Photography books make fabulous gifts. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to peruse this year’s publishing, thinking about what makes this medium so brilliant. Art is a thing of meditation, and the book is a devotional form. When the story told is one that entrances us on several levels—aesthetic, narrative, tactile—we can find ourselves lost in a moment. It’s the exact opposite of digital living, where everything moves fast. The book asks us to slow down.
Of the books I selected this week, I am considering the way in which photography has become a means of visual meditation, the way in which this medium has added a layer beyond its ability to capture the present. That it can also abstract itself, and become a canvas for anything the mind can imagine.
“There is always an element of photography that cannot be controlled,” observes Stan Douglas in his new monograph Midcentury Studio, published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at David Zwirner, New York. He was speaking in reference to unpredictability of flash-lit images that define press photography of this period. In homage, Douglas has created a series of fictional images, tributes to the distinctive style from 1945–1951.
Arranged in a simple series of a single image on a spread, the photographs appear in a chronology of the artist’s work, itself a tongue-in-chic nod to the formality of the monographs of the era. That it is an exhibition catalogue as well, with a wonderful essay by Christopher Phillips adds to the pleasure of this collection. Taken as a whole, Midcentury Studio is like an old song, timeless in its simplicity, yet layered with references to a time and place forever erased but for the photographs.
Furthermore is a collection of work from the Fraenkel Gallery on the occasion of their thirtieth anniversary and it is one of the finest produced books of the year. Featuring the work of ninety-nine photographers including Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Robert Adams, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Sol LeWitt, Lee Friedlander, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Irving Penn, Furthermore was designed by Katy Homans and printed at Meridian. The paper is delicious, the printing exquisite, the binding divine. Unto itself an objet d’art. That it presents work of such brilliance makes it a thing of devotion. Photography books are to be read, over and over again. Furthermore reminds us why.
Gaia is a collection of images of the earth taken by Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil. Published by Assouline, the book has a weightiness that echoes the land it has capture in its lens. Each image is taken from above and reveals patterns of great magic in the formation of the earth’s surface. There is no point of reference, no real way to recognize what we are looking and where we are. Best we can do is guess, while we look at the ripples and waves along the planet we all inhabit from God’s vantage point. Having no way to truly understand that which we are beholding imbues each image with a mystical presence, a look at life as we have never known it.
The book has the advantage of providing captions for each image, there to give us the simplest way to orient ourselves to the grand scale of Nature’s creations. Places we might never otherwise consider: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Queensland (Australia), Sudan, Tunisia, Sea of Azov (Russia), Idaho (United States). The world that Laliberté shows us is one to which we can understand through the still photograph. We have access to a new understanding (not just intellectually but aesthetically and emotionally) by virtue of these images. The photography book offers a glimpse into eternity—that’s why we give these keepsakes that speak from the deepest reaches of the heart.
Sara Rosen
Furthermore
Fraenkel Gallery
ISBN: 978-1881337270
Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio
Christopher Phillips, Pablo Sigg, Stan Douglas
Lundion, Uitgeverij, 2011
116 pages
ISBN: 978-9055448791
Gaia
Guy Laliberte
Assouline, 2011
300 pages
Langue : Anglais
ISBN-10: 2759405346
