Reading List #4
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! 🔮
CJ Chandler: The Twist of a Knee (Skinnerboox)
Both brutal and tender, the twist of a knee was made over four years in and around Makhanda in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Chandler’s photographs act as fractured markers of his presence as well as his interaction with and investigation of everyday life.
This work avoids spatial and temporal markers, leading the viewer on a journey of chance and critical engagement through the complexities of home, violence and ritual.
Cristian Ordóñez: On Trial (ACB Press)
Although only residing in the USA for a short period, Toronto-based Chilean Photographer Cristian Ordóñez has spent a large-period of the previous decade revisiting the lower states creating works that explore the notion of memory, personal relationship, and encounters with the territory.
On Trial observes and plays witness to these encounters, a body of work that presents the social, economic, and geographic survey of the landscape traveled by Ordóñez. A survey, engaging with all things natural and foreign on even ground, seeking to question not only the observer but the role of the object within the frame.
Forthcoming previous published works, Notes 01, 02, and 03, the new chapter continues to visualise his approach and interest in the photographic process as a medium to explore the territory, own cultural diversity.
On Trial contains a selection of 20 photographs edited by Rohan Hutchinson, and accompanied with text by Ordóñez. Designed to co-exist with previous and forthcoming published works, the body and cover of the publication exist in the same form, contextualising the in-transit approach of the photographic content, along with the journey of its publishing.
Thomas Albdorf: Body Double (Same Paper)
The series Body Double is a portrait of Los Angeles - not the actual city in California, but the abstract place which is embedded in the general consciousness through the representation in popular culture, primarily in movies. Body Double is a hike through the streets of the metropolis, partly based on appropriated images - from Google Street View, films, or vintage imagery - partly actually photographed on location in Los Angeles. Almost nothing here is what it appears to be at first glance - the sculptures photographed in the streets as well as in hotel rooms were never in the indicated places, the images are partly automatically deconstructed or created by software; the majority of the works were created in several steps that took place outside and inside the studio.
Every picture questions and discusses its conditions of production, the authenticity of what is shown, and the unconscious expectations and experiences that one brings to the table when looking at an image.
“Body Double is a book long portrait of Los Angeles made with appropriated images, constructed images, sculpted images and manifested experiences in conversation with elements, fragments of possible memories coexisting with real deconstructions, and real uncertainties glueing it all together. It takes the viewer on a dazed walk through a city’s self and its double, all filtered by the multitude of versions we might experience of it, or we definitely did experience of it, if only through a possible, unrealistic memory.”
— Elisa Medde
Robin Hinsch: Wahala (GOST Books)
The images in Wahala depict both the places in the world where raw materials are extracted from the earth for profit, and the people who make their homes there. Photographer Robin Hinsch travelled to where the human impact on the planet was particularly visible to confront the viewer with the blunt ecological and human repercussions of the global reliance on fossil fuels.
The photographs in the book were made in the oil fields of the Niger Delta, Nigeria; the coal belt of Jharkhand, India; and the open cast mines of Brandenburg and North Rhine- Westphalia in Germany and Silesia in Poland. They shift between details and overviews, landscapes and portraits, the familiar and the foreign, disorientating the viewer as to what and where they are looking at. The images are cinematic—dark and brooding skies, dramatic landscapes lit by gas flares, collapsing ruins of buildings. Deviating from straight documentary, the book constructs new narratives of associative imagery to tell the story of exploitation—both by international companies and by those living in the areas impacted by their presence, in turn, hacking into the system.
‘Wahala translates the violence of these global mechanisms of fossil fuel extraction into visibilities that help us grasp their complexity… Now we can understand: with the exploitation of the planet we destroy ourselves.’ — Dr. Sophie Charlotte Opitz
The Yoruba word ‘wahala’ means ‘problem’ or ‘stress’ and is a widely understood pidgin term in Nigeria. It rarely stands alone, but when it does it implies there is a problem that leaves one shaken or speechless. Hinsch’s focus on where man’s ecological effect on the world is most glaring aims to have this impact—showing both the subject’s complexity and that the problem is our problem.
Richard Higginbottom: Singularities
An ongoing photographic study of human gesture and movement within the space of the city. Initially made as wider, more expansive observations of groups of people as they navigate the city, these photographs accent the nuances of body language and expressive movements that exist within urban space every day.
Staged recreations, with the initial research images as a point of departure, offer a new and slowed down perspective on the everyday gestures often unseen with the hurried shift of movement through space and time.
Wysocka/Pogo: Dead Pages No.3 Bravo (Outer Space Press)
Dead Pages is a magazine, which exceeds the usual format of the other books in our catalog — both in physical size and in the fact that it will be continuously printed as an unlimited edition– as well as by not having any binding. Instead, each edition of dead pages is composed of loose 64 x 44 cm prints that are folded in half and contained in a screen printed, PVC sleeve. It is our attempt to look at and reexamine the hidden messages that exist in our library. Each issue is our (re-)interpretation of one of the books we found and collected.
John Alinder: Portraits 1910-32 (Dewi Lewis Publishing)
John Alinder, son of a farmer, was born in 1878 in the village of Sävasta, Altuna parish, in Uppland, a province in eastern central Sweden. Alinder remained in the village all his life. He chose not to take over his parents’ farm and instead became a self-taught photographer and jack of all trades. He was a music lover, holder of the Swedish agency for the British record label and gramophone brand His Master’s Voice. For a time he ran a country shop from his home, and he even operated an illicit bar for a while. From the 1910s to the 1930s he portrayed the local people, the landscape around them and their way of life. He often photographed them in their homes and gardens, using the technology of the time, glass plates. These he developed in a small darkroom he had built and then made the prints in the sunlight
The Alinder collection was “discovered” in the 1980s when a curator found over 8,000 glass plates stacked away in a library basement. Children placed on chairs, people perched in trees, labourers, confirmation candidates and old ladies; often depicted against a background of foliage and sprawling greenery penetrated by sunlight. Alinder’s portraiture allows for the magic of chance, both liberating and defining the subjects. Often they are looking straight into the camera. As if they can see us. As if their gaze can travel the hundred years or so that lie between their time and ours. As if they were saying, “You are alive now, but we were once alive.”
This book shows Alinder’s portraits for the first time. Published in collaboration with Upplandsmuseet and Landskrona Foto, it coincides with the launch of the first major exhibition of his work. He is a unique portrait photographer whose work can match other acknowledged photographers from the same period, such as Gertrude Käsebier, Mike Disfarmer or August Sander, and whilst he worked within the confines of his own small village, it is clear that such an original and skilled photographer deserves to be showcased to a broader, world-wide audience.
Masahisa Fukase 1961-1991 Retrospective (Akaaka-sha)
The magic of Masahisa Fukase’s lifework in a single book.
This pocket-sized photobook, published to accompy a large-scale retrospective at the Tokyo Photographic Museum, offers a comprehensive look at the entire oevre of master photographer Masahisa Fukase. Revered for his relentless experimentation, his unique perspective and his focus on his own private life as the subject of his photography, Fukase’s work has left a lasting impact on the Japanese photography world.
Featuring eight series, including his masterpiece “Karasu (Raven)” “Bukubuku” “Family” “Homo Ludence” “Sasuke” “Walking Eye” “Private Scenes” and, most notably, the first photobook appearance of the series “Yoko” since its original publication in 1978, this book traces Fukase’s work between the 1960s and early 1990s to provide a new audience with access into Masahisa Fukase’s unique visual world.
Jem Southam: The Harbour (RRB Photobooks)
Shot along Bristol's harbourside between 1978 and 1983, The Harbour chronicles a period of significant change for the city which reflects the wider experience of loss and regeneration in Britain at the time. After centuries during which the harbour was a central hub of the commerce of the city and great generator of its wealth, through fair and foul means, they had largely fallen silent.
The end of that working life in the late sixties to the mid-seventies, left the sculptural presence of The Floating Harbour, surrounded by the disused and decaying dockland fabric: The cranes, the bridges, the pump-houses, the warehouses and in particular the giant bonded warehouses, the offices, the railways, the terraces of houses, the ship-building yards with their dry docks, the sand yards.
In The Harbour Southam documents the disused and neglected infrastructure, a brief period of calm after those centuries of activity, before the redevelopment really got going. It is an archival record of the architectural landscape rather than meditation on loss. The industrial life of the docks, and all the human stories it impacted, preserved in record but not mourned.
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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Interesting, thanks