Reading List #2
My latest batch of recommended photo books, zines and other publications on photography
Looking for something to read? Check out my latest Reading List for recommended photo books, zines and other publications on photography.
Happy reading! 🔮
Giulia Parlato: Diachronicles (Witty Books)
Diachronicles is an examination of the historical space, regarded as a fictional container where an apparent collection of evidence opens up to the fantastic. In this space, the attempt to reconstruct the past falls into phantasmal gaps, where things are generated, used, buried, unearthed, transported, and relocated.
This nomadic and fragmentary nature of what has been left behind, reveals how the movement, transfiguration, and misinterpretation of objects shape historiography and ultimately, the real.
In the impossible search of academic legitimation, the viewer is invited into a world where the factual and the fake overlap. The work is about the absence of memory and addresses the leading role archaeology, photography and the museum space play in a historical narrative. In doing so, the human body is used to suggest scale and as a means to display objects.
Furthermore, Diachronicles digs into a parallel history, filled with disappearances, figures to decode, nonexistent artefacts and forgeries hidden in museums basements.
Text by David Campany.
Chris Mann: Valley of the Moon (Guest Editions)
Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert, translated literally as 'Valley of the Moon' in English, is renowned for its red sands, Mars-like topography, and nomadic Bedouin tribes. The series traces the viewer's imagination through a stark depiction of this dream-like world and its ephemera; offering a subjective window into a reality unbound by time or place.
A landscape both unchanged for thousands of years, yet seemingly transient, Valley of the Moon presents a visual dialogue with the desert and its transcendental oscillations between man and nature, light and dark, reality and imagination.
Alex Nazari: LADA (TUMO)
Here, in Alex Nazari’s gripping photographs, is the LADA, in all its vivid beauty, resilience and palatial influence. A Russian made, Soviet-era vehicle that arrived to Armenia in the 1970s.
This book is a hybrid documentation of life in Armenia and conversation that ties in a vehicle that has been a predominant part of society from Soviet times to today. LADA marks the end of a four year long project for Nazari. The images are a collection of 40 of his photographs taken on medium format film that he hand printed in the darkroom and later individually digitized.
Tomasz Tomaszewski: The World is Where You Stop (Blow Up Press)
Go on a journey around the world in search of human nature. The World Is Where You Stop is a critical look at our reality, where good and evil, euphoria and suffering, wealth and poverty, virtue and licentiousness, coexist side by side. For over 40 years of his career, Tomasz Tomaszewski, one of Poland’s most outstanding photographers, has recorded situations that are difficult to pass by indifferently.
Rä di Martino: Carmelo Bene. Là dove muore, canta (Humboldt Books)
Carmelo Bene. Là dove muore, canta is the work of the artist Rä di Martino and she comes to terms with the memory of Carmelo Bene (1937–2002), through his archive materials.
A documentary heritage made up of videos, audios, photographs, manuscripts and some six thousand volumes from his own personal library, from which di Martino sets out to develop a cycle bringing Bene’s figure and work back to life. Rä di Martino enters the phantasmagorical library of the actor and playwright, books with which he had an osmotic relationship, as an obsessive reader, annotating their pages. With a series of frontal photographic images, the artist focuses on the most studied pages, full of his scribbles and Post-its. She also goes through the actor’s diaries where he penned a work on Dracula that remained unfinished, and which the artist decided to photograph in its entirety. The volume also features an introductory text by Brizia Minerva and a critical contribution by Chiara Valerio.
Yana Wernicke: Companions (Loose Joints Publishing)
Wernicke documents with subtle grace the close bonds between two young women and the farm animals that they rescue, love, play with and care for, in a series mixing German romanticism and modern ethics.
John Berger’s landmark Why Look at Animals? describes the ‘species loneliness’ of modern man: how the ancient relationships between humans and nature have broken down, reducing the existence of animals to marginalised objects, as commodities, and as Other. Concerned with modern humanity’s yearning for a deeper connection to ecology, Wernicke’s series is a touching portrait of two young women who have established profound relationships with animals. Rosina and Julie each independently save animals from certain death and create bonds of love and trust with animals typically considered solely for their economic value.
In German, Companions, or Weggefährten, is a hybrid word that translates literally as ‘those who walk the path together’. Through tenderness, touch and intuition, Wernicke’s camera follows that path – of joy, emotions, tenderness and play between humans and animals – striving to close the gulf between our emotional consciousness and those of the other animals we live alongside.
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well (Steidl/Moderna Museet)
This Will Not End Well is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker. Accompaning the retrospective show and tour of the same name, organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the book draws from the nearly dozen slideshows and films Goldin has made from thousands of photographs, film sequences, audio tapes and music tracks. The stories told range from the trauma of her family history to the portrayal of her bohemian friends, to a journey into the darkness of addiction.
By focusing exclusively on slideshows and video installations, This Will Not End Well aims to fully embrace Goldin’s vision of how her work should be experienced. The book retains the presentation of the slide shows by showing all images in the same format on a black background and sequenced as they are in the sources. The 20 texts, of which the major part are newly commissioned by Goldin, complement and deepen the intention of her work.
Co-published with Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Tobias Kruse: Deponie (Spector Books)
For his work Deponie, Tobias Kruse went to East Germany to find the vestiges and scars of a period that still casts its shadow over the present: the years following reunification. It was a time that presented a wealth of opportunities but one that, for many people, also spelled disappointment, anger, and bitterness. Thirty years after the fall of the wall, the photographer, who was born in Mecklenburg, drove 8,000 kilometres through eastern Germany. He travelled through empty regions and villages and attended crowded football stadiums and night-time demonstrations. He took pictures of scenes that could be historical or contemporary phenomena and visited places that have become part of the collective memory. His black-and-white photographs convey a sense of gloomy, oppressive unease. They are ciphers of mourning and icons of a painful historical process.
Moyra Davey: Two Hot Horses — Supplement 06 (Fillip)
Two Hot Horses chronicles Moyra Davey’s observations on photography and her method and practice leading up to the exhibition Moyra Davey Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, in 2020. The text appears alongside photographs by Davey, selections from the Peter Hujar Archive, and images by Sarah Anne Johnson, Allen Frame, Zoe Leonard, and Gary Schneider.
Gilles Raynaldy: Welcome my friend (Le Point du Jour/Spector Books)
Gilles Raynaldy’s second photobook, Welcome my Friend, retraces an experience he had in the territory of the “Jungle of Calais” over the nine months preceding the evacuation of the refugees in October 2016. About eighty analogue photographs (both colour and black and white), along with excerpts from his journal, constitute a sedimentary memory. The book unfolds like a movie, following the rhythm of his wandering and the passage of the seasons: little by little, the photographs become impregnated with a place that we discover through the actions, gestures, and looks of the people who lived there and with the environment that is revealed around them. The writer Marielle Macé sheds light on the photographer’s approach, his non-intrusive presence, his attention to spaces, encounters, ways of inhabiting, gestures of hospitality. The anthropologist Michel Agier recalls the urban forms and social uses that were invented in the Jungle, whose lessons remain relevant today. Gilles Raynaldy’s photographic work focuses on social topics, gestures, architecture, and urbanistic planning, with an empirical and empathic method. His first book, Jean-Jaurès (Purpose éditions, 2015), dedicated to a school in the suburbs of Paris, was nominated for several international awards.
That’s it for this newsletter!
If you have any suggestions for interviews, features, topics, interesting work or photo books that I should check out, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or reach out!
Stay safe and keep shooting.
Kim
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Did you read all them?