A few days ago I wrote about Ed Ruscha’s work photographing the everyday and the banal. He made a series of books of this idea. The Getty has digitised a substantial amount of this work and it is available online.
Category: photobooks
New Photobook Idea
I have begun working on a new photobook idea. It is nothing novel. Just pictures of the 14 or so public phones that are situated throughout Sunshine. This screen grab from Lightroom showing 11 that I have already photographed.
The idea has sprung from a larger project I am working on about Sunshine, the place I live. I have repeatedly returned to several places around the suburb. At one point I noticed the phone box on the corner of Station Place and Sun Crescent which I photographed. I then found a website that lists all the public phones in Sunshine, and in one afternoon photographed 11 of them.
My research has turned up some interesting information. I will add some of this to the final book. At this point I’m unclear if I will use film or digital to make the pictures for the final book.
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Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore’s new book is being marketed heavily.
Here Mack books UK have published a long interview with the photographer.
I’ve always enjoyed the way he talks about picture making and cameras, this is no exception.
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Digital Printing?
This Yale website has archived an exhibition about printing.
From the site. https://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/
This site explores an exhibition on the history of the printing of pictures held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2008-09. This exhibition and the book that it accompanied traced the dominant technologies used for printing pictures throughout the modern era. Richard Benson, who wrote the book and co-curated the exhibition, was videotaped for approximately eight hours in the Museum galleries. This site gives access to that entire talk with additional images and details, allowing visitors to the site to draw their own path through its contents.
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An open letter to Martin Parr and Gerry Badger
Recently I had call to revisit some of my receipts for taxation purposes. I was reminded immediately of a couple of purchases that I had not delved that deeply into in the 2 years I had owned them. One book required little more than a flip through the contents page to reveal useful but not burning questions buried within it. I was looking for idea and inspiration for my classes as well you see. This book entitled , ‘Rethinking Digital Photography Making & Using Traditional & Contemporary Photo Tools’ by John Neel will come in handy for exploring bespoke and handmade image making classes.
The other book, ‘The Camera Essence And Apparatus’ by Victor Burgin will hopefully float on or around my desk at home for a while. It may even get dragged to work. Burgin is a renowned Artist, Marxist and Theoretician. I have on loan from the RMIT library a copy of his photobook ‘Between’ published in 1986. ‘Between’ is a kind of retrospective catalogue, but is also a photobook unto itself, predominantly about the pictures with in it.
I am going to assume that both my readers know of my long interest in photobooks. They will also appreciate that I own the 3 volume set of the ‘History of the Photobook‘, by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.
Reading the Burgin book, ‘Between’ got me wondering. Was it listed in the 3 volume set by Parr and Badger? Well the short answer is no. At least not in the index of any of the books. Another author/critic whose writings I admire is John Berger. He has co-published a photobook that is also very interesting, ‘Another Way of Telling’. This too is not listed in any of the 3 volumes. My question then to Mr Parr and Mr Badger. Why are these two Artists and their books omitted from your histories? Even though Martin Parr talks about the size of the task and the impossibility to include every photobook ever made in the introduction to Volume 1. Surely including ‘Between’, and ‘A Different Way Of Telling’ should have been a no-brainer?
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