STREET SIGHT

Tim Wride

Southern California’s modern landscape was formed by the automobile. This wide-ranging exhibition catalog examines how the automobile invaded the consciousness of Los Angeles artists in the late 1960s through the early 1980s, influencing every aspect of their art. From Ed Ruscha’s meditative celebration of the parking lot, to Darryl Curran’s sexually charged view of the gas station, to Jane O’Neal’s colorful street carnival, to Julian Wasser’s time-exposure approach to motion – here is an abundant buffet of the car-saturated essence of the Los Angeles landscape. For artists in the region, this was a pioneering moment that drew from the emergent sensibilities that informed New Topographics, embraced the unbridled nature of their art community, and internalized the unique street view that cemented the disparate geographies of Southern California.

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Ingeborg Strobl

Photo Roman (2)

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FRANZ BERGMÜLLER

Studio Stills

A mythic place of inspiration and production, the artist’s studio has long been a source of interest. Like Brancusi’s atelier preserved in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the environment, tools and objects that artists choose to surround themselves with help us feel closer to how the works came into being. In a very nontraditional or narrative way, young Austrian photographer Franz Bergmüller creates a kaleidoscope-like look into his studio world and the unique objects that fill his working environment. Full-page black-and-white plates of images taken at every possible angle create both a wonderful journey and intimate view into this artist’s creative process. Also included is a short but informative essay by Hildegard Fraueneder. A parallel iPad app can also be downloaded, if the still image experience is not quite enough.

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SEBASTIAN STUMPF

Never Really There

The first exhibition catalog for emerging photographer/filmmaker Sebastian Stumpf explores the gaps in public space and the accessibility of pictorial space in various media. The video project documented in this catalog is part of a group called Leaving White Spaces, which are produced in different art institutions and then projected at the site of their production. There are also 28 photographs of Stumpf literally standing on doors and walls between the gaps of buildings in Tokyo. While there are clear signs of life, the only figure inhabiting these architectural spaces is Stumpf’s. The Leipzig-based artist, a student of renowned photographer Timm Rautert, is included in the upcoming 2010 Berlin Biennale. His photographs flash us back and forth between our lived experiences of cities and the possibilities available in the gaps.

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Josef Sudek

The Commercial Photography for Druzstevni Práce

Maija Holma

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The Sun

Rika Noguchi

Rika Noguchi captures the abstract beauty of the everyday using the camera’s eye, through compositions the emphasize the otherworldliness of geometrical forms. The Sun, begun in 2005, depicts images recorded by shooting directly into the sun using the most primitive type of lens-less device for capturing images: the pinhole camera. The soft-focus glow of these works suggest the unknown the resides within the possibility of human experience. The series was included in the 2008 Carnegie International exhibition, as well as the Walked Art Center and the Jumex Collection in Mexico City. This limited edition book of 1500, featured in a custom slipcase, includes 36 color images, as well as a secret photographic image on the front cover using thermal-sensitive ink, brought only into exposure through ambient heat and light.

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SUSANNE HUTH

Poesie

An entire generation has now passed since Germany’s reunification, and in this artist’s book Susanne Huth has gone in search of the East Germany of her childhood. The search is reflected in Huth’s fond photographs of the run-down remnants of the socialist housing project in which she grew up, and also in the sweet reproductions of the autograph album of her school days, which in a subtle way already hinted at political resistance. In an evocative essay, Berlin author Annett Gröschner explores the relationship between public and private, with a certain ironic nostalgia for the now-vanished German Democratic Republic girlhood she shared with Huth. This is Huth’s first book publication.

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SUSPENDING TIME

Life – Photography – Death

Geoffrey Batchen

The magic of photography is its unique power to capture a moment in the past to be viewed in the present, to capture a subject suspended between life and death. This evocative, beautifully written catalog from Japan’s Izu Photo Museum documents an inspired exhibition that looks into photography’s mystical way of suspending time – with an innovative mix of photos from Japan and the West. Even with the relatively recent inclusion of vernacular photos in “serious” photography collections, the study of the art form has remained almost entirely Euro-centric. Yet in Suspending Time, curator Geoffrey Batchen (a professor at City University New York) opens the door to using Japanese vernacular photos – and what a treasure-trove he’s found! Among the sections is one of memorial “cabinet cards” and funerary photos, from Mexico, France, the United States and Japan. A delightful collection of snapshots shows the shadow of the photographer; “group portraits in which both subject and object are figured in eternal union,” writes Batchen. He includes photos by professionals Lee Friedlander and Daido Moriyama to make his point. With over 100 beautiful plates of cabinet cards, Daguerreotypes, photography jewelry, tintypes, Japanese ambrotypes, and Mexican sculptures. Includes essays by Batchen, Yoshiaki Kai and Masashi Kohara.

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LILLA SZÁSZ

Daughters

For five years, Hungarian photographer Lilla Szász photographed women living in shelter houses, focusing on elderly women, young girls who had become criminals and homeless mothers. Her main question was how women find happiness in these extreme circumstances of life. In Daughters, Szász asked the young girls what the word “beauty” meant for them. The girls then organized the photo-shoot; they behaved in front of the camera the way they wished to be seen by the viewer. The outcome is their result, their image—of happiness and a better life. With an additional text from Zsófia Somogyi.

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JUERGEN TELLER

The Clinic

Francesco Bonami

The hard-driving German photo-based artist Juergen Teller’s 50th-birthday present to himself was a stay at a European rehabilitation facility. His raw, diaristic images from that stay, presented with a metallic cover in a zine-like format from CFA, Berlin, are intermixed with historical family photographs taken by Teller’s father, who had committed suicide when he was young. A brief essay by curator Francesco Bonami explores Teller’s method of “dramaturgical shooting” as a way of creating a dramatic and sometimes comedic distance between himself and the viewer. In this way, Teller—the subject of many of his own images—suggests that what we are seeing is not real, but a way someone is experiencing the real. Juergen Teller’s work in books, magazines or exhibitions, and often in collaboration with fashion houses and designers, is marked by his refusal to separate his commercial fashion imagery from his autobiographical, uncommissioned images.

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