Le Bal’s latest exhibition, Foto/Gráfica: Une nouvelle histoire des livres de photographie latino-américains (A New History of Latin-American Photobooks) opened last week. The show is based on a selection of 40 books taken from Horacio Fernandez’s recently published book on books, The Latin-American Photobook (Aperture, 2011). This is not Le Bal’s first photobook exhibition—they presented Japanese Photobooks Now in the summer of 2011—but it is the first time that they have devoted their entire space to an exhibition of books. Following this show they will be hosting the 5th International Fotobook Festival, which is traditionally held in Kassel, so it seems that photobooks are becoming one of the major areas of focus of their programme.

According to Martin Parr, Latin-American photobooks “are the best kept secret in the history of photography”… one of the many secrets that are being steadily revealed by Parr and/or Aperture through The Photobook: A History series, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s and a forthcoming book on Chinese photobooks that Parr is doing with WassinkLundgren chez Aperture. The ‘books on books’ phenomenon is gaining so much traction that Andreas Schmidt, a pleasingly disruptive photobook maker, is already looking forward to the book on books on books which surely can’t be too far away. As for Parr’s quote, I am willing to take his word for it, knowing absolutely nothing about Latin-Amercian photobooks (with a few Mexican exceptions) and having had very few opportunities to see any.

© Pascal Martinez

I was particularly interested to see how Le Bal would take on this subject. Although there appears to be a growing trend for exhibiting books, the ones I have seen so far have generally been disappointing. Books are not an easy thing to exhibit, in fact they are exhibition-resistant in my view. Most people’s preferred position for reading or looking at books is sitting down and they are generally consumed by one person at a time, things that are difficult to replicate in an exhibition context. Exhibitions do not encourage visitors to touch the works on display, making it difficult to display more than one spread, something which is painfully reductive unless multiple copies of each book displayed can be tracked down. I think the key in exhibiting books is in overcoming these obstacles by recreating the immersive experience of a book in a way that goes beyond the experience of going into a very good bookstore.

In addition to the basic difficulties of exhibiting books, Le Bal’s space is far from huge whereas Latin America is on the large side and presumably has produced a decent number of interesting photobooks over the years. This poses the additional challenge of avoiding the exhibition equivalent of a ‘best of’ compilation album. To borrow the strapline from a random ‘Best of Latin America’ compilation, this could have been “a lively exhibition filled with hot and spicy Latin American photoboks!” which would probably have given me a severe case of indigestion.

Thankfully the exhibition successfully avoids most of these pitfalls. Rather than structuring the exhibition around individual countries, it is broken up into a series of sections: history and propaganda, urban photography, photographic essays, artist books, literature and photography, and contemporary books. These categories go beyond the traditional bounds of the photobook, expanding its definition to something like ‘books that contain photography,’ which makes the terrain far more diverse and interesting, bringing in books such as the revolutionary propaganda tome, Sartre Visite a Cuba (1960) or Auto-photos (1978) an artist book documenting a performance. There is enough material in each of the sections to whet the appetite, but without requiring you to spend several hours in the exhibition space just to cover all the material on display.

The scénographie of Foto/Gráfica is particularly good, the best I have seen for a photobook exhibition. Firstly, in order to tackle the issue of displaying more than one spread from each book, the organizers have decided to go down the road of sacrifice and cut the books up so that a series of spreads can be displayed (there are clearly enough copies of these books to spare, as book-surgery is not the kind of thing that could be done with an exhibition of rare Japanese photobooks for example). The books are displayed in a variety of different ways, from ‘classic’ glass display cases, to superimposed custom shelving units hanging on the walls. The exhibition also makes good use of prints, which are exhibited alongside the books and are a useful reminder of how different these media are. In the downstairs space, the central wall has been covered with scans of the spreads from a single book with a handful of prints displayed in mounts floating on the surface, a very impressive display. I’m posting a few of the official installation views with this post, as my crappy iPhone shots would not do the exhibition justice. By deconstructing the books in these different ways, it makes the viewer think about the form of the book and its specific qualities.

© Pascal Martinez

© Pascal Martinez

© Pascal Martinez

The success of Foto/Gráfica is that it opens itself out beyond Latin American photography to engage with Latin American artistic culture more broadly. By giving politics, literature and other art forms center stage, the exhibition not only provides some much-needed context, but opens up a number of interesting paths of inquiry. Photobook lovers won’t need my encouragement to go and see this, but this is one for those that are not book geeks as well. After Paris, the exhibition is travelling to Ivory Press in Madrid, Aperture in New York and to the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua in Buenos-Aires.

Foto/Gráfica, Une nouvelle histoire des livres de photographie latino-américains, Le Bal, 20 January – 8 April 2012.

Rating: Recommended

No related posts.

Colin Pantall has written an interesting post on his blog regarding the many year-end ‘best photobooks of 2011′ lists that have been published of late. In the post he raises questions about this process, the role of “tastemakers” in today’s photobook market and discusses the need for the expansion of the photobook market. I started to respond to his post initially as a comment on his blog, but it got so out of hand that I decided to turn my response into a post of its own.

After having compiled a non-exhaustive meta-list of 52 of the Best Photobooks of 2011 lists, I am interested by the reactions that these lists have generated. It seems to me that many of us have a love/hate relationship with them. We hate the idea that everything seems to get boiled down to a top 10, or even a top 50. But we can’t help but read them, particularly when they are written by people whose opinions we respect or have been on the telly, or just because everyone else is reading them and liking them on Facebook. As I recently posted in a Facebook group, there are myriad and sometimes very good reasons why we make and read lists. Umberto Eco has said it a little better than I can here (and Ken Schles has written a marvellous response to Umberto Eco’s ideas on lists which you can read here).

In his post Colin focused on Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood, the “winner” of my meta-list, as an example of a book that is getting all the plaudits. Colin bought it after it received so many recommendations but it left him cold. I got the feeling from his post that it was a book that he admired but did not enjoy. What I found amazing in the mind-bendingly tedious exercise of compiling all these lists is that Redheaded Peckerwood only got 14 mentions in the 52 lists that I compiled. In total 313 books got mentions. Colin mentioned Martin Parr, Alec Soth and Markus Schaden as three of the ‘tastemakers’ on photobooks, but Redheaded Peckerwood is not actually on Parr or Soth’s lists on Photo-eye (Soth did an expanded Top 20 list on which it does appear) and as far as I know Markus Schaden hasn’t done a 2011 list. What I found particularly interesting about the 2011 lists is that the tastemakers seldom agreed. To use Colin’s example Soth and Parr only agreed on 3 books of the 10 that they each selected. Expand the list of ‘tastemakers’ to 5 (I took Gerry Badger, Martin Parr, John Gossage, Alec Soth and Todd Hido) and there isn’t a single ‘best’ book that they all agreed on. John Gossage, who makes photographs and photobooks, designs and publishes them, and looks at more photobooks than most, said it best in his comment in response to Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks list, “None of us see more than a small part of what is being done in photobooks these days. So many things that touch people. A good time to be alive”… at least, if you like photobooks… it’s probably less good if you invested in sub-prime mortgages. That is the positive side of today’s photobook market. I think the tastemakers are generally a positive force: the more there are of them and the more that their opinions differ, the better. You can take or leave their recommendations, but they are often helpful in drawing your attention to new work.

That is the good side of the current photo-market. But as Colin points out, there are many bad sides too: books that are being bought and kept in shrinkwrap so that they are worth more on some “mythical future date of sale”, books that are bought and never looked at, photographers being stalked at their hotel by overzealous book dealers to sign hundreds of books so that they can be sold at an inflated price (true story)… I was amazed to see this article on the Guardian Money website a little while ago, which seemed to suggest that photobooks have become a good investment vehicle and a reliable way of doubling your investment within a couple of years. That might be true for a handful of books, but what percentage of the books being made are sold for less than their retail price 6 months after they have been published? Go and spend $100,000 on photobooks today and then try to sell them in 2 or 3 years time. Let me know how that goes for you.

I think that the most important and difficult question that Colin raises is the need for the expansion of the photobook market. As an artist it must be incredibly frustrating to spend years making a book only for it to be bought by a maximum of 1,000 people and seen only by a few hundred. The issues with the fragmentation of the photobooks market, the problematic distribution model, the proliferation of tiny independent publishers and self-published books, all made me think of some of the issues that there are with the music industry (although the almost-total digitisation of music has yet to happen to photobooks and is unlikely to). Big record labels are struggling, and people are distributing their music themselves or via small labels through the internet. Like with the photobook, I think this is a time where there is a huge amount of musical experimentation, of trying everything and anything. As a consumer of music, I see this as a golden age: I have never been able to access so much music so easily. Name an obscure musical genre (e.g. post-gangsta neofolkcore) and I will be able to listen to it within minutes and own (or steal) several albums of it within hours. But for those people making the music (let’s not worry about the ones selling the stuff) it is more complicated. I am no expert on the music industry but my understanding is that musicians now have to rely on concerts to make their money since virtually no-one makes anything from selling albums any more. What is the photographer’s equivalent of the tour? Exhibitions? Surely there is even less money in that than in books. Workshops maybe?

While I would love to see the photobook market expand, I can’t help but wonder exactly how big its potential is? The “population at large” never really bought photobooks before all these pictures were available online for free, so I’m just not sure why and how that would happen now. But then stranger things have happened. Allow me to leave you with this beautiful chart of vinyl sales over the last two decades which, if my tenuous musical analogy holds water, suggests there may be hope for photobooks yet.

No related posts.

Dan Abbe, (blogger and publisher)

Kazuyoshi Usui, “Showa88” (Zen Foto Gallery)

“Maybe my favorite book of the year. Bright colors, geisha and yakuza draw you in, but Usui is very conscious about playing with Japanese culture and history. I will definitely introduce this work in more detail in 2012.”

Kazuo Kitai, “Spanish Night” (Tosei-Sha)

“Color photos of Spain in the 1970s that Kitai dug up from his basement. Simple and excellent. I posted a few photos here and they were later picked up by a blogger in Spain who wrote some very nice things about them.”

Haruna Sato, “First of the Month” (Self-published)

“A criminally cheap self-publication which creates an artificial structure for ‘daily snap photography’ – it’s a book of photos only taken on the first of each month.”

Hiroshi Takizawa, “A Rock of the Moon” (Self-published)

“Color photographs from a psychology graduate turned photographer. You could actually buy this zine using the link above.”

Taishi Hirokawa, “Still Crazy” (Korinsha, 1994)

“I’m cheating. This book was actually published in 1994, but it’s the most I spent on a book this year, and with good reason.”

*****

Nao Amino (Editor. Worked at Little More and FOIL, freelance editor and exhibition planner from 2011)

Rinko Kawauchi, “Illuminance” (FOIL)

Katsumi Omori, “Everything happens for the first time” (Match and Company)

Shigekazu Onuma, “SHIGEKAZU ONUMA” (limArt)

Anders Edstrom, “Two Houses” (part of a special book published by X-Knowledge)

Emiko Nagahiro, “Reverb” (Self-published)

*****

Atsushi Fujiwara, (photographer and founder of ASPHALT Magazine)

Eiji Sakurai, “Hokkaido 1971-1976” (Sokyu-sha)

Mao Ishikawa, “Here’s What the Japanese Flag Means to Me” (Miraisha)

Takao Niikura, “Scorching Port Town” (Seikyusha)

Hara Yoshiichi, “Walk while ye have the light” (Sokyu-sha)

Hiroh Kikai, “Tokyo Portrait” (Crevis)

*****

Ken Iseki, (website editor and blogger)

Masayuki Yoshinaga, “Sento“* (Tokyo Kirara-sha)

“Masayuki Yoshinaga, who has been shooting groups of minority and outsiders in Japan, made this series of work in 1993 when he was still a photographer’s assistant. Building good relationships with the subjects made it possible to photograph these relaxed naked men from such a close distance.”

*Sento is an old style public bath (not a natural hot spring) that can be found almost anywhere in Japan.

Masafumi Sanai, “Pylon” (Taisyo)

“After publishing tons of photobooks with various publishers since his debut in the late 1990s, he launched his own publishing label ‘Taisyo’ in 2008. Sanai is a very typical Japanese photographer in a way: strolling around neighborhoods and shooting photos without any concept, but no other photographer’s work has as much strength as his photography. This is the tenth book of his own from the label.”

Takashi Homma, “mushrooms from the forest 2011” (Blind gallery)

“As many other photographers did, Takashi Homma also left for the Tohoku area to document the aftermath. But he didn’t photograph any debris or people like others did, instead he chose to shoot the forest and mushrooms in Fukushima which also suffered from radioactive contamination.”

Kotori Kawashima, Mirai-Chan (Nanaroku-sha)

“Because this photobook reached people who don’t buy photobooks or who are not even interested in photography at all. Simply amazing.”

Masterpieces of Japanese Pictorial Photography (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)

“The exhibition “Masterpieces of Japanese Pictorial Photography” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography reminded us that there was also an significant movement, which is hardly recognized, before the era of Araki and Moriyama. This is the catalog from the exhibition.”

*****

Ryosuke Iwamoto (photographer)

Naoya Hatakeyama, “Natural Stories” (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)

“For me, the best thing wasn’t a book but an exhibit—Naoya Hatakeyama’s show ‘Natural Stories’ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. It’s not really ‘today’s Japanese style,’ but I thought it was great on the whole, so I’ll pick the catalog that he made for the show.”

*****

Microcord (blogger)

Nobuyoshi Araki, “Rakuen” (Rat Hole Gallery)

Shinya Arimoto, “Ariphoto Selection vol. 2” (Totem Pole Photo Gallery)

Hiroh Kikai, “Anatolia” (Crevis)

*****

Tomoe Murakami (photographer and lecturer)

Naoya Hatakeyama, “Terrils” (Taka Ishii Gallery)

*****

John Sypal (photographer and blogger)

“2011 saw the publication of several more photobooks by Nobuyoshi Araki. In addition to being featured in at least one magazine each month, the man puts out more solo photobooks in a year than most established Western photographers put out in a career. Here are three of my favorites and one non-Araki publication.”

Araki, “Theater of Love“, (Taka Ishii/Zen Foto)

“A small visual treat published by Taka Ishii & Zen Foto galleries which is a collection of recently rediscovered pictures taken by Araki in the mid 1960s, several years before his Sentimental Journey debut in 1970. The book, published in an edition of 1000 copies, matches the 5×7 size of the actual rough little prints while the content allows one to see the the very foundations of Araki’s future major themes coming to light. A must-have for those interested in learning more about the early stages of this artist.”

Araki, “Shakyo-rojin Nikki” (WIDES)

“With a title that roughly translates into “The Diary of an Old Man Photo Maniac”, Araki again employs his date-imprint function to great effect chronicling the three months to the day after the Tohoku Earthquake on March 11th. Where his inclusion of color paints to black and white photographs resulted in brilliant and moving imagery, his alteration of the images in this book was subtractive in his scratching of the negatives with the edge of a coin. Each image bears a scar or fault line through it with results that fluctuate between sadness, horror, and at other times comedy. His tenacious treatment of the actual physical essence of film-based photography comes across as a rebellious challenge to the dry dull digital era he has been lamenting in recent interviews.”

Araki, “Shamanatsu 2011” (Rathole)

“The third and most beautiful of three Araki books published by Rathole Gallery in 2011, Shamanatsu continues on with the artist’s personal destructive alteration of physical photographs. The book is divided into two parts, the first being pictures taken with his Leica over the past 5 years from various commercial assignments and personal experiences. Each print has been unsettlingly and completely torn in half only to be mended back together with cellophane tape across the front the prints. The publisher did a marvelous job recreating the shimmer of the tape on each page. The second half of the book is a series of images Araki took over the unusually hot 2011 summer with a new Fuji 6×7 camera purchased earlier in the year. In a recent interview in the mens’ fashion and culture magazine, HUGE, Araki states clearly that Shamanatsu is not any sort of Art with deep meaning, but simply the photographic manifestation of his own physiology. He also added that after his new camera broke this series came to its sudden end.”

Meisa Fujishiro, “Mou, Uchi ni Kaerou 2″ (Let’s go home 2), (Rockin’ On)

“Photographer Meisa Fujishiro’s sequel to his wildly popular book “Let’s go home”. While his first book, now in it’s 9th printing, simply dealt with married life with his wife (a professional model) and dogs, the sequel introduces his son from birth and five years after that. For a skilled photographer who mainly shoots celebrities and bikini models, Fujishiro’s pictures of his home life are never bogged down by excessive slick camerawork or sentimentality. Their delightful frankness is a simple kind of beauty.”

*****

Ivan Vartanian (author, editor, publisher and book producer)

“With the risk of sounding contrarian, compiling a list of books as a year in review is tricky business because most often such lists are mistaken for “best of” and do a great disservice to publications whose stand-alone value is problematic. If there is one thing I’ve learned from working with Japanese photography and Japanese photobooks it is the need for trepidation in looking at things in isolation, which is the inherent project of such review lists. So much of Japanese photography has to do with the relationship and context of images within a given sequence, as well as the circumstance of publication and why a book was made. In a similar regard, the books I’ve selected aren’t necessarily “best of” books. Rather, they were selected for what they say in relationship to the photobook oeuvre of each individual photographer.”

Yurie Nagashima, “SWISS+” (Akaaka Art Publishing)

“From her earliest and strongest photography projects, Nagashima has used Family, her family in particular, as the source material for her photography. As a book production, SWISS+ interleaves pages of photography with prose printed on tracing paper. The photographer has recently turned her attention to writing both non-fiction and fiction. This book most poetically gives us a framework for how she finds a sort of concordance between the two mediums, sometimes independent, sometimes dependent on one another.”

Takuma Nakahira, “Documentary” (Akio Nagasawa Publishing)

“This book was largely overlooked and under-appreciated after its publication. Documentary compiles this master photographer’s recent color work. The photography’s awkward vertical format and how it reveals the position of the photographer relative to his subject matter seem to be at odds with the book’s lofty title. But when we consider this publication in light of Nakahira’s early and other experimental work, the project of his color work is slightly more understandable—resisting the dogma and trappings of contemporary photography. The publication of Documentary was almost simultaneous with the publication of a facsimile edition of his legendary For a Language to Come (Osiris, 2010).”

Daido Moriyama, “Sunflower” (MMM Label [Match and Company])

“The lush black and tonal range of this publication are an example of how beautiful basic offset printing can be. The same is true of the craftsmanship exhibited in the book’s layout and edit. In its simplicity, it shines.”

Takashi Homma, M2 (Gallery 360)

“M is an ongoing series of about fast food restaurants around the world. M refers to the identifying logo mark of the McDonald’s chain of restaurants. Such establishments have been a continual object in Homma Takashi’s photography since his Tokyo Suburbia series, which addressed the Americanization of Japanese culture. The screen printing of the photobook’s cover has a plain visual kinship with the discernible dot pattern on the cups and packaging produced by the fast-food chain. Does eating too much fast food also effect vision? Among the 500 copies of the edition, there are multiple cover variations.”

Koji Onaka, “Long Time No See” (Média Immédiat [France])

“This is a bit of a cheat. This book was not published by a Japanese publisher but, as a body of work, it may be one of Onaka’s best photobooks so far, especially when considered relative to his previous publications. This is an example of the photographer stepping outside of his familiar territory and producing a body of work that is free of his usual rigor. The full weight of his previous work still lingers in the air of this tiny book. It is a treat to see the cone-shaped birthday hat worn by his otherwise hapless mother, dutifully giving her son (Koji) a birthday party. The photographer scanned monochromatic photographs from his family albums and added color to each image in Photoshop. Onaka’s father was a photographer so there was a wealth of snapshots to choose from.”

Related posts:

1. Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s
2. Photobooks 2011: And the winner is…
3. Another best books of 2011 list…

The constant stream of best books of 2011 lists that have appeared in the past couple of weeks got me wondering whether there are any books that are getting all the plaudits. I have pulled together 52 lists in total (the final update to this post was made on 29 December), including my own, (the sources are listed at the bottom of the post). Some contrarians like Blake Andrews included books that weren’t published this year, but for this statistical exercise I have only included books that were published in 2011. After compiling the results (I gave 1 ‘vote’ to any book that was on any of these lists) one book has risen to the top of the pile with 19 votes. And the winner is…

1st Place (19 votes)
- Redheaded Peckerwood, Christian Patterson (Mack)

2nd Place (14 votes)
- A Criminal Investigation, Yukichi Watabe (Xavier Barral/Le Bal)
- Illuminance, Rinko Kawauchi (Aperture)

3rd Place (10 votes)
- Paloma al aire, Ricardo Cases (Photovision)

4th Place (9 votes)
- Gomorrah Girl, Valerio Spada (Self-published)

5th Place (8 votes)
- A, Gregory Halpern (J&L Books)

6th Place (7 votes)
- Series, Enrique Metinides (Kominek Books)

7th Place (6 votes)
- Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography, Verna Posever Curtis (Aperture)
- A New Map of Italy, Guido Guidi (Loosestrife Editions)
- The Suffering of Light, Alex Webb (Aperture)

8th Place (5 votes)
- The Place we Live, Robert Adams (Yale University Press)
- Salt & Truth, Shelby Lee Adams (Candela Books)
- In the Shadow of Things, Léonie Hampton (Contrasto)
- The Brothers, Elin Høyland (Dewi Lewis)
- Permanent Error, Pieter Hugo (Prestel)
- Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide, Pieter Hugo (Oodee)
- Magnum Contact Sheets, Kristen Lubben (Thames & Hudson)
- Animals that Saw Me, Ed Panar (The Ice Plant)
- Redwood Saw, Richard Rothman (Nazraeli Press)
- The New York Times Magazine Photographs, Kathy Ryan (ed.) (Aperture)
- First Pictures, Joel Sternfeld (Steidl)
- Is this Place Great or What, Brian Ulrich (Aperture)
- Visitor, Ofer Wolberger (Self-published)

9th Place (4 votes)
- C.E.N.S.U.R.A, Julián Barón (Editorial RM)
- Dirk Braeckman (Roma Publications)
- People in Trouble, Laughing, Pushing Each Other to the Ground, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (Mack)
- Fragile, Raphaël Dallaporta (Editions GwinZegal)
- The Unseen Eye, W. M. Hunt (Aperture)
- Pontiac, Gerry Johansson (Mack)
- Seacoal, Chris Killip (Steidl)
- Koudelka: Gypsies, Josef Koudelka (Aperture)
- Lang Zal Ze Levan, Anouk Kruithof (Self-published)
- Iraq / Perspectives, Ben Lowy (Duke University Press)
- History’s Shadow, David Maisel (Nazraeli Press)
- pretty girls wander, Raymond Meeks
- Believing is Seeing, Errol Morris (Penguin Press)
- Mom & Dad, Terry Richardson (Mörel Books)
- The Heath, Andy Sewell (Self-published)

10th place (3 votes)
- La Creciente, Alejandro Chaskielberg (Nazraeli Press)
- Abendsonne, Misha de Ridder (Schaden.com)
- Chromes, William Eggleston (Steidl)
- Films, Paul Graham (Mack)
- Mexico Roma, Graciela Iturbide (RM Editorial)
- Sunday, Paul Kooiker (van Zoetendaal)
- On Thin Ice, In a Blizzard, Paula McCartney (Self-published)
- You and I, Ryan McGinley (Twin Palms)
- One to Nothing, Irina Rozovsky (Kehrer)
- 83 Days of Darkness, Niels Stomps (Kominek Books)
- A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, Taryn Simon (Steidl)
- The Bridge at Hoover Dam, James Stillings (Nazraeli Press)
- Les Amies de Place Blanche, Christer Strömholm (Dewi Lewis)
- Abstract Pictures, Wolfgang Tillmans (Hatje Cantz)
- Photographs, Penelope Umbrico (Aperture)
- Interrogations, Donald Weber (Schilt)
- Conductors of the Moving World, Brad Zellar (Little Brown Mushroom)

11th place (2 votes)
- Half Life, Michael Ackerman (Dewi Lewis)
- Unmarked Sites, Jessica Auer (Les Territoires)
- Candlestick Point, Lewis Baltz (Steidl)
- A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners, Yto Barrada (Deutsche Guggenheim)
- One Day: Ten Photographers, Harvey Benge (Kehrer)
- Tibet: Culture on the Edge, Phil Borges (Rizzoli)
- War Primer 2, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (Mack)
- Eden is a Magic World, Miguel Calderón (Little Big Man)
- The King of Photography, Tiane Doan Na Champassak (Self-published)
- Double Life, Kelli Connell (Decode Books)
- A Falling Horizon, Heidi de Gier (Fw:)
- Subway, Bruce Davidson (Aperture)
- The Latin American Photobook, Horacio Fernández (Aperture)
- The Vanities, Larry Fink (Schirmer/Mosel)
- In the Picture: Self-Portraits 1958-2011, Lee Friedlander (Yale University Press)
- Color Correction, Ernst Haas (Steidl)
- Astronomical, Mishka Henner (Self-published)
- No Man’s Land, Mishka Henner (Self-published)
- Afterwards, Nathalie Herschdorfer (ed.) (Thames & Hudson)
- Celebrity, Kenji Hirasawa (Bemojake)
- Playground, Jeroen Hofman (Self-published)
- Safety First, Rob Hornstra (The Sochi Project)
- Sochi Singers, Rob Hornstra (The Sochi Project)
- In Almost Every Picture 9, Erik Kessels (Kesselskramer)
- A Head with Wings, Anouk Kruithof (Little Brown Mushroom)
- The Sea, Mark Laita (Abrams)
- Pilgrimage, Annie Liebovitz (Random House)
- Tooth for an Eye, Deborah Luster (Twin Palms)
- God Forgotten Face, Robin Maddock (Trolley)
- Street Photographer, Vivian Maier (Powerhouse)
- Carnal Knowledge, Malerie Marder (Violette Editions)
- 7 Rooms, Rafal Milach (Kehrer)
- Mark Morrisroe, Mark Morrisroe (JRP Ringier)
- Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk, Simon Norfolk (Dewi Lewis)
- Hard Ground, Michael O’Brien (University of Texas Press)
- As Long as it Photographs, It Must be a Camera, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (Self-published)
- Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, Tod Papageorge (Aperture)
- Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present, Peter Pfrunder (ed.) (Prestel)
- Photographs 2001-2009, Ken Rosenthal (Self-published)
- Oculus, Ken Schles (Noorderlicht/Aurora Borealis)
- Hurricane Story, Jennifer Shaw (Broken Levee Books)
- Subscription Series 3, Mark Steinmetz (TBW Books)
- Summertime, Mark Steinmetz (Nazraeli Press)
- Dessau, Bill Sullivan (Kaugummi Books)
- Nomad, Jeroen Toirkens (Lannoo)
- Self Publish Be Naughty, Various (Self Publish Be Happy)
- Chinese Sentiment, Shen Wei (Charles Lane Press)
- Waikiki, Henry Wessel (Steidl)
- The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott, David M. Wilson (Little, Brown & Co.)

So there it is. The meta ‘best of’ list. A few points worth noting. I have only included books that got more than 1 vote. There were 313 books nominated in the 52 lists that I used to compile this meta-list. It’s fascinating to see that there is so little consensus on the ‘best’ books of the year and that there is such a broad playing field. There are books on here that were printed in editions of several thousand copies and books that were printed in editions of less than 100. Some artists even managed to get nominated for several books produced in the same year. I’d like to leave you with a final recommendation: remember, these rankings are totally subjective, meaningless and even nonsensical. It’s hard to resist looking at these lists (although if I see another list at this stage, I will probably have to take my own life), but remember that there are hundreds of other books that are just as good if not better than these.

Sources: Brainpickings, The 11 best photography books of 2011; Sean O’Hagan (The Guardian), Photography books of the year 2011; American Photo, The best photobooks of 2011; Alec Soth, Top 20 photobooks of 2011; Rémi Coignet & Maria-Karina Bojikian, Livres de photographie: notre sélection 2011; Le Monde, Ouvrages de fête à savourer (Photographie); Jörg Colberg, My favourite photobooks this year; Tom Claxton, 2011 photobook highlights; Corey Presha, Favorite Books of 2011; Bridget Coaker, Photography Books of the Year; Yannick Bouillis, Favorite photobooks; Bart Peters, 10 favourite photobooks of 2011; Claire de Rouen, Xmas Top Ten; BJP, The best photobooks of 2011; Blake Andrews, Photography Books; Conor Donlon, Favourite Books of 2011; Sebastian Hau, “books that engaged me the most”; Larissa Leclair, The Best Books of 2011 (self and indie published); Willem Van Zoetendaal, Favorite Books of 2011; Rob Hornstra, Top Photo Books 2011; Marcel Du, Best of 2011 photobooks; Photobookstore, Our favourite photobooks of 2011; Elizabeth Avedon and friends, 2011 best photography books; NY Times Photo Department, Our Top 10 Photo Books of 2011; Time, Best of 2011: The Photobooks We Loved; Photo-eye (26 contributors), The Best Books of 2011; Laurence Vecten, 7 livres photographiques du moment, à feuilleter au coin du feu; Me, Another best books of 2011 list.

Before I sign off this post, it is worth remembering that there is also another way to cut this ‘best photobook’ cake and that is sales. This is how the list ends up looking based on sales (according to this article by PDN):

1. Simply Beautiful Photographs (National Geographic)
2. The Great LIFE Photographers (Little, Brown & Co.)
3. The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (LIFE)
4. One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001, 10 Years Later (Little, Brown & Co.)
5. Portraits of Camelot: A Thousand Days in the Kennedy White House (Abrams)
6. In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits (National Geographic)
7. The President’s Photographer: Fifty Years Inside the Oval Office (National Geographic)
8. Decade (Phaidon)
9. Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans (Chartwell)
10. Wonders of LIFE: A Fantastic Voyage Through Nature (LIFE)

Related posts:

1. Photobooks 2011: a view from Japan
2. Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s
3. Another best books of 2011 list…

My most recent trip to Japan in October happily coincided with Naoya Hatakeyama’s first retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of his work – and there is quite a lot of it – so I was curious to see how this exhibition, entitled Natural Stories, would be put together. The exhibition has now closed in Tokyo but opens at the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam today until the end of February 2012. To coincide with Natural Stories, Hatakeyama also released his latest book, Ciel Tombé, which I included on my best books of 2011 list, so I thought I would discuss them together here.

I will admit to being a little surprised at the selection of work in Natural Stories. Although there are ten different bodies of work in the exhibition, none of Hatakeyama’s work on Tokyo (Underground, River, Maquettes/Light…) was included. However, in the curator’s text on the exhibition she is quick to explain that this was a conscious decision given that Hatakeyama already had several solo exhibitions in Japan including a 2007 show at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura & Hayama which took the city as its theme. With that in mind the exhibition’s focus on the natural landscape makes sense.

The title Natural Stories is an intriguing one. I think it works best in french (Histoires naturelles), which I believe is the language in which the title was originally given. In french ‘histoire’ can mean both history or a story. The title evokes Natural History, stories about nature, and perhaps even a history of nature itself. The essay by the French writer Philippe Forest in the exhibition catalogue explores these notions in detail so I won’t dwell on them any further, but the title evokes the very different considerations that inform Hatakeyama’s photographic approach to the landscape. His landscapes are never ‘just’ landscapes: they are always the reflection or the echo of something else. For instance, although it depicts the limestone mines, the series Lime Hills deals with the transformation of the natural landscape to feed the insatiable growth of the city of Tokyo.

Although it is almost never directly present in this exhibition, the city is never very far away. In the series Ciel Tombé Hatakeyama explored the Parisian catacombs and their underground ‘fallen skies’ (ciel tombé). This series is the subject of Hatakeyama’s latest book, Ciel Tombé (Super Labo, 2011). For this book Hatakeyama has deviated from the standard photobook formula and asked the French author Sylvie Germain to contribute a short story based on his photographs . I won’t go into detail about this book as this post is already overly long, but I will say this: I first saw the work from Ciel Tombé a few years ago at a gallery in Tokyo. Several months later I had the opportunity to read Sylvie Germain’s deliciously strange and unsettling text. I had not seen any of the images since that first viewing, but as I read through the story the images appeared in my mind as if I had only just seen them. For the moment the book only exists in a deluxe edition of 200 which includes a print, a book of Hatakeyama’s photographs and another book containing Sylvie Germain’s text in French, English and Japanese, but there is word of a second edition in the making.

Returning to Natural Stories, for me the final two rooms of the exhibition were the highlight. The first of these rooms (pictured at the top of this post) contained Hatakeyama’s most recent work on his hometown of Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture, one of the many towns destroyed in the tsunami of 11 March 2011. Although very little time has passed, Hatakeyama decided to include a series of photographs in the exhibition that he took in the wake of the disaster. Many images have been produced of the aftermath of the tsunami, but most of these fail to connect beyond conveying the scale of the physical destruction. What stands out about Hatakeyama’s images is how matter of fact they feel. He has photographed these landscapes with the same unflinching precision, intelligence and quietness tinged with nostalgia as any other landscape. His photographs strike me as the most natural possible response to the disaster, but they must have been incredibly difficult to make given the deeply personal and tragic nature of the subject. These images are presented on three adjacent walls in the space, while on the fourth a slideshow of images taken between 2008-2010 in his native region is presented in the guise of a framed photograph.

The final room contains the companion series Blast and A Bird. Both series have been exhibited and published in the past, but for this exhibition Hatakeyama also chose to present Blast as a stop-motion video projected on a huge wall in the space. These photographs have a potent mix of beauty and brutal force which is heightened even further when animated in this way. It is an overwhelming end to the exhibition and one which resonates long after you leave the space.

Related posts:

1. Review: Naoya Hatakeyama @ Rencontres d’Arles
2. Review: From Back Home (book and exhibition)
3. Some more fuel on the photo-book fire

I have given up, caved in, admitted defeat. Although the world does not need it, the temptation was just too great, so I have gone ahead and compiled a selection of my favourite books of the year. Instead of giving you a top 10 I decided to humbly borrow the format of the Oscars and select the best books by category (as with the Oscars, my categories are suitably ridiculous). So without further ado, I bring you the the official eyecurious Best Books of 2011.

Best really good book

Enrique Metinides, Series (Kominek)

Most unlikely best book of the year

Yukichi Watabe, A Criminal Investigation (Xavier Barral)

Best self-published book that is too big for most bookshelves

Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, As long as it photographs / It must be a camera (Self-published)

Best spiral-bound book

Ricardo Cases, Paloma al Aire (Photovision)

Best sold out collectible book that gets damaged very easily

Valerio Spada, Gomorrah Girl (Cross Editions)

Best super-deluxe VIP book with all the trimmings

Naoya Hatakeyama, Ciel Tombé (Super Labo)

Best really weird book

Paul Kooiker, Sunday (William van Zoetendaal)

Best book cover

Takashi Homma, M2 (Gallery 360°)

Best book that I bought in 2011 but wasn’t actually published this year

Tadanori Yokoo, Tokyo Y-junctions (Kokushokankokai)

Best book of outtakes

Rob Hornstra, Safety First (Self-published)

Best book of pictures made using an archaic photographic process

Christian Marclay, Cyanotypes (JRP Ringier)

Best calendar for a good cause

Yuka Amano, Seiji Kumagai, Aya Muto & Hiroshi Nomura, One Year for Japan (Lozen Up)

I will leave you with a final word of advice: the number of best books of 2011 lists that have already popped up is proof that you should NEVER publish a book in December. You’ll be too late for all the best books lists and will be technically ineligible for the best books lists of the following year. You have been warned.

Related posts:

1. eyecurious books etc.
2. Photobooks 2011: a view from Japan
3. Photobooks 2011: And the winner is…

Now that the dust has settled, it is difficult to find many dissenters on the big move. The Grand Palais is pretty much unbeatable as a space for housing a fair, particularly given the amount of natural light that pours in through the several-storey-high glass roof (sunny days can be a bit problematic but if they can find a way to guarantee cloud cover, you will not find better light for looking at photographs). The fair has increased in size with 117 galleries, 27 more than in 2010, and 18 publishers, but the airier premises make it feel less crowded and, if you put your mind to it, it is possible to find enough space to spend time looking at photographs without jostling for space with other visitors. The gallery newcomers included Pace/MacGill, Gagosian, Fraenkel and Marian Goodman, which gave a heavyweight feel to proceedings. Gagosian, who apparently doesn’t really do art fairs, had a interesting quirk to his booth: a closet-sized “private viewing room”, presumably so that the unseemly practice of paying for art would not have to take place in public.

Installation of Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank

One of the biggest improvements of the fair was the space devoted to photo-books, something that had been a point of contention in recent years. Although there was no increase in the number of participating publishers and book dealers, their booths were far bigger (the Steidl booth must have tripled in size) and this seemed to be a particularly busy section of the fair. There was also a great installation by Markus Schaden of Ed Van der Elsken’s wonderful Love on the Left Bank. The installation, a kind of exploded book, gave a great sense of the process of putting a book together. And finally the Paris Photo book prize was launched to reward “a reference photographic book that has marked the past 15 years” (editor’s note: the English translation of the Paris Photo website leaves a lot to be desired). Paul Graham’s A Shimmer of Possibility was the deserved winner.

Andrew Bush wall at M+B gallery

I guess at this point that I should say something about the photography itself. With a fair the size of Paris Photo I’m convinced that every visitor has a different experience and it is impossible not to find things both to love and to hate. My overall impression was of a strong year with a fairly diverse selection of material, whereas sometimes it can feel like the same pictures pop up on every booth. I don’t think Paris Photo is the place to see the cutting edge of contemporary photography, although there is always something hiding around a corner if you look hard enough, but rather a venue for great vintage work and a cross-section of what is ‘hot’ right now.

Sigmar Polke at Springer & Winckler Kunsthandel

Some brief personal highlights from the fair include San Francisco-based Fraenkel‘s booth, which was an achingly (overly?) tasteful mix of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Robert Adams, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Richard Misrach, Edward Weston and others; LA gallery M+B‘s wall of Andrew Bush vector portraits of drivers in their cars; an exquisite 3×3 grid of late 1970s miniature Peter Downsbrough cityscapes at the excellent Cologne-based Thomas Zander booth; and Berlin-based Springer & Winckler Kunsthandel‘s booth devoted entirely to photographs by the recently deceased German artist Sigmar Polke. The fair has also maintained the guest country/region format from previous years and this year it was Africa that had the place of honour. This is a hit and miss exercise, but I thought Africa was well represented, and although Malick Sidibe turned up absolutely everywhere, there was a fairly diverse selection of material on show. A few personal favourites were a Michael Subotzky prison yard panorama at the South African Goodman Gallery (not to be confused with Marian), Nigerian artist J.D. Okhai Ojeikere’s typological hairstyle portraits which appeared in several places, and a Michael Wolf Real Fake Art clin d’oeil to Malick Sidibe at 51 Fine Art from Antwerp.

Michael Wolf at 51 Fine Art

Another innovation of the fair was to host exhibitions of both public (ICP, Tate Modern and Musée de l’Elysée) and private (Artur Walther, J.P. Morgan and Giorgio Armani) collections, a pretty simple idea that makes a lot of sense in the context of an art fair. Thankfully the exhibitions went beyond the “here’s some stuff we bought this year” format and were generally well-curated and/or insightful.

J.D. Okhai Ojeikere from the Artur Walther collection

The only big question mark over the success of Paris Photo 2011 has to be a commercial one. These new premises must involve a pretty significant price increase and I wonder whether the less established galleries will have made sufficient sales to compensate for the cost of a Grand Palais booth, particularly in the current turbulent economic context. With FIAC taking place just a handful of days beforehand, and a growing number of contemporary art galleries present at Paris Photo there is also a question of how these two fairs will coexist. I hope the outcome is a positive one because this edition of Paris Photo certainly felt like the best yet.

Related posts:

1. Paris November photo madness round-up
2. November Photo Madness in Paris
3. Paris Photo: crossing the finish line

I spend quite a bit of time with photobooks, whether it be for this blog, it’s slightly less wordy Tumblr cousin, or just for my personal pleasure, but it is not often that I get to spend a day with a book like this one. In fact, it is not a book but a maquette for a book that was never published. Entitled Mario, it is a children’s photobook by Cornell Capa that tells the story of a young Peruvian boy named Mario. I’m not sure why it was never published but I understand that this maquette spent most of it’s life sitting on a shelf and that it has only recently resurfaced. So when I was given the opportunity to borrow the book for a day, I jumped at the opportunity.

Cornell Capa is probably best known for founding the International Center of Photography in New York in 1974 and perhaps also for being Robert Capa’s younger brother, but he was also a photographer and a member of Magnum Photos in his own right. His approach to photography was articulated in his 1968 book, The Concerned Photographer, which he described as a book of “images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism”. Mario is very much in line with this philosophy.

The book is made up of approximately 60 images by Cornell Capa. The photographs are predominantly black-and-white although it also includes a handful of colour images. The photographs are accompanied by a narrative written by Sam Holmes which follows a Quechuan Indian boy named Mario who dreams of going to America where he will buy a tractor for his father. The story follows Mario from his family’s simple life on the farm to his school and then on to the city of Cuzco in southeastern Peru for the Corpus Christi Festival, ending with Mario returning home. When in Cuzco, Mario happens to meet an American boy who is about the same age as him, his first encounter with the country he has been dreaming of visiting.

Although the text is clearly aimed at children, there are also some quite dense historical passages. One section deals with the richness of the ancient Inca civilization while another describes the rituals of the Corpus Christi festival. One of the most fascinating things about Mario, is that beneath the childlike language, the book has a strong political message. Returning home after his encounter with the young American during which he experiences some of the comforts of the Western consumerist lifestyle after sleeping over with his family in a hotel in Cuzco, Mario grows to appreciate the simple, ancient beauty and traditions of the rural land where he is from and his urge to travel to the city or to America fades. Today’s right-wing American cable news networks would be outraged by the book’s progressive, ‘socialist’ message.

I’m not sure exactly when the maquette for Mario was made (my guess would be in the late 1950s or 1960s), but it is an extremely interesting window onto American politics at the time and to the forthcoming interventionist American foreign policy of the 1970s. Although it is aimed at children, the book is essentially a progressive political tract… you could even go so far as to call it political propaganda.

The maquette is an interesting insight into the photobook-making process of the pre-digital era. The design is done by using a set of prints made specifically for the layout which are then stuck into the pages of the dummy book. The text is laid out in the same fashion. The design is pretty dynamic: the book doesn’t follow a ‘one-page-per-picture’ format but plays with different formats and layouts for the images. Having spent most of its life on a shelf, the prints are in excellent condition, even those in colour. As an added bonus, I have featured more images of Mario than usual as this is not a book that you are likely to be able to get your hands on.

What makes this maquette particularly exciting is that I believe that, aside from the odd exhibition catalogue, Capa did not publish any photobooks of his work. With Horacio Fernandez’s The Latin American Photobook coming out next week and Parr & Badger’s The Photobook: A History Vol. 3 — with a chapter devoted to ‘propaganda’ — currently in the making, Mario is a timely (re)discovery.

Related posts:

1. Book of the Week #5: Mexico, D.F.

As a blogger I get sent several press releases a day for upcoming exhibitions, from the weird to the wonderful and everything in between. Although 95% of it doesn’t hold my interest, once in a while something stands out. The press release for the upcoming exhibition at Gallery 138 in New York of photographs and videos by Clark Winter entitled The Wonder of it All stopped me dead in my tracks.

I knew nothing about Clark Winter, but discovered that he is a global investment advisor, a TV pundit, an art world mover and shaker (he serves on the Committee on Photography at the Museum of Modern Art), as well as a photographer and an “artist”. The release tells us that “in his photographs and videos (…) patterns appear, information is collected, everything is experienced; nothing is explained (…) Something’s coming, and you don’t know what it is.” It would seem that Winter leaves the explaining to his day job and let’s the invisible hand of chance govern his artistic endeavours. From the visuals I got my hands on, his photographs seem to be as random as the above press statement: snapshots taken in hotel lobbies, airports and assorted ‘exotic’ locations. Winter travels a lot and rubs shoulders with the powerful and famous, but is also capable of photographing the totally banal… a toaster, some flowers, a field. All of this is then thrown together in 3×3 grids where the mundane rubs shoulders with the “extraordinary things he has seen while travelling as a global financial advisor” and where the former comes out comfortably on top. In one self-portrait, Winter appears with electrodes attached to his head, suggesting his deep connection to these many complex layers of our planet, or perhaps simply to suggest the powerful brain that lies within it.

Of course I haven’t seen and won’t be able to see The Wonder of it All and this may simply be a case of overblown PR, but to me this feels incredibly misguided. Could there be a worse time to put together an exhibition that reveals “the private world of high finance” by giving us “access to things that are unavailable to ordinary travlers (sic)”? The idea that a man who certainly has a deeper understanding than most of global economics, finance and the powers that be and is clearly very successful in his field, could somehow translate this into a visual form with a series of off-the-cuff photographs, strikes me as a little overambitious, if not downright pretentious.

Clinton and Ali at Davos

The exhibition is part of a series exploring the relationship between art and finance, something that is extremely pertinent at this moment in time. There is a lot that is wrong with both worlds and an exploration of how they influence and affect each other could make an interesting exhibition. But surely this is something that requires more than the contents of a powerful man’s iPhone camera roll. I don’t write blogposts that frequently and writing a critique of this exhibition may have been unnecessary, a waste of your and my time. However, I can’t help feeling that in a way this exhibition is insulting to people who are actually devoting themselves to making art. The idea that it is this easy suggests that the relationship between art and finance is a lot more twisted than I thought.

If anyone does actually manage to see The Wonder of it All I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts. However, I am concerned that for someone who cites Picasso and Piero della Francesca as influences, it may be difficult to live up to such lofty expectations.

No related posts.

I should start by saying that this review is long overdue. This is partly due to the fact that my blogging activity has ground to a halt of late, but also because of Memory Traces itself. The book is an intimidating object consisting of one oversized (30.5 x 41 cm) volume weighing in at a hefty 202 pages accompanied by two smaller books, ‘Höffding Step’ and ‘Dark Star’, inset into a custom cardboard case. Memory Traces is not only intimidating but unwieldy. This is not a book that can be casually flicked through: it requires space (if only to support its weight and size) and time to get through its complex layout made up of gatefolds and double-gatefolds of different sizes. Its three-book structure is also complex and of course there is no easy instruction manual provided to tell you how to get started. However, while these first observations may come across as criticisms, it is precisely because Memory Traces is such a difficult book that it is so unique.

Sarajevo, Hrasno 1997

The central book in the trilogy consists of a series of large format landscape photographs that were made in Sarajevo; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Berlin, Bitterfeld-Wolfen and Ronneburg; Bikini Island and Nam Island; Chernobyl; Khe San and My Lai. These images all depict places that have been deeply affected by recent man-made conflicts or disasters. However, Markerink’s images are far removed from the inflated drama of what has become known as ‘ruin porn’. His photographs of Sarajevo, My Lai or Chernobyl reveal places that seem to be defined by the scars of their past. As the Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu said of Nagasaki, these are places where it seems as if “time has stopped”. Memory Traces also depicts landscapes, such as those of Hiroshima or Berlin, that show few visible signs of past traumatic events. Although these cities are still defined in many ways by their history, their landscapes are in the process of being radically transformed by the objectives of economic growth.

You could say that Memory Traces deals with the different ways that history manifests itself within the landscape. However, it is as concerned with the present and the future as with the past. One of the most remarkable things about the imagery in this book is its treatment of time: the locations that Markerink has photographed all have troubling pasts, but these images do not give the sense of looking back. Instead they raise questions of how the past is carried forward and transformed as time passes. Although it is made up entirely of landscape photographs, this is fundamentally a book of big ideas. Markerink is not interested in the formal aspects of landscape, but rather in how landscape acts as a mirror for culture, for society in general. In ‘Höffding Step’, a book of text combining travel diaries, reflections on contemporary culture with Markerink’s views on the changing nature of photography, Memory Traces reveals itself to have even greater and broader aspirations.

'Moonset over Ground Zero Able & Baker A-bomb test shots (Bikini Island) and Bravo H-bomb test shot (Nam Island), Bikini Atoll - 1999'

With Memory Traces, Markerink has created an object that is designed to create the space for us to stop and think, a space that is essential when dealing with such ambitious subjects. Everything about the way it is made — the book’s huge size, its use of gatefolds, etc. — seems to be designed to slow down the reading process as much as possible. This is a book that also made me think about the way that we read photobooks. To use Markerink’s own description, Memory Traces is an “experience” with many entry and exit points rather than a book that can simply be read from start to finish.

If all of this sounds a little lofty, that is because it is: I doubt that you will ever come across a more ambitious photobook. It is a project that Markerink worked on for over 10 years, one which he describes as a gift he decided to make to himself for his 50th birthday “as a means to come to terms with (his) culture and (his) position within it.” It is a book that swims directly against the current of these times in which images are made, distributed and consumed and discarded in a matter of seconds. It will most likely bewilder you, frustrate you, confuse you and probably keep you coming back for more. Like Terence Malick’s Tree of Life, it is not without its flaws, but it is rare to come across projects that are this outrageously ambitious and for that alone Memory Traces is worth seeking out.

Ronneburg, Uran Tagebau Restloch, 2001

Cary Markerink, Memory Traces. Ideas on Paper (self-pub., clothbound hardcover, 30.5 x 41 cm, 202 pages together with two small booklets, ‘Höffding Step’ and ‘Dark Star’ 12 x 16 cm in a printed box, 2009).

Rating: Highly Recommended

Related posts:

1. Interview: Joan Fontcuberta, Landscapes without memory
2. Review: Mariken Wessels, Queen Ann. P.S. Belly Cut Off
3. Review: Stefan Heyne, The Noise