B-Cuts, Antic-Ham

Like anyone, I have my predilections. I like highly personal, quirky and modest photobooks. It is not necessary in my opinion that a photobook be a capital “G” Great work of capital “A” work of Art for it to cause a viewer to see the world in a new way or to reconsider her vantage. Sometimes it is a small observation lovingly made and lovingly shared that offers the greatest return.

Several years ago I participated in a workshop run by Jeffrey Ladd and Ken Schles. The two photographers asked each participant to bring a couple of favorite photobooks. My selections were Paul Kooiker‘s Seminar and Ld by Yasushi Cho. Kooiker and Cho’s books are quirky–Cho’s particularly so. Seminar is a modest volume of photographs of one woman’s shoes shot during a seminar. The photographs are obsessive, almost desperate. What at first seems simply a particular detail catching and holding the photographer’s attention slowly builds into a discomfiting misogynistic fetish. The handmade Ld is probably as far as one could push a photobook before it becomes an artists book. The darkly printed photographs of light sources are layered with laser over print. The pages are irregularly shaped and hand sewn into an odd shaped cover. A laser printed acetate sheet forms a kind of dustjacket. I find books like these fascinating because one can see how an idea wends its way through a photographer’s mind.

Antic-Ham’s B-Cuts has a similarly acute sensibility. It is a small book, only 14 pages, inkjet printed in a limited edition of 169 copies. It is hand sewn and features a cover cut from the book review section of a French newspaper with the title silkscreened atop the text. The photographs within and the design itself connect this book to Franticham’s oeuvre.

The photographs in book are the usually discarded frames lost to light leaks, skewed perspectives, random subjects, double exposures and other technical lapses in the rush to load a roll or in processing the film. In these photographs, the visual frames end and blend haphazardly. Frames are cut off abruptly, jam one against the next or sit one atop the other in double exposures. This can be jarring, though as often as not the compositions feel highly intentional.

Photography is a multifaceted process, and there is opportunity for creative discovery throughout it.These photographs are primarily a product of Antic-Ham’s treating the editing with as much reverence as the shooting. As much as one creates photographs by framing the real world, it is in the editing that one makes judgements about if and how a photograph “works”. Sometimes there are diamonds to be found in the rough.

B-Cuts is fun and quirky and offers the viewer an opportunity to reframe their conception of what is a good photograph. In the digital rush attention has been primarily directed toward technical perfection. In this new, cleaner process the opportunistic happenstance represented by the beauty of flawed images has been lost. Antic-Ham reminds us remain open to the beauty found in our castoffs and offcuts throughout the photographic process and throughout life.

B-Cuts
Antic-Ham
Edition of 169
2008

A Conversation with Jorg Colberg

Back in June 2015, Jörg Colberg posted a weekly photobook review at CPhMag.com that he prefaced with some thoughts relevant to readers of Korean Photography Books. I reached out to Jörg, and he was gracious enough to expand on those thoughts in a brief conversation. The conversation took place via e-mail in early July; it has not been edited except for the addition of links to articles he refers to.

Michael N. Meyer (KoreanPhotographyBooks): Could you sketch out, very briefly, your background, and your roles within the photography world for any readers of this blog who might not know who you are?

Jörg Colberg: I have a background in theoretical astrophysics (computational cosmology). Now, I’m probably most widely known through my website CPhMag.com, which is the latest version of what used to be a blog (“Conscientious”) and which focuses on contemporary photography. I earn my living through teaching photography, as one of the core faculty of the fairly new Limited Residency Photography MFA Program at Hartford Art School, besides the occasional essay or interview for a publication. I’m also currently working on a book about photobooks, albeit not a survey book, but rather a book about how to approach photobook making.

KPB: You sum up the preface to a recent post, Photobook Reviews (W21/2015), with an offhanded comment about all of the books on photobooks and the increasing balkanization created by such publications. You ask this as a kind of joke, but I suspect you made light of it only because to do otherwise would require an entire blog post of its own or indeed an entire book. I’d like to orient this conversation around the reasoning of your preface: that there are a helluva lot of photobooks being produced, that photographers are not going to stop producing these books, and that consumers, critics and academics will need to find strategies to deal with this wealth of material. Furthermore, much of this material is outside of what might be considered the mainstream canon–which brings up questions of the usefulness of a shared canon and the limits of slicing photography into ever thinner slivers.

JC: Given how heavily fragmented the photobook world is, slicing and dicing it up even further might be of limited utility. It certainly won’t do much to expand the photobook out of its rather narrow confines (you’ll see the same faces at every photobook festival). I’m saying that the photobook world is fragmented, based on my own experience with it. See, for example this. I look at a lot of books, and I know a lot of people who do the same. But it’s often surprising how few books we all share as having heard of. And almost none of them are part of whatever a mainstream canon might even be.

KPB: What strategies do you use to create order and logic of the flood of titles being published? I’m thinking personal strategies specifically, but as a follow up, would you define your role as critic as helping your audience find order in the swirling chaos of photobooks or photography more broadly?

JC: I’m not sure I have a strategy. I basically react to books I see, hear of, or find in whatever way (I get a lot of submissions from people). I can’t afford traveling to all those festivals, and even if I could, I doubt I’d go. The flood of titles doesn’t worry me too much. It’s exciting, and there are always surprises. But of course, the vast majority of published photobooks are really not very good at all.

As a critic, I see my role as someone critically examining photobooks and photography. Of course, that’s a circular way to talk about this (isn’t that what critics do? But then, you’d be surprised to see the number of people who think it’s criticism when you copy some text from a press release and add a little bit of a description). But I think that’s a difficult enough task, and it’s hard to do it well. I do believe (or at least hope) that examining books critically and helping others approach them will ultimately help everybody find some sort of order. I personally wouldn’t necessarily attempt to identify an order, given it would be my order, and there are already enough people who proclaim how things work (without explaining too much why they make their choices).

KPB: What importance, if any, is there in broadening the pool of work under consideration by identifying cultural histories of one kind or another that aren’t being seen or written about? In your role as critic or educator do you feel any responsibility for actively doing this? (How fascinating might that very photography history “North-Eastern Lithuanian” that you jokingly mention in your post be? It might also be a dead end or a stultifying backwater, but how would we know until someone looks and writes usefully about it?)

JC: There are various cultural strands that people are following currently. My main problem with something like a “North-Eastern Lithuanian” history is that if it stays that, it’s of very limited utility. Last year, I moderated a panel on what was billed as “Japanese photography,” and the members of the panel agreed very quickly that thinking about “Japanese photography” as something that was completely different than, say, “German photography” was really not very helpful. So I think there’s nothing wrong with a “North-Eastern Lithuanian” history of photobooks – as long as it tells us more about photobooks and photography history in general, and doesn’t just carve out yet another niche.

So yes, in my role as critic and educator I do attempt to bring things always to the photography at the core, because that is, after all, what we have at the core. All the rest, all those things we see, those assumptions, that ideology we bring to it – that’s just piled on. I know I got my own ideology, but I do think it’s very important not to confuse ideology with what’s in the pictures.

KPB: Diverse fields of academic inquiry have tended towards dissecting smaller and smaller slices of the world. To what extent is it still useful to seek an overarching picture of a global history of photography? Asked another way–is an agreed upon canon still useful?

JC: I would probably argue along the lines of something I wrote about what I thought good criticism for me amounted to: an attempt to make sense, an attempt to bring useful criteria to the table that can then be used to get to a deeper understanding of photography. Whether or not we need an agreed-upon canon I don’t know. There is something to be said for the work John Szarkowski did, however limited it was. After all, he did attempt to make sense of things, something that cannot be said about the people who are now curators at MoMA. Why we can’t have a group of people who do that I don’t know.

But the canon(s) aside, the moment you know how to approach photography, you understand a lot more about photography, regardless of whether you’re aware of the (or a) canon. And that then is what I spoke of earlier concerning “Japanese photography” (or “German photography” or whatever else). I suppose this really boils down to knowing of a canon really only means something if you can read pictures. Otherwise, it’s just like knowing that 1812 was some special moment in US history, but you don’t really know much else.

There are a large variety of topics that keep propping up in photography’s history, and it certainly is important to be aware of them. We don’t need to be constantly re-inventing the wheel. And regardless of whether we agree with how history has been written, to understand it (and possibly re-write it) we need to know what went on and why (and what it means in terms of the pictures).

I don’t know whether this answers your question. In the end, it all boils down to the question “What is in the picture?” If you can’t give a good answer for that, your knowledge of a history or canon of photography is useless.

KPB: Jörg, thank you so much for taking the time to share your perspective and understanding.

OT: Karen Sinsheimer’s passing

Last week Karen Sinsheimer passed away. She had been the curator of photographer at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for the past 25 years. Her curatorial work has been widely described as ground-breaking and highly influential. Readers of this blog will likely recognize her as one of the curators of Chaotic Harmony.

An obituary can be found on the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s website.

Condolences to her friends and family.

An observation about the publisher Hatje Cantz

In doing a bit of background research for the last review, Taewon Jang’s Stained Ground, I noticed that over the past decade the publisher of that book, Hatje Cantz, has been giving significant attention to work by Korean photographers.

Hatje Cantz has published works by Nikki S. Lee (2005), Kyung Woo Chun (2005 & 2009), In Sook Kim (2009), Atta Kim in (two titles in 2009), NOH Suntag (2009), Bae Bien-U (2009 & 2010), Sung Soo Koo (2012), Hyun Mi Yoo (2013), Yoon Ji Seon (2014) and Taewon Jang (2014). In November of this year (2015) the publisher is releasing Contemporary Korean Photography, which explores how “pioneering” Korean photographers have made a splash on the global photography scene between 1986 and 2015. This is based only on a quick search through the publisher’s online catalog; there may be additional titles in its deep catalog that I missed.

Korea appears to be the best represented country outside of Europe, America and Japan (though if we exclude Sugimoto titles, Japan would probably have fewer titles than Korea) in Hatje Cantz’s catalog. I have no idea why this is, but it is certainly notable. For anyone looking for accessible titles by Korean photographers in Europe or America, Hatje Cantz’s catalog is worth exploring.

Stained Ground, Taewon Jang

Photographing at night exposes the world in a new light. We are able to see things in ways that we cannot during daylight hours. Taewon Jang has gone out into the darkness to photograph stalled construction projects, remnants of abandoned factories and the nocturnal glow of functioning industrial sites so that we can see them, literally, in a different light.

The light of the night is the opposite of the light of day. Daylight is external and falls onto the world–and does so with relative equality. At night, light jets outward from the subjects and pools close to its source leaving the rest of the world dark. By photographing at night–and by making use of the long exposures required by his large format camera, Jang traces the power relations (literal and metaphorical) of contemporary society.

Jang began making photographs in Korea and Japan of stalled construction sites. Over the seven year period during which he photographed, he expanded his subject matter to include abandoned factories and functioning industrial sites as well as expanded his geographic area to include the United States. In total, he has photographed almost 400 different sites. Seventy-seven of these appear in Stained Ground.

Distilling physical objects and their complex outer appearances into photographic form gave way to seeking evidence of the deep structures of our social contract. What is interesting is how the subjects suggest not only the social developments that begat them but also the continual development that will later consign them to obsolescence.

He describes the way his subjects evolved over the course of the seven year project in an interview with Suejin Shin included in the book: “In the beginning, I concentrated on the specific topography or the architecture, or perhaps a structure, or construction equipment, thinking that these elements could reveal the strange tension I felt at the site[s]… But then as I continued working on this project for a long time, I came to realize that what I saw was only a very small part of a larger picture… the places I photographed have changed beyond recognition or have even vanished from the map.”

The light that illuminates these subjects and suffuses the photographs with an ethereal glow is itself a product of the development that these photographs trace. Likewise, Jang’s ability to photograph is a product of the development. Without the progress of the first and second industrial revolutions (and that continues in the third industrial–or technological, revolution of the present day) these photographs could not exist and their subjects would not exist. The advancements of each revolution bring about new technologies and new industries while leaving behind the old and setting the foundation for the next.

The last three photographs of Stained Ground can be read as a coda for understanding the book: In “SG U #415, 2013”, a vast windfarm spreads across the frame. Each windmill is marked off by the red glow of its warning light. The movement of some of the turbines’ blades over the course of the long exposure has blurred them into nothingness. In the background a miasma of green light sets off the dark and skewed horizon. Our own technology appears as “other.” The scene suggests both a technological miracle and an apocalypse brought about by the chain of changes these machines are intended, at least in part, to solve. The next photograph, “SG U #321, 2007,” is of a small, low industrial building. It’s garage door is dark but open–we can see the dim form of a white chair inside. To the right, the bare spindly branches of a tree loom over the building as if about to collapse onto it. In the background the cooling towers of a power plant hover in a haze of brackish yellow clouds. Running from the foreground to the background in the left of the frame are high-tension power lines. They run straight back to a patch of blue cloud along the far horizon. The path to our current state has run along a line of iterative steps. Each successive revolution has brought the next. Photographically, the book ends with “SG K #420, 2007”. This photograph is one of only a handful that includes people and is the only photograph in which people are central. A group of 9 men (I assume they are men) are in a line in the center of the frame. They are dwarfed by the night around them. Five stand while four crouch or sit huddled on the ground. A line of hills run along the horizon and are dark against a multicolored sky. The ground on which the men are set is orange and indistinct. It is unclear if this is where perhaps some original industrial beginning occurred or where and how we’ll be left at some point in the future after our industry has run us to ground.

This is beautiful work and powerfully moving–in spite of the book’s humdrum design. As an object, Stained Ground is disappointing. As a point of comparison with another recent Hatje Cantz, Bae Bien-U’s Windscape‘s design pays attention to small details like the use of different papers for the text and plates and the use of a translucent matte dust-jacket that evokes the soft light of the photographs within. By comparison, Stained Ground lacks these small book maker’s touches. The cover is a good example of this: it is a garish glossy wrap with the title lost in the tones of the photograph over which it is set. Looking at Jang’s previous book, Black Midday, one sees a somewhat lower production value but a significantly greater attention to the design.

Stained Ground is a nice book to have on the shelf but not a necessary one. It doesn’t elicit delight. While it may seem odd to suggest that this should be the goal of a book whose subject matter is so somber, art books ought to be as much an object of delight as a carrier of content. One could imagine and certainly desire that design might have better served as mirror and amplifier to the content of Stained Ground. None of this is meant to discount the power of the photographs which are necessary and ought to be seen.

Stained Ground
Taewon Jang (site)
Edited by Suejin Shin and Markus Hartmann
Copyediting: Leina Gonzalez
Graphic Design and Typesetting: Andreas Platzgummer, Hatje Cantz
Production: Nadine Schmidt, Hatje Cantz
Typeface: Thesis, The Sans
Reproductions: Jan Scheffler, prints professional
Paper: Galaxi Keramik
Printing and Binding: DZA Druckerei zu Altenberg GmBH, Altenberg
2014

***

A brief post-script: A couple of American photographers making work contemporaneously with Jang are brought to mind by this book. Jang’s “SG U #405, 2013” recalls Mitch Epstein’s, American Power (as well as State of the Union, also published by Hatje Cantz). Epstein’s photographs examine the relationship of American society with industry, primarily in the form of energy production. Epstein places industry as ever present in the background of everyday life. Industry is there, but it remains, just barely, secondary to the human lives that it supports. Like Jang, his photographs are hesitant in passing judgement but present a troubling view. Less ambivalent is Will Steacy. Like Jang, Steacy spent long nights photographing America at night with a large format camera. In Down These Mean Streets, Steacy brought an agitprop sensibility to depicting the plight of the American City–in its archetypal and specific forms. The light in Jang’s photographs may hint at apocalypse and dystopia, but it has none of Steacy’s firebrand anger.

Cathedral de Lausanne 1505 -2022, Kyoungtae Kim

Despite the grand subject and lofty conceptual framework, Kyoungtae Kim’s Cathedral de Lausanne 1505–2022 is a rather modest affair in both its design and material construction. The brief text by Kyungyong Lim on the rear cover is short, to the point and written in language that a layperson can understand. The sum of these choices is an approachable and engaging book that encourages the reader to reconsider his or her reading of iconic landmark buildings.

The simple and rough hewn book uses the Cathedral of Lausanne, under constant renovation, as a metaphor for the way that urban spaces are constantly shifting as we remake them building by building, stone by stone, piece by piece. Kyungtae Kim has photographed sections of the cathedral where there is evidence of past or ongoing work on building. The book begins with the darkly printed cover image–a section of decaying stone that gives way, via the card stock cover’s gatefold, to a light colored section of concrete fill where the stone is being repaired.

The interior pages are an alternating mix of uncoated heavyweight stock and lightweight coated stock. The heavyweight pages generally contain sections of wall where either a stone is marked with the date of its replacement or sections of stone where repair work is being done. These photographs are all relatively tight close ups and printed full page. The lightweight coated pages contain longer views of either work sites or larger sections where renovations have been completed and are printed roughly quarter page. The book closes with two scenic shots of the cathedral from either end–these are printed back to back on the lightweight stock and the images ghost into one another through the paper.

The photographs are elegant black and white. While they show their maker’s technical prowess and awareness of formal modernist concerns they are always driven by the conceptual thrust of the book. Beauty is secondary to meaning.

As I wrote about Kim’s On the Rocks, Cathedral de Lausanne “isn’t grand or ostentatious but it is wonderful nonetheless.” It engages the reader to open his or her eyes to the way in which buildings that are culturally and geographically central can be read metaphorical as embodying the process by which the cities that surround them are remaking themselves moment to moment year after year.

Cathedral de Lausanne 1505–2022
Kyoungtae Kim
Essay: Kyungyong Lim
Publisher: mediabus
Editing & Graphic Design: Haeok Shin & Donghyeok Shin
Translation: Yunim Kim
2014

The Shining Things, Oksun Kim

Oksun Kim is best known for unsparing, full force portraiture. The best metaphor for her portraits is a frontal assault. She approaches her subjects head on.

The Shining Things is a departure. Rather than people, she has brought her lens to bear on trees. Though it might seem a logical step to describe these photographs as portraits of trees, I do not think that is accurate or useful. While Kim has brought her usual head-on style, these are not portraits.

Kim is based on Jeju Island, and that is where these photographs were taken. The trees are from a range of species and they appear as often in natural surrounds as the edges of urban spaces. Some trees are singled out and others blend into a cacophonous forest tableau of texture and color.

The photographs call to mind Ed Panar’s Golden Palms. Panar’s lo-fi photographs of LA made shortly after he moved there are similarly direct and diverse. While his photographs often include trees or vegetation, they are not the sole or even primary subject matter. What ties his book together is an affectionate sense of amusement at his new home.

Affection is likewise apparent in Kim’s The Shining Things. Kim’s portrait projects Hamel’s Boat and No Direction Home were shot on Jeju Island where she is currently based. While the location has not been a central visual concern in these photographs (though certainly conceptually it has), I can’t help but feel that the intense close looking so important in her portraits must bleed over into her quotidian view. When she walks away from a portrait session or goes for a drive the next day, how can a vestige of that intensity not carry over? How can the world not appear beautiful and wonderful in her intense gaze?

The book opens with a quote from Hubert Dreyfus’ and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: “All things are not shining, but all the shining things are.” Their book is a call to reawaken an “intense involvement with the wonder and beauty of the world” (that is according to Amazon’s blurb–I’ve not read the book myself**). Kim’s close looking and affection for place have led her to make these photographs. They are an outpouring of involvement with the wonder and beauty of the everyday world. These are the shining things that have become apparent through Kim’s intense gaze.

**
Postscript: Since publishing this review in June I have read All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly. With an expanded understanding of the ideas in the book, which are a source for Kim’s photography, I want to make a couple of additional comments on Kim’s The Shining Things. Dreyfus and Kelly write about the process by which meaning in human being has been reduced and diminished over the past two millenniums and the potential for reawakening the opportunities for meaning through polytheistic attitudes. In their view, meaning in contemporary life has become flattened with the spiritual shift to monotheism and the drive towards radical individualism (abetted by technological advancement). Their contention is that there remains a multiplicity of poietic conceptions of human being, going back through history, that offer us a manifold understanding of the way the world is. Drawing from these multiple conceptions of the world we can move beyond the dearth of meaning offered by the confluence of monotheism and individualism. By seeking a new kind of vibrant polytheism we can unlock a wonderful world of shining things.

In their book’s conclusion, Dreyfus and Kelly write: “[Becoming receptive to a modern pantheon of gods] requires developing the senses of the sacred that still linger unappreciated at the margins of our disenchanted world.” With this thought in mind, an alternative reading of Kim’s trees would be as the physical embodiment of Dreyfus’s and Kelly’s idea. The trees themselves linger at the margins; Kim elevates them through the wonder of her lens and shows them to be shining. This in no way diminishes the affection for place that I considered previously. I think that her engagement with the local is expansive. Through Kim’s expert use of craft (a poietic mode of meaning) and her attentiveness to the potential for beauty and meaning in the quotidian, her photographs both mirror and amplify the ideas in All Things Shining.

The Shining Things
Oksun Kim
Edited by The Museum of Photography, Seoul
Curated by: Senior Curator Son Young-joo, Curator Kim Sunyoung, Assistant Curator Kim Jeehyun, Educators Hyeju Hong & Mihyun Kim, Interns Jeena Lee & Eunji Choi
Text by: Loo Youngwook
Translated by: Juhee Son (Kor-Eng)
Designed by: Kim Jindeuk
Printed by: Graphic Korea, Ltd.
Published by: Song Youngsook, Ga-Hyeon Foundation of Culture
First Published August 9, 2014

OT: Grant opportunities for artists of Korean heritage working in the United States

An e-mail just came into my inbox with information about the AHL Foundation’s Andrew & Barbara Choi Family Grant. The grant is intended to “recognize and support the accomplishments of talented artists of Korean heritage working in the United States” and open to emerging, mid-career and established artists. The organization also offers the Jason J. Kim Grant aimed at more established “visual artists who have already demonstrated an exceptional capacity in the visual arts.”

I thought it was likely that these grants would be of interest to some readers of this blog. I have no affiliation with this organization.

Memento One & Two, Seung Woo Back

IMG_20150601_104121

Other peoples’ photographs are strange. This couple embracing on the bed: why does he still wear his shoes while she is barefoot? How tame must a reindeer be to accept food from a human’s outstretched hand? Who’s bicycle is that on top of those two humps of hay on the road? Why is it humorous when an old lady looks through a howitzer of a telescope but oddly unsettling when a man in dark sunglasses looks over a ship’s rail with a pair of binoculars? Who are all of these people? And who took these photographs?

What is going on here?

IMG_20150601_104237 Photographs are rich in physical facts: what someone wore, where someone stood, who they stood beside, what they were doing. Snapshots serve to jog our memories of why the physical world was in this state and how we felt about the experience of being in that place at that time. Unmoor snapshots from the personal memories that give them specific meaning and they become mysteries open to interpretation and invention.

IMG_20150601_104413 This is a conceptual performance of sorts. Back poses a question and allows his chosen editors and then we, the readers, to work out the answer to it. Back collected over ten thousand vintage personal snapshots from across the US and selected 2,700 to print. These prints were then presented to eight people (one being Back himself) who were asked to select a set of eight images. These people were invited to add text to photographs if they wished. Memento One and Two are each a cardboard box containing half of the selected photographs. The “prints” are snapshot sized offset reproductions, but their varying paper base colors and surface textures mimics the feeling of flipping through a stack of old photographs. Some photographs are annotated with dates or captions in English or Korean while others are unadorned with text. Several images repeat–often with different text on them. One image of two men skeet shooting towards the ocean appears three times. As readers, we are free to rearrange and mix and match our own sets of images.

IMG_20150601_104302
This design choice, of loose unbound prints, mirrors the premise. What do these photographs mean? To whoever took them? To ourselves? In some absolute way? Loose prints place the onus on the reader who becomes an active participant in the performance: a kind of detective. The reader must interrogate the stack of prints seeking clues in small fragments of meaning. Who knows if she will find the true meaning through this process of close looking, but she must come to her own conclusions as to what is going on here.

IMG_20150601_104150 Memento One & Two
Seung Woo Back
Essay by Hyeyoung Shin
Designed by Yeoun Joo Park
Courtesy of Gana Art
Published by IANNBOOKS
(no year of publication listed)
Selection One: edition of 400
Selection Two: edition of 400

W. M. Hunt on Bohnchang Koo’s Slow Talk In The Photobook Review 008

There is a review of Bonhchang Koo’s Slow Talk by W.M. Hunt in the latest The Photobook Review that accompanies the Summer issue of Aperture Magazine.

The review isn’t available online, but print or digital subscription information can be found here. The magazine is also available at many bookshops.