Gallery Carte Blanche and the Indie Photobook Library (IPL) are pleased to present, A Survey of Documentary Style in Early 21st Century Photobooks, a unique exhibition of photobooks selected from the Indie Photobook Library. Curated by Darius Himes (Assistant Director, Fraenkel Gallery and Co-Founder, Radius Books) and Larissa Leclair (Founder, Indie Photobook Library), the goal of this exhibition is to survey the field before us and to put in the foreground questions of authorship, voice, style and content.
“The books selected for this exhibition,” comments co-curator Himes, “present a range of subject matter, each coupled with a particular visual language drawn from a pool of diversity. There are books that speak a more traditional documentary language, while there are those that explicitly critique that very same tradition. There are diary’esque books and titles that overlay a typological structure, other books rely primarily on found and vernacular imagery, and there are many books that borrow heavily from an art-photography storehouse.”
In it’s 3rd iteration and first West Coast showing, the Indie Photobook Library exhibition, and the opening weekend events, open the doors to a broader discussion about the burgeoning number of independent and self published works by contemporary photographers from around the world. Featuring 70 indie photography books, displayed in six categories, the exhibition looks at the “documentary tradition” through the lens of a 21st century global photographic community, in which the lines between journalism, art and the long-term documentary project have blurred, morphed and continue to feed off of each other. Concurrently on view in the gallery and exploring the experiential differences in hung versus bound photography, will be a selection of limited-edition works by artists represented in the IPL exhibition, including Eliot Dudik, Michael Jang and Lacey Terrell.
Discussing the nature of photography’s documentary style in the 21st century, Himes notes that, “the early- to mid-20th century produced a handful of photographic styles with a photojournalistic or documentary vocabulary at their core. This “documentary tradition” flourished in the latter half of the century, as photographic equipment shrunk, film speeds increased and world-wide traveled became easier and cheaper. The last decades have seen an explosion in art-photography educational programs and self-publishing, coupled with a continuing desire to explore the world, near and far. As we stand in the morning light of a new century, already some 12 years old, it is worth considering the question, What of the documentary style? When it comes to approaching the world around us—its people, places, conflicts, development and intertwined societies—how have the languages within the growing world of photography changed and shaped the conversation we have in images?”
A Survey of Documentary Style in Early 21st Century Photobooks
September 14 – October 18, 2012
Gallery Carte Blanche
973 Valencia St,
San Francisco, CA, 94110
USA
