Books, Design and Culture
I’ve already posted a couple of magazine covers about the current crisis, and yet another one has caught my eye. The cover of the April 13-26 edition of New York magazine features an extraordinary photograph by Alexei Hay of all but deserted Times Square on the morning of Monday, March 30.
You can see more of Alexei Hay’s photographs of an eerily empty New York here.
(via Robert Newman)
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Geoff Dyer, whose new book The Street Philosophy of Gary Winogrand features personal essays inspired by Winogrand photographs, considers other books that combine images and essays in The New York Times:
John Szarkowski was for many years the head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2000, in the twilight of a provocative, highly influential career, he published “Atget,” a selection of 100 images by the French photographer Eugène Atget, each reproduced on the recto page with an accompanying caption-essay on the facing verso page. With Szarkowski as the best kind of guide — one whose itinerary allows interludes of undisturbed contemplation — we wind our way through the haunts of old Paris, emerging from time-shuttered streets into the open skies of the surrounding countryside. Szarkowski had always been a distinctive stylist, but this format enabled him to give free rein to his talents as a writer, which were usually securely tethered by curatorial obligation. He also drew confidence, I think, from an earlier assay at the same form, “Looking at Photographs” (1973), in which he used a single picture by each of the most important photographers in the museum’s holdings to compile a radically synecdochic survey of the medium’s history. The obligation to cover so much ground, to balance what he had to say about so many major figures on such slender plinths, rather limited Szarkowski’s range of literary and thematic movement. With Atget — whose photographs, appropriately enough, were originally offered as “Documents for Artists” — the combination of abundance of subject matter and limited space encouraged a kind of tight flourishing or contained extravagance. Szarkowski’s knowledge of Atget’s work was so extensive that he had scarcely even to think about what he knew. And so the photographs serve as starting-off points for reflections on all sorts of things, including how photography has changed our view of the world: “I do not think that empty chairs meant the same thing before photography as they mean to us now.”
You can find reviews of Dyer’s Winogrand book in the New York Times and The Guardian.
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Rebecca Mead’s long profile of publisher Gerhard Steidl for The New Yorker is a wonderful, fascinating read:
Each Steidl title is unique, printed with a bespoke combination of inks and papers. But to the informed eye, and the informed hand, a Steidl book is as distinctive as an Eggleston photograph. Unlike another German art publisher, Taschen—which is known for reproducing risqué images by the likes of Helmut Newton in enormous formats that would crush most coffee tables to splinters—Steidl produces books that invite holding and reading. Steidl dislikes the shiny paper that is often found in photography books, and prefers to use uncoated paper, even though it takes longer to dry and thus makes a printing cycle more expensive. He opts for understatement even with projects that would tempt other publishers to be ostentatious. “Exposed,” a collection of portraits of famous people by Bryan Adams, the rock star turned photographer, has no image on its cover. Bound in blue cloth, the book looks as if it might be found on a shelf in an academic library. Steidl wants his creations to satisfy all the senses. When he first opens a book, he holds it up close to his nose and smells it, like a sommelier assessing a glass of wine. High-quality papers and inks smell organic, he says, not chemical. To the uninitiated, a Steidl book smells rather like a just-opened box of children’s crayons.
I love this part about the attention to the detail:
Comments closedDesigning a book’s packaging is a process Steidl particularly relishes. “He wants to pick the cover, he wants to pick the endpapers,” [Robert] Polidori told me. “He treasures this limited one-on-one time with the artist. It’s almost a love act.” Sometimes Steidl indulges in a brightly colored ribbon for a bookmark, like statement socks worn with a formal suit. He pays attention to elements that barely register with most readers, such as the head and tail bands—colored silk placed where the pages attach to the spine. “It’s a tiny bit of fashion,” Steidl said. “With Karl [Lagerfeld], it is the buttons. With me, it is the head and tail bands.” For Gossage, he chose black bands and black endpaper, to contrast with the colored ink on the pages. The endpaper was made from cotton, and would cost thirty cents per book, as opposed to the seven cents it would cost if he used offset paper. “Using the cheaper one saves significant money for the shareholders,” he said. “But I am the only shareholder.”
Augusten Burroughs’ strange and sad profile of photographer William Eggleston for T, the New York Times Style Magazine:
WE LEAVE THE OFFICES of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.” It is a devastating thing to see. Heartbreaking. I was also an alcoholic for decades, the kind who had shakes and saw spiders. I’m not even through the hallway and my mind is racing from “I want that sign” to “What kind of doctor prescribes alcohol for an alcoholic? Where was he when I was drinking?”
I ask if his drinking ever got in the way of his photography. “I’ve never been able to take a picture after a drink,” he says. “It just doesn’t work. Maybe — I don’t know what it is. It’s not like I’m too drunk to take a picture. I just — the whole idea of it just goes away after one or two drinks.” Eggleston perches atop the bench in front of his Bösendorfer concert grand piano. An active ashtray and a sweating tumbler of icy bourbon on a burn-marked coaster sit inside the piano directly on the frame. He reaches for the glass and takes several small, noisy sips and his body visibly relaxes. I know his relief, exactly. “I’m gonna get this drink down,” he tells me. And as soon as he does he wants another. He suggests that I pour one for myself and join him but I tell him that I don’t drink anymore, that once I start I can’t ever stop. He replies, “Well, I can stop, but I’ll admit I want another one.”
The profile is accompanied by a short film by Wolfgang Tillmans:
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Website Typorn1 talks to Stephen ONeill about his photographs of found type, lettering, and signs, TypeChap:
“I’m always on the look out for the vernacular and spectacular, documenting beautiful old letters and signage before they disappear… Through my photographs I want to provide inspiration for designers, sign-writers and photographers to keep these wonderful old letterforms alive… It’s interesting to see how positively clients react to type. One very dry financial client I worked for, were totally sold on some letterpress ads (very much influenced by the great Alan Kitching) and it became their house style for about 3 or 4 years – something of a miracle in an industry swamped with weak stock imagery”
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has a remarkable profile of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank by writer Nicholas Dawidoff:
Frank absorbed artistic influences all over New York. Edward Hopper’s moody office-scapes, restaurant interiors and gas pumps were not in fashion when Frank discovered the painter: ‘‘So clear and so decisive. The human form in it. You look twice — what’s this guy waiting for? What’s he looking at? The simplicity of two facing each other. A man in a chair.’’ Frank’s creative day to day was informed by the Abstract Expressionist painters he lived among. Through his window, Frank studied Willem de Kooning pacing his studio in his underwear, pausing at his easel and then walking the floor some more. ‘‘I was a very silent unobserved watcher of this man at work. It meant a lot to me. It encouraged me to pace up and down and struggle.’’ He also saw the downside of an artist’s life: ‘‘I used to watch de Kooning work, and then I’d walk down the street and see him drinking and lying in the gutter. Somebody’s bringing him upstairs. You drink because you have doubts. Things seem to crumble around you.’’
Online, the Times also revisits The Americans, Frank’s best known work and “one of the most influential photography books of all time.”
“William Eggleston never takes multiple shots of the same image, just the right picture at just the right moment.”
Curator Simon Baker discusses the work of photographer William Eggleston, currently on display at the Tate Modern in London:
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“Are you filming, or am I wasting my fucking time?”
A short film by Jamie Roberts about British fashion photographer David Bailey, who I will forever associate with David Hemmings propeller-purchasing photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up:
The film was commissioned by Dazed & Confused.
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I missed this when it was posted last month: Brian Dillon on New York photographer Saul Leiter, who died on November 26th, for the London Review of Books blog:
Comments closedLeiter used cheap film that gave his images a muted quality, and the slowness of the stock made it harder to capture the momentary dramas of the street that Klein or Cartier-Bresson could freeze in fast black and white. Technical constraints cannot, however, quite explain what Leiter did with colour and composition. Time and again in the 1950s he depicts New York under snow, with just a red umbrella or a pair of temporary stop lights to punctuate the dirty white. He used the whitewashed windows of defunct stores to silhouette the odd scurrying figure, little more than a smudge of overcoat, shopping bags or another umbrella – always umbrellas. He was a connoisseur of the effects of condensation.
Teju Cole, author of Open City and a photographer himself, on the late Saul Leiter at The New Yorker:
The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s work is a mystery, even to their creator.
Leiter died aged 89 on Tuesday this week. Read The New York Times obituary.
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Everybody Street is a new documentary about the lives and work of New York’s street photographers and the city that inspires them. The film features photographer Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Jill Freedman, Bruce Gilden, Joel Meyerowitz, Rebecca Lepkoff, Mary Ellen Mark, Jeff Mermelstein, Clayton Patterson, Ricky Powell, Jamel Shabazz, Martha Cooper, and Boogie, as well as historians Max Kozloff and Luc Sante. It looks amazing:
Everybody Street can be watched on demand at Vimeo, and you can read an interview with director Cheryl Dunn here.
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In this new TateShots video, artist Ed Ruscha talks about the “cultural curiosities” — the gas stations, swimming pools and parking lots of Los Angeles — that he photographed for his books:
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