Thierry Colin

Beyond the Edge

In the work of photographer Thierry Colin, every picture definitely tells a story – a memory of happiness, an expression of anger, a message of shared humanity. In this beautifully printed, large-format book, these political and poetic photos from Colin’s travels in the Third World – from India to Morocco to Cuba – show, as the artist says, “the experience of what lies beyond the pictures.” Whether he’s shooting children in Phnom Penh as they rummage with rats on a garbage dump, or a stunning forest scene in Kenya’s Masai Mara reserve, Colin is doing what true artists do: letting us see the world through his eyes.

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COLORFUL LUCENCY

Transparent Stills of the 1920s and 1930s
Roland Fischer-Briand

Monika Faber & Walter Moser (Eds.)

In the 1920s and 1930s, motion pictures enjoyed a great popularity. To guarantee cinema’s visibility beyond the sphere of projection though, the help of its elder brother, photography, was called for. Color Lucency is the first book to explore a rare medium of film photography indebted to its day and, like film, relying on celluloid: brightly hand-colored stills owing their lucency to backlight illumination. Taken on the set, these mostly anonymous pictures were aimed at arousing the public’s visual curiosity in the lobbies of Vienna’s movie palaces and at encouraging them to purchase a ticket. Following the supposedly sharp dividing lines—between color and black and white, moving image and still, incident light and backlight—Roland Fischer-Briand’s text enters hitherto unexplored terrain. Fischer-Briand (b. 1975) is an art historian and senior curator of the Stills Collection of the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.

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DANIELA COMANI

Sunsets

Berlin-based Italian artist Daniela Comani’s new book Sunsets captures 32 images of her photographic series OFF . With painstaking precision she probes that ever-present device for the reproduction of moving images—the television set—but in “off” mode. Turned off, TV sets seem dead, yet they serve as surfaces for viewers to project their own fears and fantasies onto. Comani (b. 1965) doesn’t merely take pictures of inactive TV sets, she shoots them—the flash hits the dark screen like a Big Bang that yields new insights, even as it outshines and obliterates the protagonist’s reflection. Comani mounts the photographs on paperboard to create a new three-dimensional object, so each picture is unique despite photography’s capability of infinite reproduction. Sunsets serves as a minimalistic mise-en-scène of TV sets of varying shape, size, and design—a series of blank frontal portraits that are not bereft of content.

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STÉPHANE COUTURIER

Melting Point (Continued)

An extensive monograph/exhibition catalog on Stéphane Couturier, who is undeniably one of the most important French contemporary photographers, an influential presence on the international exhibition scene since the mid-1990s with his large-format, brilliantly elaborated photographic tableaux. His architecture photographs – inspired in particular by the aesthetics of Le Corbusier – and his cityscapes are the result of a special image construction that uses the media properties and possibilities of photography and film to create transitory states between documentation and fiction. Couturier asks engrossing questions about the nature of modernity. Images selected from series including Brasilia, Barcelone, Chandigarh, Couvent La Tourette, Itamarati and La Havane. Also includes documentation of the intense new multipart videos Brasilia and Seoul. Essay by Dr. Martin Hochleitner and Damien Sausset.

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JEAN-LUC CRAMATTE

Culs de ferme

In Culs de ferme, Swiss photographer Jean-Luc Cramatte (b. 1959) portrays forms of accumulation in a globalized landscape often touted as clean and orderly. An obsessive collector of pictures, including both his own photographs and found pictures, Cramatte has been compiling a photographic inventory for 20 years. With the 200 images in this artist’s book, he simultaneously adheres to a strict, documentary approach—which does not eschew the unsightly, the bleak, and the monotonous—and comments on this visible world through scribbled notations and painted additions. From the first hints of degradation to outright overgrown ruins, unvarnished and free of nostalgia, these images offer an insightful look at the state of decline, with Cramatte’s examinations steering the gaze toward inconspicuous things that are usually overlooked. His photographic inventories shed a humorous and critical light on the “normal” present-day world, producing a telling ethnography of quotidian life.

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Zoe Crosher

Out the Window [LAX]

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ANIA DABROWSKA

A Lebanese Archive

Bureau d’Etudes

A chance encounter in a homeless hostel between Polish artist and photographer Ania Dabrowska and Lebanese journalist Diab Alkarssifi led to the discovery of Alkarssifi’s collection of 27,000 photographs from Beirut, Damascus and Cairo covering over 100 years of Arab history. Complemented by the journalist’s previously unknown personal photographs of everyday life in Beirut, his home city of Baalbeck on the Syrian border, and his student years in the early 1970s in Moscow and Budapest, this treasure trove is an extraordinary record of modern Arab history. Dabrowska designed the book to preserve and re-present to the public a century of cultural and political history in Lebanon and the Middle East. A Lebanese Archive is an electrifying historical record featuring an essay by artist Akram Zaatari and over 100 images from the archive.

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BERT DANCKAERT

The Extras

A photographer lands on a film set in Bollywood to photograph the decors as part of his PhD research in the arts. Posing as an extra, he infiltrates the set of Tezz, a “romantic terrorist” film, where nothing goes as he had imagined. During the shoot, among 30 other extras and with surrealistic Bollywood featured as the backdrop, he enters into conversations about photography and society with the overpopulated and poverty-stricken Mumbai. In The Extras, photographer and professor of photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp Bert Danckaert (b. 1965) explores the doubt and incapacity that drive the artistic process. Inspired by his 2013 project Simple Present, these pages also reflect on the oeuvre of photographers working along the boundaries of fiction and reality in a globalized world, where it is increasingly difficult to take a clear position (or photographic point of view).

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KATRINA DASCHNER

Nouvelle Burlesque Brutal: A Trilogy by Katrina Daschner

Performance artist Katrina Daschner’s explosive third book is divided into chapters corresponding to her films Hafenperlen (2008), Aria de Mustang (2009) and Flaming Flamingoes (2011).While the burlesque narratives are told in part through film stills, flip-book effects are also used in the book format to “read” the gestural moments and performative aspects visible in the cinematic rendition. The stage and the exhibition are perceived as a sexualized arena of play and performance in which processes of desire and power – along with gaze scenarios – are negotiated and staged. Readers walk on to a stage setting to find themselves in a field of gazes in which they have become not just the audience but also the protagonists.

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Katrina Daschner

Killing the Systems Softly 8 Feminist Photographic Essays

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