Photography – Bowblog

Art book sale!

I’m having a bit of a clear-out. Here are some of the art books I’ve accumulated over the years. All priced to sell (I don’t think you’ll find any of them for less online) and all available for immediate purchase on eBay. Click the eBay links to see many more pages from each book.

The Futurist Cookbook – Marinetti

A page from Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook showing an item about the 'aerosculptural dinner in the cockpit'

A splendid, beautifully reproduced edition of the weirdest (and perhaps most sinister) cookbook ever published. It was written/assembled by founder of Italian Futurism Filippo Thommaso Marinetti, who also wrote the more famous Futurist Manifesto (and Musolini’s 1919 Fascist manifesto, since you’re asking). Marinetti campaigned against pasta because “…it induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia, and neutralism”, which I guess might be true. David Runciman discussed this culinary curiosity in an episode of his podcast that was about the manifesto. The translation, by Suzanne Brill, is excellent. Read some of the recipes in the eBay listing. It seems to be a rarity and this first edition is selling for £200 and more. I’ve got it on eBay for £150, art/history/politics fans! Buy the Futurist Cookbook on eBay.

Hybrid Imagery – April Greiman

Front cover of Hybrid Imagery by designer April Greiman. Colourful pixelated close-up fills the cover

Anyone interested in digital art or design back in the early days worshipped April Greiman, a brilliant American graphic designer who adopted and invented new techniques for production in multiple media. It’s still a thrill to flick through the pages of this book and reminds me of the days we used to struggle to get this kind of exciting imagery out of our lovely new Macs. Buy Hybrid Imagery on eBay.

Barbara Kruger – We Won’t Play Nature to your Culture – 1983 ICA exhibition catalogue

Front cover of 1983 Barbara Kruger exhibition catalogue. Upside-down big close-up of woman's face in black and white - leaves cover her eyes. Text overlaid reads: 'we won't play nature to your culture'

Another exciting moment from the eighties. An ICA exhibition that anyone interested in photography, contemporary art or feminism rushed to. This is the original exhibition catalogue, the first edition bought from the gallery shop. On the eBay listing you’ll find more pages from the book. Buy We Won’t Play Nature to your Culture on eBay.

Bellocq – Photographs from Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans

One of the loveliest books here: a beautifully-printed, large-format collection of E.J. Bellocq‘s spontaneous, touching portraits from Storyville – and it’s in impeccable condition. The reproductions are based on the prints made by another American photographic legend Lee Friedlander and there’s a famous introduction by Susan Sontag. On the eBay listing you’ll be find lots more photographs from the book. Buy Bellocq on eBay.

The Sculpture Show – 1983 exhibition catalogue

The Scupture Show: 1983 Hayward Gallery/Serpentine Gallery catalogue front cover

Flexidisc and gallery guide from 1983 exhibition catalogue The Sculpture Show

This was an important show: identifying a generation of important artists, and a decade before the YBAs. It was a huge show, across the whole of the South Bank and the Serpentine Gallery. I was at St Albans doing a foundation course and we all trooped down to London to see this. It was a bit of a thrill. The catalogue comes with a flexidisc of ambient audio and sound art by some of the artists from the show which is a genuine rarity and sells on its own for a decent sum on Discogs. Buy The Sculpture Show on eBay.

Paul Graham – A1: Great North Road

Paul Graham's 1983 collection A1: Great North Road. Photo book with front cover image of a roadside cafe lit up at night

Colour photography from a British master of the form, published in 1983 and thought of as very much a response to the hyper-saturated work of the American Ektachrome artists. It’s a beautiful, humane, melancholy work. Click the eBay link for more pics from inside. Buy A1 on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – 18. Oktober 1977

Richter belongs to the generation of West Germans that had been too young to serve in WW2 but had then had to metabolise and transcend the essentially untranscendable: the terrible crimes of their parents and of the criminal state they obeyed or at the very least tolerated. This book represents a series of paintings, from Richter’s photorealist practice. An extraordinary and chilling set of images based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof group (alive and dead). Buy 19 Oktober 1977 on eBay.

Histoire(s) du Cinema – Jean-Luc Godard

The four volumes of Jean-Luc Godard's 'Histoire(s) du Cinema' laid out in a row a counter. Elegant, dark blue coveres with white and light san-serif lettering. — Godard

Sold. Four hardback volumes and five CDs in a very solid slip-case. This is a splendid thing. The whole soundtrack of Godard’s amazing eight-part TV history of the movies (a project that some – including me, I think – consider to be his most interesting work) plus four beautifully designed books in a handsome slipcase. And it’s an ECM edition, which I guess makes perfect sense.

Semiotext(e) Architecture

One of the more bonkers Semiotext(e) editions: a three-foot, in-your-face, on-your-lap monster. Chaotic and frankly nausea-inducing design – kind of David Carson on acid. Complex texts struggling with graphic design that’s intended to give you a visual and conceptual headache. Inside you’ll find Atom Egoyan, Félix Guattari, Arthur Kroker, Catherine Ingraham and other members of the po-mo and theory elite, in a volume too big to open in most city flats. Buy Semiotext(e) Architecture on eBay.

From my Window – André Kertész

Front cover of a book of photos by Hungarian-American artist André Kertész. Glass ornaments on a windowsill refract the light from the New York sky beyond. — André Kertész

This is such a gorgeous book. I remember loving the fact that Kertész carried on taking photographs and making his beautiful art after he couldn’t get out so much by turning his camera to the view from the windows of his apartment in New York. Now that I’m older (still getting out, though!) I find this even more moving. A great artist who narrowed his focus so that he could stay productive. Wonderful. I also kind of love the fact that the cover is unevenly faded, presumably by the sunlight from the windows in my house. Buy From My Window on eBay.

Art and Its Double, A New York Perspective

This is a fascinating and quite rare thing. It’s the catalogue from a 1987 group show at the Fundació Caixa de Pensions gallery in Barcelona; a snapshot of a local art scene that went on to become essentially hegemonic, to define contemporary art since then. The artists: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Matt Mullican, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Peter Schuyff, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe. Buy Art and its Double on eBay.

Chris Marker – Staring Back

Front cover of a book of black and white photos by Chris Marker. A young woman looks seriously at the camera, the background thrown out of focus by a large aperture. She is smoking a cigarette — Chris Marker

Lovely book of black and white photos by the great Chris Marker. I guess we knew he was an obsessive photographer of his world: his first feature, a film I’ve always found to be so unsettling I can barely watch it, was made entirely from still photos. This is a gentle book, maybe not so hard-edged as the movies. It’s beautifully printed, in the way photography books ought to be, and it’s in a lovely approximately 35mm aspect ratio, which make it even more treasurable. Click the link to see more of the photos. Buy Staring Back on eBay.

Ralph Gibson – Syntax

A high-contrast black and white portrait of the side of a man's face. The front cover of a book of photos by American artist Ralph Gibson — Ralph Gibson

A beautiful and quite rare collection of photographs by American art photographer Ralph Gibson. I loved this kind of cool abstraction when I was trying to get started with photography. In fact I still find the camera roll on my mobile to be full of squared-off urban scenes, grids, shadows and so on. Gibson’s obviously still lodged in my brain somewhere. The book is in beautiful condition and the photographs, printed in the highest quality, are among the most distinctive of their era. A treasure. Buy Syntax on eBay.

Branded Youth and Other Stories – Bruce Weber

A young man leans, asleep, against a huge pig , lying calmly in straw. The cover of a book of photos by Bruce Weber called Branded Youth — Bruce Weber

Sold. It’s a beautifully-printed, heavy hardback published for Bruce Weber’s popular exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1997. The title refers to a story of some wild-child teenagers Weber met in Montana, who in an act of teenage bonding had branded each other on the shoulder with the heated blade of an army bayonet. It’s a bit of a gay classic and long out-of-print.

Sol LeWitt – PhotoGrids

Grids of drain covers photographed by artist Sol LeWitt — Sol LeWitt

Sorry, this one’s gone. A beautiful and quite rare paperback from an important phase in Sol LeWitt‘s career. Over 400 photographs of found grids from his travels around the world: doors, windows, fencing, gratings and manholes. Photographs of grids laid out in grids, a visual exploration of the grid’s organizing influence on our everyday lives. The cover is scuffed but the interior is perfect.

Allan Sekula – Fish Story

Cover of Allan Sekula's book 'Fish Story'. At the top a photo looking forward along the top of a container ship - in the background a cloudy sky and choppy sea — Allan Sekula

Sold. Sekula spent his whole career trying to invent and then popularise a politicised, realist art photography. He was a kind of photographic Brecht. This book is typical – the tip of a vast iceberg. Fish Story wasnt’t just a book of photos or an exhibition, it was a huge, multi-year, documentary project that traced the entire fishing supply chain. This book documents the project. This edition was specially printed to coincide with a show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London and comes with the original printed material from the exhibition. It also has an updated foreword by Laleh Khalili, an academic who has studied global supply chains. Fascinating and beautiful.

Bernard Tschumi – Event-Cities

Front cover of an architecture book by Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. A red and black duotone image of a modernist structure — Bernard Tschumi

One of a famous architecture series created for MIT Press. This one’s now quite rare as far as I can tell. It’s a double-phone-book 600-page collection of Bernard Tschumi‘s most important projects. Gorgeous, head-spinning 1990s design (very MIT), packed with provocative illustrations and texts. A po-mo jewel. Buy Event-Cities on eBay.

Gilles Deleuze – Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation

The front covers of a two-volume book by Gilles Deleuze called Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. — Gilles Deleuze

I remember spotting this in the Pompidou bookshop and being brought up sharply by an unexpected collision of Bacon’s decadent London modernism and glamorous French philosophy – I didn’t know these worlds had ever met, or that they could. It’s all aesthetics, objects of perception (‘percepts’) and sensation.

It’s a beautifully packaged two-volume set in a slip-case. Volume 1 is the paintings and volume 2 is Gilles Deleuze’s essay on the painter and his work. I bought this edition during the gallery’s 1996 Bacon exhibition. It’s in essentially perfect condition. Buy Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation on eBay.

Bill Brandt – Portraits

Front cover of a collection of photographs by Bill Brandt. White text out of black and a sombre portrtait of a very serious man in a large greenhouse — Bill Brandt

This is the catalogue from a landmark 1982 exhibition. Brandt was an enormous inspiration to me when I was beginning as a photographer – something about the unlimited possibilities of a wide-angle lens and a roll of HP5. This is a lovely, slim introduction to his portraiture. From the gallery’s description of the show: “Bill Brandt has for some time been recognised as one of the established masters of British photography. This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major retrospective devoted entirely to his portraits: from the earliest, taken while an assistant to Man Ray in Paris in the late 1920s, to the famous series of poets photographed for Lilliput and Picture Post in the war years. There are also examples of his later work, and many recent portraits which will be seen for the first time.” Buy Bill Brandt: Portraits on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – Atlas

The front cover of Atlas, a collection of found art, drawings, photographs and painting from German artist Gerhard Richter. In the middle of the cover one of the artist's works in which a young woman in a floral jacket turns away from the viewer — Gerhard Richter

This is a mighty tome – one of the many clever and beautiful editions the Richter machine seems to produce. It’s a pretty special and quite rare edition of a career-spanning collection of sketches, collages and photographs from Gerhard Richter, who must be one of the most collected contemporary artists (imagine how rich he must be!). This material has been collected by the artist since he was a young man (click the eBay link to see some of the book’s layouts). It’s a beautifully-produced, oversized (34x24x3.5cm, 388 pages) monograph that’s considered rare (and the marks on the cover, like a artist’s accidental marks, are all part of the design). Buy Atlas on eBay.

Ava Hofman – poems

Front cover of a book of poetry by Ava Hofman, apparently designed to look like the cover of a very worn old music manuscript, brown and stained. — Ava Hofman

This is a lovely, slim paperback that’s somewhere between a collection of poems and an artist’s book. A self-consciously visual collection that’s really charming. More pics from inside the book in the eBay listing. Buy Ava Hofman – Poems on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – Tate Gallery 1991

Front cover of a Gerhard Richter exhibition catalogue. A blood-red abstract painting with prominent brush marks fills the cover.

I bought this at a big Richter show at the Tate in 1991 (this is before the power station was converted so we’re in Pimlico). It’s mainly the gorgeous and quite haunting abstract paintings, reproduced beautifully. Buy Gerhard Richter on eBay.

Bani Abidi – the Speech Writer

And this is an actual artist’s book. I should say I don’t think I’ve ever been very sympathetic to the idea of an artist’s book: “artists, you do the art; authors, you focus on the books.” Maybe I’m just being pedantic. I mean this one is nuts, though. Click through to the eBay listing and you’ll see that it’s substantially more than a book – more of a puzzle or a card game embedded in a book. I can’t actually remember where I acquired this but it’s genuinely unique. Buy The Speech Writer on eBay.

Always lots of accidental art at the hospital

Inside the Acute Admissions dept. at Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton. A laundry trolley, a mobile air-conditioner stand in front of two doors, busy with stickers and signs. Verticals are all lined up.

View from a lift lobby on an upper floor in the new wing of Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton. Framed by the big picture window is part of the modern building opposite. Verticals are all ined up and square.

View from a waiting area on an upper floor in the new wing of Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton. Framed in a doorway is a consultation room - sink, bin, paper towels etc. Verticals are all lined up and square.

View from a waiting area on an upper floor in the new wing of Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton. Framed by the big picture window is a scrubby green roof and, beyond it, the rooftops of Kemptown and the sea. Verticals are all ined up and square, a chair by the window breaks up the symmetry

View from a stairwell on an upper floor in the new wing of Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton. Framed by the big picture window the rooftops of Kemptown and the sea. Verticals are all ined up and square

You know, actual curation

Patrick Keiller's Robinson Institute, an exhibition at Tate Britain in London in 2012 — Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson Institute’ at Tate Britain

Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was blown away.

I took two of my kids to Tate Britain (four different modes of transport: train, tube, boat and bus – I suspect that’s what they’ll remember about the day). First I dragged them round Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson Institute’ which, in truth, was my main reason for schlepping across London (like I said, four modes of transport…). I’m the kind of old git that loves Keiller’s films (although I haven’t seen Robinson in Ruins yet) and I was really excited to see what he’d come up with in an art gallery. It’s really stunning – works from the Tate’s collection are brought together with passages from Keiller’s films, books, film stills and artefacts of his own (over 120 works in all).

This is curation as storytelling as art. The connections Keiller makes are cheeky, funny, poignant. Nineteenth century romantic and picturesque imagery (landscapes, landowner portraits, animal pictures) interleaved with documents of resistance to enclosure, maps, signposts and other inscriptions made by humans on the landscape. Also those Keiller signature images of mysterious and desolate scientific and military establishments and quite a lot of post-war conceptual art. And the persistent Robinson cosmic entrainment stuff is here: meteors, geological patterns, lay-lines and other psycho-geo tropes. It’s magically done. A situationist people’s history. A visual poem.

And the designers have done simple things to parenthesise the content – the works are offset from the gallery walls in a kind of linear zig-zag that gives the choice a kind of scrapbook-feel – for you Tumblr kids. It’s a cheeky, delirious intellectual walkabout.

Next (after the compulsory visit to the cafe for cake, obviously) we walked through to the Clore Gallery and caught what I learn was the second-to-last last day of another beautiful specimen of the curator’s art. David Blayney Brown is the man behind the wonderful ‘Romantics’, a show that mashes up the work of the Clore’s anchor tenant, JMW Turner, with that of his contemporaries to tell the story of Romanticism in a way that was hugely and pleasurably engaging for an art history pygmy like myself (I notice that the broadsheet reviews for the show when it opened nearly two years ago were pretty snooty about the accessible format – I think this kind of curation with a personality will put critics’ noses out of joint – it seems to be straying onto their territory).

This is (was, sorry!) a highly-visible kind of curation – opinionated and full of information about the period and the context. Big, assertive statements about the context and the work are printed in huge type alongside pictures grouped together in ‘pods’. It’s a really vigorous narrative, full of energy and ideas. I came away with a sense of the flow of events and the interaction of personalities that I’d never have got from the mute curation of the old school. Gripping storytelling about art.

And the whole experience (not the cake, obviously, or the boat) was a quite bracing reminder that this curation business is really not about pointing, in a sort of dilatory way, at stuff we like the look of (I called it ‘the curatorial twitch’ in an earlier post), but about the hard graft of assembling artefacts, information, context and inspiration to tell really important stories (see the previous post about Radio 3’s awe-inspiring week of Schubert output for an example of how to do this on the radio).

Make My Pano now

Pano is an iPhone app. It stitches together the photos you take to make fantastically compelling panoramas. I’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with Pano and a lot of the pics I upload to my Flickr stream are now Panos. They’re fascinating and uncanny and I’ve been wondering what actually happens when you make a panorama using Pano. Four things happen when you click ‘Make my Pano Now’:

This accounts for the uncanniness – it’s a different time at one end than it is at the other. And this, of course, introduces the possibility of paradoxes, multiple-appearances, overlaps, vanishings and other freaky occurrences. A Pano is a flattened-out movie where everything goes a bit sci-fi.

Smearing the picture across time and space busts up the classical emphasis on a single event at a single time. There’s no decisive moment, no ‘punctum‘. It’s not a 30th of a second behind the Gare St-Lazare. It’s a messy collision of moments and locations glued together to make a sort of story.

Favoured by 18th Century history painters and egomaniacs, tableaux are paintings – big, immersive, utterly artificial pictorial confections – set in an idealised location – a timeless glade, a battlefield, a classical ruin. The eye wanders in the scene, taking in the action in several distinct sub-scenes (the robed elders over by the ruin, the nymphs in the foreground, the stricken hero in the middle…). And there’s something frozen, ponderous and monolithic about a tableau. I’m not comparing my iPhone snaps to the work of the greats but I’m intrigued by the correspondences between those epic works and the mini-tableau in my phone. There’s something about their artificiality. Unremarkable scenes take on a spooky monumentality – a meeting or a street scene or a party, frozen for eternity.

Pano tries to stitch pics together so you can’t see the join but only very boring scenes – landscapes from a uniform distance, for instance – can be stitched thus. In fact, interesting Panos are shot from slightly too close and with elements at varying distances from the lens or at an angle that makes it impossible to knit the elements together properly. And the result is a messy, discontinuous whole. The best Panos are a bit off, slightly wonky – a bit gothic – and because the eye naturally makes a big effort not to see the joins – seeking integrity where it doesn’t exist – they produce a kind of unease, an uncomfortable feeling that something is wrong. And that’s their charm.

My Panos are here and there’s a Pano group on Flickr.

Nifty OSX photo stitcher

Panoramic photo of the shop window of a hat shop in Soho in London, taken using a photo sticher app on an iPhone

I’m having fun with a nicely put-together OS X photo stitcher called Double Take. The Soho hat shop pic is made from three originals stitched together – can you see the join? I’m really in awe of the quality and completeness of the kind of OS X shareware/freeware I’ve been downloading lately – and this one costs much less than a tenner.

The three lives of a photograph

My Mother, Bridie, was born in rural County Kilkenny at the end of the twenties. I think this photograph was taken there by my Dad in about 1960, after they were married and on a visit home. So that’s how this photograph’s first life got started, presumably in a little Kodak camera of some sort, in the middle of Ireland.

Dad gave me the photograph, or at least a smaller, more dog-eared version of it, about twenty years ago when I was studying photography at what was then The Polytechnic of Central London. PCL was the first Polytechnic in Britain and had a long history of independence and innovation. Now, of course, it’s called The University of Westminster and it’s just like all the others. I wonder if it’s occurred to anyone to try reversing one of these anonymous ‘Unis’ back into a retro Polytechnic brand? I wonder if they’d be allowed to?).

I started the photograph’s second life when I re-photographed it on a huge, cast iron copy stand at the Polytechnic (using black & white film – probably Pan-F) then developed the film and printed the neg in the college’s amazing darkrooms. I took those darkrooms for granted but they were something special – three or four thousand square feet of red-stained darkness five or six floors above a narrow West End street. There was something relaxing about hours spent in the quiet darkness – the only noise I remember was the tinny sound of the complete soundtrack from Taxi Driver (including the dialogue) coming from Paul‘s darkroom next door.

I’d love to go back for an hour or two. Except, of course, they’re not there any more. They’ve been moved from their groovy West End location to an end-of-the-Piccadilly-Line suburb not far from where I live now (the idea of all those ungrateful, spotty youths mooning around in the dark in all that priceless West End Real Estate must have got to those pioneering, Thatcher-era educrats).

Anyway, once I’d made some prints, I retouched the pic using some inks and a sable brush I bought from the shop in the photography department. Got rid of all the creases and scratches. I regret that now. I’d have left the blemishes alone if I was copying it now.

The cleaned-up copy has hung on various walls in my life for over twenty years now without ever encountering a computer, until last week when I finally scanned it. And now it’s on flickr.com, living out its third life in the digital realm. I wonder if there’ll be more lives?

Lovely prints

Thanks to the excellent Kookymojo for this link to a fascinating site about Iris fine art (‘giclee‘) printers. I have one of Michael Light’s gorgeous black & white moon prints which I thought was made on an Iris but I now learn used another digital method called Direct-Digital Color Coupler (I wonder if they changed the method since I bought mine) and I can confirm that these prints are uncannily good. By the way, isn’t Google labs’ glossary brilliant?

Distressed geeks

Some scratched and mangled black & white photos I took at Dave & Danny’s ‘Village Fete for the Twenty First Century’ back in the Summer showed up in the post months late. Some frames were lost all together – including all the ones of Dave & Danny themselves. The rest, including this one of Matt “Warchalking” Jones plus Yoz, Paul, Adam, paper folders, my kids, Juliet… and Freeman Dyson are spooky. They should offer this as a service.

Matt Jones at XCOM 2002. A black and white photo from a negative apparently damaged in processing — Matt Jones