, sidewalks and fields in Summer Nights,Walking retain the wonder and stillness of the original edition, while adopting the artist’s intention of a dreamy fluidity, befitting his nighttime perambulations.

The extraordinary care taken with the new reproductions also registers Adams’ attention to the subtleties of the night, and conveys his appeal to look again at places we might have dismissed as uninteresting. Adams observes,'What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace.' "