eyecurious books etc.

I've decided to launch an eyecurious offshoot over on tumblr: eyecurious books etc. I have started this little side-project because of the photo-books that are overtaking my small Paris apartment. For a number of reasons, including compulsive buying, getting sent review copies and amazingly generous photographers, I get my hands on a fair number of photobooks. I would love to review them all on eyecurious, but I just don’t have enough words in me for that and so I have decided to start this blog to feature some of the weird and wonderful photobooks that are finding their way into my life.

The plan is to focus on pictures of the books themselves and maybe to set up the odd book swap. The reviews and other photo-related writing will stay right here on eyecurious.

Review: Stefan Heyne, The Noise

Stefan Heyne's The Noise is aptly named. His images give the impression of being situated between two states, like the static between radio stations. Their subjects, a window, the keel of a boat, a doorway, a phone, are still recognizable but are reduced to the most basic forms emerging from the surrounding darkness. Heyne uses blur to create these abstractions of simple objects in such a way that there is little that is obviously 'photographic' about these images. The essays in the book refer to Gerhard Richter's photorealistic paintings and Heyne's images feel like a similar exploration of the boundary between painting and photography.

The Noise is a collection of controlled experiments at the edge of photography. These are not happy accidents or ultra-loose snapshots, but very deliberate images made which question the nature of photography and of our perception. In some ways this feels like anti-photography, rejecting the sharpness and the detail that is is often equated with photographic perfection in favour of out-of-focus hard-to-read images. Even though Heyne may be deep into uncharted territory, these images are still fundamentally about photography, even though it is a corner of it that few of us spend much time in.

Other adventurous types have wandered into this remote area before, Hiroshi Sugimoto's double-infinity series comes to mind, but Heyne's images feel more purposeful. Less 'let's see what happens' than complex visual conundrums. The images all seem to be emerging from pitch-blackness, as if they were shot from the window of a deep-sea submarine, just short glimpses of a passing object that is already drifting back into the silence and the darkness. And yet, despite all of this I found that the austerity of these images made it difficult to penetrate into this world.

I was surprised to see that Heyne's titles give information about their subjects, although at times this is so general that it reveals little. With abstract photography, I often find that my vision oscillates between focusing on the object being photographed and 'accepting' the form and texture of the abstraction. Because of this I found the titles to be distracting as they keep the images anchored to their subjects, instead of allowing them to move into a different realm.

I am not convinced that the photobook is the best space for this work. The book's three essays (were three really necessary?) refer to Heyne's prints on several occasions and I have the feeling that this work may work better the form of individual images at a large scale.

This is intriguing, adventurous and difficult work that is more of a visual and conceptual work-out than a feast.

Stefan Heyne, The Noise: The Exposure of the Uncertain, (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, Hardback, 267 x 222 mm, 96 pp, 45 colour plates, 2008).

Rating: Worth a look

Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and '70s

Ivan Vartanian and Ryuichi Kaneko's Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and '70s belongs to a new breed of photobook: the book on books. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's two-volume history of the photobook is probably the best known of these, but there are other interesting examples. Jeff Ladd's Errata Editions is taking this one step further with the 'Books on Books' series which each focus on a single photobook in order to make rare and out-of-print books accessible to us mere mortals.

Volume I of Parr & Badger already contained a chapter on the post-war Japanese photobook with a selection of some of the major books to come out of Japan in the 60s and 70s. Japanese photobooks expands on this territory over 240 pages providing a much broader selection of photobooks, including some relatively unknown ones. Some may be surprised to see a 240-page book with such a narrow focus as this, but this period of photobook production in Japan was so rich that this could have been expanded to twelve volumes and still left a lot of room for discovery.

Much of the interest in Japanese photobooks has been focused on the magazine Provoke and publications relating to it. This is the case with Parr & Badger's selection and essay which focuses heavily on Provoke. The refreshing thing about Japanese photobooks is that it doesn't just present the best-known and respected books of the period and instead includes a selection  ranging from the unavoidable Chizu (The Map) by Kikuji Kawada to a collection of anonymous student photography.

The book contains essays by Kaneko and Vartanian. Kaneko's essay recounts his personal journey with the photobook, a unique one since few people were buying photobooks when he did (to the point where he once ordered a book only to have the publisher turn up at his door to deliver it himself because he thought it would be cheaper than sending it in the mail). Vartanian focuses on drawing out the major characteristics and functions of photobooks and their production. I think this is one of the key strengths of Japanese photobooks and one which I would have liked to see developed even further. This kind of editorial exercise often ends up becoming focused on ranking or selecting the best books, in keeping with our ever-increasing love for the list (something I have somewhat hypocritically complained about before). This book successfully avoids the pitfalls of writing a 'best of' list, choosing instead to present a rounded picture of the many facets of Japanese photobook production of this period and to show how they relate to each other in order to provide the reader with a context for understanding what defines these books and what makes them great.

Japanese photobooks admittedly has an unfair advantage over its competition: it is drawn from the collection of Ryuichi Kaneko, which includes some 20,000 publications making Martin Parr's Japanese photobook collection look like a first-grade stamp collector's in comparison. This headstart isn't wasted and Japanese photobooks certainly uncovers its fair share of undiscovered gems. The forty or so books are presented with an extended essay and a healthy number of 'interior' shots (there is a nice preview of the book available on Vartanian's website) which successfully give a feel for each book's individual characteristics. For the geeks (and amongst photobook collectors that percentage is alarmingly high) there is also a wealth of technical information on the production process for each book (photobook porn if you will): who designed it, how it was printed and who by, where it was bound and, as a bonus, the original retail price just to make you wince when you find out how much these are worth today.

If you can't afford a photobook collection (or even if you can) this is one you really shouldn't miss.

Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian, Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and '70s, (New York: Aperture, Hardcover with bellyband, 23 x 31cm, 240 pages, ca. 400 four-color and duotone images, 2009).

Rating: Highly recommended

Review: Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder

"I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues" Lewis Koch

Lewis Koch's Touchless Automatic Wonder started out as a web-based project quite a few years ago (the site is optimized for Internet Explorer 5, so it shows its age) and has recently made the leap into book form. For more than 20 years, Koch has collected fragments of found text from all over the world with his camera. As someone who obsesses about what font to use every time I open a Word document, I was naturally curious to see Koch's textual world. After a first viewing of the book, I realised that this is a much more difficult project than I had initially thought. Finding bits of quirky or visually interesting text around the world is one thing, but there is a lot more required to go beyond visual gimmickry or typology (in both senses of the word) to create a coherent photographic project that says something about the world in which these fragments of text are found.

The text does not always take center stage in Koch's photographs, and instead often acts as an element of intrigue that is there to enrich the photograph. The book jumps from India to the Deep South, from Paris to Mexico, with a big chunk of time spent in Wisconsin and there is a feeling of universality which this nomadic wandering brings to the series. More interestingly, Koch has collected text in very different forms: this is not just a succession of amusing billboards or old peeling posters, but also of dollar bills, broken bottles, TV subtitles, children's sanskrit scrawl on a blackboard, and a peeling stencil in the window of a photo studio that felt like a nod to a certain Walker Evans. Importantly I found a lot of these images to be interesting photographs without whatever textual element they might contain. There are a couple of weak points and I felt that the book would have been benefited from a slightly tighter edit, but overall Koch succeeds in weaving some very disparate elements into a world that feels like his own.

The quote at the beginning of this review is also revelatory of one strong characteristic of this work. Koch's photographs do not contain many people, or no more than a hand, a silhouette or a few shadows. Often the words that appear graffitied on a wall, carved into stone, or plastered across a billboard feel almost like direct pronouncements from some kind of God. ART, MODESTY, THE PROMISE, SEE, STOP. They don't combine into any form of coherent message, Koch is not trying to unlock the codex of life, but instead I think he succeeds in creating a real feeling of (touchless automatic) wonder.

Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text from the Real World, (Madison: Borderland Books, Hardback, 267 x 222 mm, 112 pp, 80 duotone illustrations, 2009).

Rating: Recommended

Stuart Woodman, Now We Are 30

Stuart Woodman recently sent me Now We Are 30, a book of his polaroid photographs which is the first to be published by his imprint, Doubleplusgood Books. The book is based on a series of pictures that Stuart took every day for a year, his 30th as you may have guessed. You can get copies online from Doubleplus and they also have a list of a few bookstores around the world that are carrying copies.

P.S. While we are on the subject of polaroids, Sean Cousin is in the process of setting up a PDF magazine on integral Polaroid photography. He is looking for submissions so, for any polaroiders out there, find out more here.