Introducing The Weekly Diary, a newsletter from Nowhere Diary
Out of the ashes, something beautiful will rise
Today I’m launching a new weekly newsletter called The Weekly Diary. It’s a shorter more frequent newsletter for subscribers of Nowhere Diary featuring my favorite findings of the week. This is the first edition.
I am also deep down in the proces of developing new ideas for the Nowhere Diary newsletter and my love for this community has never been burning brighter.
Day by day I am also getting better at writing, thanks to the amazing Substack platform and community.
With the collapse of social media and the uncertainty of the future we can no longer rely on social media alone to reach our audiences.
My newsletter is my next step in preserving Nowhere Diary, growing an unpoluted community and building it even bigger and better. Free from algorithms and ads. A place where we can all connect or re-connect and continue to discuss, share, learn and worship the thing we love the most — photography.
Join me on my continuous journey to build the strongest and most passionate community for photographers and subscribe now.
I hope you will stick with me. If you don't follow me yet, I invite you to join my mailing list.
Robert Adams receives the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2022 Lucie Awards
Congratulations to Robert Adams on receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2022 Lucie Awards.
Robert Adams (b. 1937, Orange, NJ) is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, both reasons to despair and to hope. “The goal,” he has said, “is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.” Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, in each place enjoying the out-of-doors, often in company with his father. At age twenty-five, as a college English teacher with summers off, he learned photography, choosing as his first subjects early prairie churches and early Hispanic art, subjects of unalloyed beauty. After spending time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Kerstin, however, he realized that there were complexities in the American geography that merited exploration.
In the 1970s and ’80s Adams produced a series of books—The New West, Denver, What We Bought, Summer Nights—that focused on expanding suburbs along Colorado’s Front Range, books that pictured heedless development but also the surviving light, scale, form, and silence of the natural world. He also examined this mixture of humanity’s imprint and nature’s resilience in the wider western landscape (From the Missouri West) and in the Los Angeles basin (Los Angeles Spring, California).
As counterpoint, Adams has occasionally published smaller, sometimes more personal volumes. These have included a prayer book set in the forest (Prayers in an American Church), a memoir of days walking on the Pawnee National Grassland with his wife (Perfect Times, Perfect Places), and a portrait of their dog, Sally, and her contentment in the backyard (I Hear the Leaves and Love the Light).
He has sometimes directly engaged civic and political issues as well. A series of photographs at the Ludlow memorial, for example, speaks for organized labor, and another at a protest against the second Iraq war records the suffering that accompanies empire. Most notably, Our Lives and Our Children pictures individuals who lived at risk downwind from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, where Adams himself once lived.
Over the years he has also published four small books of essays and interviews (Beauty in Photography, Why People Photograph, Along Some Rivers, and Art Can Help). Of these the critic Richard Woodward has observed that they “are defiantly free of postmodern attitudes and theorizing, arguing that one of the chief purposes of making art is to keep intact an affection for life.” In 1989 the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted a mid-life retrospective of Adams’s work, and in 1994 the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a fellowship, both of which contributed to a financial stability that enabled Kerstin to retire from her work as a librarian and for the couple to move from Colorado to the Oregon coast in 1997. There they began, with Kerstin working as editor, to document the deforestation of the Coast Range, and eventually this effort resulted in a large exhibition and book (Turning Back).
Since then Adams has continued to call attention to clearcutting, but has, characteristically, balanced this with celebrations of living trees and of the sea (This Day, Sea Stories, A Road Through Shore Pine, An Old Forest Road, Tenancy, A Parallel World, Standing Still). His effort continues to be, he has said, “to find redeeming metaphor.” In 2010 the Yale University Art Gallery created a retrospective exhibition that traveled widely, and published an accompanying three-volume catalog (The Place We Live). In 2014 Adams was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters. A retrospective of his work will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in May 2022, later traveling to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Photograph by Sonia Lenzi 2022
Remembering Peter Schjeldahl, a Consummate Critic
Sometimes a writer, an artist, a human being is so defiant of mortality that you begin to take him at his word. Just a few weeks ago, Peter Schjeldahl, who has been The New Yorker’s art critic for a generation, handed in a review of a newly translated biography, by Hans Janssen, of the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian. To Peter’s mind, Mondrian and Picasso were the “twin groundbreakers of twentieth-century European pictorial art: Picasso the greatest painter who modernized picture-making, and Mondrian the greatest modernizer who painted.” In this longish essay (longish for Peter, more a sprinter than a miler), he is at his very best—his most incisive, insistent, and personal:
Critical attention to him may rise and fall. For anyone undertaking to pay it, though, there can be no ups or downs in Mondrian’s importance, relative to other artists past, present, and to come. There is only a steady state of inexhaustible meaning, beggaring comparison and defying definition. Even the critically consummate Janssen, with his magnum opus of a biography, can merely dance around, and not penetrate, the adamantine conundrum of the Dutch magus’s dead stops in lived time.
As we were going to press this Friday, word came that Peter had died. It’s hard to imagine what he must have summoned to write like that in his last weeks.
An outtake from the beautiful postscript in the New Yorker. The longtime New Yorker writer Peter Schjeldahl recently died, at age 80.
Read Schjeldahl’s reflection on the art of dying, which he wrote after receiving a devastating diagnosis of rampant lung cancer.
A Geography of Abandonment by Raymond Meeks
Origini edizioni is working on a new zine/book with Raymond Meeks (and I am silently screaming…) and they are teasing the release on their Instagram.
Should be out in November.
ATL by Mark Steinmetz
Mark Steinmetz is also working on a new book ATL, published by Nazraeli Press. Found some photos via Japan-based distributor twelvebooks.
Heat of Sand by Satoshi Tsuchiyama
Looks incredible.
After living for several years in the chaos of influences that is New York, the visual artist Satoshi Tsuchiyama realized that it is Israel that is the world’s hub for contemporary dance. His experiences of working with both dance and Jewish artefacts fused together. Questions arose in his head: Since the political situation has long been unstable in this religiously and culturally rich region, what kind of normal everyday life can be found there? What colours and scents does a country like this retain, and how do the dancers appear and move under the influence of an environment like this? He decided to go there to witness the extraordinary on a daily basis.
During his four visits to Israel and Palestine in 2017–19, he wandered in scorching sand and graffiti-filled streets, climbed to the collapsing top floor of the art school. He followed the desires of his eyes. The dancers he met came from all over the world, but they seemed to share the same mood, the same force that oozed out of the ground. And one and the same aura accompanied their bodies in a common direction. He avoided all the areas at high risk of terror, but death and the random character of life were present wherever he went. The energy of the inhabitants to survive was strong, and he experienced a singular beauty in this raw, tough and vulnerable ordeal of perseverance and adaptation.
In this video of the dance that accompanied the installation, you can see the beautiful mock up of the book (at the 8 minute mark).
More books
A Photographic Friendship by James Ravilious and Chris Chapman
A new book to celebrate the friendship of master photographers James Ravilious and Chris Chapman who both embarked on their careers in Devon 50 years ago.
We Were Born Before the Wind by Henri Prestes
Henri Prestes’ first monograph We Were Born Before the Wind, is an exploration of solitude and melancholy in the mysterious landscape of Portugal.
Across the UK, town centres are undergoing a major transformation. Over the past decade, empty storefronts have become an increasingly familiar sight as businesses disappear from our high streets, leaving an atmosphere of uncertainty in their wake.
While working on his previous project This Land, Martin Amis noticed the prevalence of closed premises, and began to explore this phenomenon further.
In Dark Matter, Ron Jude revisits the source material taken from photographs in his hometown newspaper in Central Idaho in the American West. In this new body of work, Jude reimagines how these photographs can be configured to reflect this microcosm’s collective mood and values.
This Pleasant Land: New Photography of the British Landscape
The British Landscape is changing. Geographically, politically, even emotionally, the boundary lines of Britain - and what it means to be British - are in flux. This book looks at the new terrains, memories and myths of this contemporary landscape through the eyes of some of the world's most exciting photographers.
The Hackney Marshes by Freya Najade
Freya Najade takes us on a journey through the uncontainable wildness of the Hackney Marshes; an explosion of nature in the heart of the city, where ancient trees and grasslands are overlooked by tower blocks and pylons. Following the meadows and riverbanks, abandoned infrastructure and football pitches, Najade documents the magic of these overgrown spaces and the people who seek refuge there.
Bedfellow by Caroline Tompkins
Over the past five years, Caroline Tompkins has been making images of her sexual desires and fears. Her forthcoming book, Bedfellow explores the relationship sex has with pleasure and danger. It holds two truths at all times – desiring men while fearing them.
Twelve years in the making, Cowspines by Kate Kirkwood is a body of landscape photography like no other. Kate’s project is an obsession born out of a love of the Lake District and the elements, and an appreciation of the titular subject matter that forms the basis of each image.
Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice
This compelling publication traces the broad arc of photography’s development in France from the 1970s to the present day. A decade-by-decade account reveals unexpected points of convergence between practices that are not usually considered in a comparative perspective.
That’s it for this 1st edition of The Weekly Diary — a shorter more frequent newsletter for subscribers of Nowhere Diary.
If you have any suggestions for interviews, features, topics, interesting work or books that I should check out, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Keep shooting and stay safe.
Kim
Find Nowhere Diary on Instagram and Twitter
Love to read the Weekly Diary. Keep up.