ERWIN POLANC

8630 Mariazell

Young Austrian photographer Erwin Polanc (b. 1982) has no interest in the use of photographic imagery to promote religious fervor. In his new survey, Polanc turns his eye to the small town of Mariazell in inner Austria, home of one of the most important and visited pilgrimage shrines in Europe, Basilica Maria Geburt. There are several stories regarding the power and miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary in Mariazell dating back to the 11th century, suggesting a richly historical past. However, Polnac, in his photographic record, strips the town of pilgrims, religious iconography and acts of devotion, and replaces them with stark color images and views and details of a town that is shockingly plain and at times a bit run-down. As Polanc describes his method of working in a conversation with Viennese graphic designer Christian Hoffelner, “My intention is to use precise, ultra-realistic digital imaging to counter the conventional romantic notions that exist among many of the people in Mariazell.”

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WILLEM POPELIER

____ and Willem: Documentation of a Youth

As the title makes clear, something is missing here. Photographer Willem Popelier searches for the genesis of identity and representation, based on his own life experience, in a story about the youthful years of separated twins. By way of his clear, dry photography, Popelier steps back from the private history, creating a distance that is brought into perspective with original family photographs. The artist creates an extensive family tree and portraits of individuals and objects from the past, such as train tickets and the many keys to the twins’ various family homes. Each image is as neutral as possible a documentation of one of the segments that play a role or give insight into the story. A clever investigation from an edgy artist.

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POSE

(Ugandan Images)

Most Ugandans are unable to take a holiday. But it is possible for them to have photos taken with a different world in the background, a world of fantasy gardens and luxury beach resorts. Dutch photographer Andrea Stultiens’s prizewinning Pose (Ugandan Images) shows us the photo studios of Uganda as places where people can try on an alternate reality for a short while. Her images of homes and studios, photo albums and found vernacular photography show the importance of photography as a tool for remembrance and status in Ugandan life. The photos on the separate pages of the full-color book are actually panoramas, which are presented contiguously on fold-out front and back covers. Stultiens is the photographer who brought the visual biography of Ugandan community activist Kaddu Wasswa to light.

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PRE-ENACTMENTS

Victoria Halford & Steve Beard

Collaborative art team Victoria Halford and Steve Beard have journeyed to the consumer non-places found across the English landscape— its shopping malls and retail parks—to pre-enact the end times. Here, visions of Ranters, Diggers, Seekers and Fifth Monarchists, joined with the Angry Brigade, King Mob and Occupy, gave rise to images of dissident writings stamped into the architectural fabric of drive-through restaurants. Presented as tokens of things to come, this compact book filled with their investigative black-and-white photographs is an invitation, or perhaps an incitement, to break apart these amnesiac zones of consumption, to remake them into crucibles of social transformation warmed by the distant flames of urban riot and revolt.

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O PUBLIC ROAD!

Photographs of America by Peter Kayafas

Wide-ranging American socio-documentary photographer Peter Kayafas has spent twenty years documenting the United States. Think of him as a contemporary Robert Frank or Walker Evans, a photographer with a great interest in place, culture, and people’s stories, a mirror of who we are in America. In this book, which includes 65 duotones, he takes the viewer on the road with him, looking at eateries, and ruins and horizons, the starts of parades, the aftermaths of tornados, human faces, human backs. “His pictures are crisp and direct, and the best of them vibrate with understated graphic tension,” said The New Yorker. With a joyous essay by novelist Allan Gurganus.

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PUNCTUM

Reflections on Photography

“Punctum,” a term coined by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida, is a detail in a photograph that pricks or bruises the viewer—or as Barthes wrote, “It is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.” In the context of the catalog from the exhibition Punctum: Reflections on Photography at the Salzburger Kunstverein (2014), we are asked to reflect on the phenomenon of the image that relates to its referents but at the same time escapes it. Organized by curator Seamus Kealy, 50 photographs including a variety of work from landscapes and portraits to the indexing of objects and conceptual photography by photo-based artists from Carleton Watkins to Moyra Davey and Kader Attia are reproduced in full-bleed color spreads with short texts by the artists, writers and curators who chose the work. An introductory essay by curator Boris Groys eloquently explores the theoretical concerns behind the exhibition.

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LAURENCE RASTI

There Are No Homosexuals in Iran

While most Western nations now officially accept homosexuality, in Iran it is still punishable by death. The only options for a homosexual in Iran are to choose transsexuality, which is tolerated by law, or to flee. The subjects of Iranian photographer Laurence Rasti’s (b. 1990, Geneva) elegant hardcover photo book live in the small Turkish town of Denizli, where hundreds of gay Iranians are waiting to move to a tolerant country. Rasti explores concepts of beauty, identity and gender in her spare and evocative images set in landscapes, mundane settings and street scenes, creating a new language of camouflage and discretion. Underlining the contrast between conspicuousness and obscurity, Rasti’s couples hide behind eye-catching props such as balloons or flowers or are glimpsed behind trees or bushes. She hides her subjects in plain sight, referencing the experience of these individuals who “do not exist” in Iran. Rasti was the Aperture Portfolio Award Finalist and Magnum Photo Award – Juror’s Pick (2016).

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Man Ray

La Photographie N’Est Pas L’Art
12 Photographs

Photography is not art, proclaims Man Ray in the essay re-published here as an impeccable facsimile edition of the 1937 original. A pamphlet of loose sheets and 12 images, this publication re-visits an issue that was hotly controversial during the first half of the 20th century – Is Photography Art? – as examined in the influential Paris magazine L’Art. Despite the fact that Man Ray’s provocative works were among the photographs generally agreed by critics to be, in fact, art, Man Ray himself seems barely interested in considering the question. “There’s no point trying to find out if it’s an art,” he said. “Art is a thing of the past. We need something else. You’ve got to watch light at work. It’s light that creates. I sit down in front of my sheet of photographic paper and I think.”

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THE REFUGEE JACKPOT

Karijn Kakebeeke and Eefje Blankevoort

There’s no more controversial subject in the United States these days than immigration, legal or illegal. Americans can learn from this multi-layered exhibition catalog, in which photographer Karijn Kakebeeke and journalist Eefje Blankevoort spend 18 months following the lives of a group of refugees who win an immigration lottery in The Netherlands. Part socio-documentary, part anthropology, part political commentary, the book uses photography, texts and interviews to show how our world in turmoil uproots people’s lives, and to ask whether anyone can really begin anew. Kakebeeke and Blankevoort address the opportunities and joy of the refugees but also the disappointments and the nostalgia for the lives they left behind. Did the refugees really win the jackpot?

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Sascha Reichstein

Be My Guest

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