Russet Lederman: How did the idea for the Magnum Contact Sheets book develop?

Kristen Lubben: The idea of archives was on everyone’s mind, partly as a result of the New York Magnum office having just sent their “working prints” archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

Thames & Hudson and Magnum approached me as editor and curator of the project, which they had conceived together. They came to me because I had recently completed a book with Susan Meiselas (In History), which had been very heavily archival based. Also my earlier book Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon focused on the process of editing and circulation of images; I was also at the same time engaged in working with the recently recovered negatives in the Mexican Suitcase. These projects cast a wider net in terms of the kind of materials one can consider when looking at photographs, and Thames & Hudson thought I’d be a good fit in terms of my approach and interest in working process.
RL: Who else was involved in shaping the book’s focus?

Kristen Lubben: Martin Parr was the photographer representative on the project and was a guiding force throughout.  He was the person who really identified that the contact sheet would make a good subject now because of the transition to digital.  We were meeting in Paris to do the first edit and he just sort of tossed out the comment that the book would function as an epitaph to the contact sheet. His words really stuck with me and gave me a lens through which to see the project and its timeliness. None of us think that any of these things are going to end, but of course they are. The design of the book mirrors the look of the Kodak paper box, and it was a little eerie that the Kodak bankruptcy was announced on the same day as the opening for the show that is associated with the book.

RL: You decided to sequence the book in chronological order. Why?

Kristen Lubben: It was crucial for distinguishing this book. We wanted it to be about Magnum, the agency and its photographers, as well as about the development of the medium over time–the larger arc of history. The book is an homage to a way of working.

RL: Can you discuss why you decided to include a variety of analog film formats: 35 mm, slide, large format and panoramic?

Kristen Lubben: It was important to show the range of material, since Magnum (and contact sheets) are probably most associated with black and white 35mm. Nothing in the book was shot on digital; everything is film or analog. There are a few instances where we blur the edges: Mikhail Subotzky digitally edited his project, but it was shot on film. We also included color slide sequences, which, while not technically contact sheets, are similar to film in that both are about the process of editing. Everything shifted when color positive came in. It was a different way of working, because the photographer would do an initial edit of their slides with an “A” box, a “B” box, a “C” box, and only give over a certain cut of the images to the agency. This is the first loss of not seeing absolutely everything, since the agency editor no longer made the first cuts—it’s a precursor to what happened with digital.

RL: How did you select the contact sheets used to represent each Magnum photographer?

Kristen Lubben: We began by inviting all the photographers to send us 3 suggestions, which could either be their key image or a surprising lesser-known image that had an interesting story behind it. Most of the time the selections were spot-on and were absolutely what we want to use. Sometimes they were a surprise — a great image didn’t necessarily have a great contact sheet. There were also cases where maybe an image wouldn’t pop out of somebody’s top 5 most famous photographs, but had an especially interesting contact sheet. That was the case with the two Chris Anderson examples in the book — particularly the Afghanistan one. Contact sheets are not just about zeroing in on that key image, but also about revealing a way of working and how our understanding of an image can change over time.  
RL: If the contact sheet can also be seen as a teaching tool, then what will young photographers now use to learn about the working process of older and more established photographers?

Kristen Lubben: I think they are missing out on that opportunity. Hopefully the book will be used as a teaching tool. I think one of its really strong benefits is that opportunity to see how someone else works. A huge question with digital material is what happens to all of this overwhelmingly massive volume of digital material that isn’t perceived to be the top tier or the final edit? There is so much digital detritus, and nobody knows at this point what is going to happen to all of it. In the past, you used to have a packet of letters with a ribbon around them in your dresser, and now it is all email and so ephemeral. I think there are so many questions here.

Contacts are more than just a teaching tool for working process. They are also a reminder of the value of history and the need to preserve archives. Hopefully when people look at the book they will realize what’s happening today and what we are losing? I hope it will make people mindful of the importance of preserving history.

RL: You curated a show at ICP based on the book. What were some of the issues you had to consider in translating the book format to the walls of a museum?

Kristen Lubben: I view the book and the show as separate entities. I think because of the small physical scale of the exhibition, I had to see it as something that would be a portal to the book. The biggest challenge was scale: both the scale of the room, as well as the scale of the contact sheets. I’m very glad that I chose to blow the contact sheets up. I want to encourage the viewer to get up close and personal in the same way as with a real contact sheet. With a book, you can get as close as you need to, but you can’t do that in an exhibition—the enlarged scale of the prints bridges that distance. I wanted to do something that wasn’t just imitating the book, but added a different dimension to the viewing experience.RL: In the show you don’t emphasize the chronology, while you do in the book. Can you speak to that curatorial decision?

Kristen Lubben: Because the show is so compact, it is hard to sketch out something that is a real history of the medium. Instead I decided to pick really interesting examples –contact sheets that are either visually engaging or have a good story behind them. In the book, we are pretty religious in every case about showing the contact sheet and its key image. I didn’t do that in the show because I felt like it would eat up too much space and give the prints too much importance.   Where I did include prints in the show it was more about trying to add something different to the story, rather than just show what the key image was. For example, Robert Capa’s “D-Day,” an image not on the contact sheet, is included because it highlights the story about a negative that is missing.  With the René Burri, it’s the verso of one of the contact sheets, where you see all those stamps and get a sense of how these were real working objects. The Jim Goldberg is a unique collage.

RL: Are you going to continue to work with Magnum?

Kristen Lubben: Absolutely, for somebody who is interested in photojournalism, documentary and socially engaged photography, there’s no better group to work with. They are some of the most important photographers, working in ways that perfectly align with my interests. I think Magnum is just an amazing and unique organization and it has a close and intertwined history with ICP.

Kristen Lubben, ed. Magnum Contact Sheets (2011)
TR820 .M34 2011

MFA THESIS SHOW   23 – 25 FEBRUARY 2012

ICP-BARD MFA STUDIOS

24–20 JACKSON AVENUE, 3RD FLOOR, LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS

G, E, M TRAINS TO COURT SQUARE

OPENING:

THURSDAY / 23 FEBRUARY / 6 – 9 PM

ON VIEW: 

FRIDAY – SATURDAY / 24 – 25 FEBRUARY / 12 – 5 PM

 http://speedshow.net/dfghfhg-soloshow-daniel-temkin/

All are welcome unless you’re one of these people:

Daniel’s books in the ICP library include:

Yeep! Eep! Eep! For the commodore 64 / Daniel Temkin.
R TR179.5.T452 .Y44 2010

Sector / Daniel Temkin.
TR179.5.T452 .S43 2010

Mutator 1 / Daniel Temkin
TR179.5.T452 .M88 2011

The evening of January 31st saw the ICP Library Committee visit the Gitterman Gallery for an evening discussion with the celebrated Dutch artist Machiel Botman. Evan Mirapaul, Buzz Hartshorn and Deirdre Donohue introduced the evening as the audience sat and listened to the erudite and brilliant artist, curator, and photobook maker Machiel speak about his influences and practices. Botman was accompanied by his long-time friend and graphic designer as he charmed this exclusive audience with tales of his early days hanging with the Beach Boys in Holland and LA and also a thorough and thoughtful exploration of his creative process.  On display this evening along with the best of Botman’s books and photographs were some truly gorgeous book dummies that he has made over the past 30 years or so.

The ICP library and archives would like to thank the Gitterman Gallery and Machiel Botman for their donation of Machiel Botman books and for providing such a warm venue and enchanting reception.

Heartbeat / Machiel Botman.
R TR140 .B684 1994

Rainchild / Machiel Botman.
R TR140 .B684 2004

One tree / Machiel Botman.
R TR140.B684 2011

http://gittermangallery.com/html/ArtistResults.asp?artist=1581

Photographs courtesy of Jeff Gutterman, Phil Block and me.

Remembering Absent Meaning
MFA Thesis Exhibition: Nandita Raman

Opening Reception: February 2 | Thursday | 6:00–9:00 pm
On View: February 3-4 | Friday–Saturday | 12:00–5:00 pm

ICP-Bard MFA Studios, 24–20 Jackson Avenue, 3rd Floor, Long Island City, New York

“Remembering Absent Meaning. . .

Moving to the US in 2008 created distance from my familiar landscape, activating experiences that had been retained in the past 28 years. I remembered a lot of events and instants that had accumulated unconsciously. Last summer, I visited Banaras and asked my grandfather if he remembered his childhood home, his room and how it had changed over the years. He went from an objective description of the room to remembering people and events located in and around the house. The course of these accounts changed when the question was repeated another day. New associations were made, characters were introduced and fresh emotions were attached to the old narrative. The digressions too made their appearance at different instances in his story, deviating from their prior progression. This made me curious about how memory functions, its relationship to objective reality and time.”  – Nandita Raman

“Memory and thought can only exist in time. A mirror, on the other hand is not subject to duration. It has nothing of the past, the reflection is in the now, nothing is retained. Here, in the no-place of the mirror, the present as the fleeting instant, the past invoked by this moment and the future memory of this reflection might simultaneously come together. What would be the relevance of memory if there were no past, no future; in timelessness?” – Nandita Raman

Nandita is a brilliant young artist who also has an extraordinary artists’ book in the ICP library.
Book by Chance / Nandita Raman
R  TR179.5.R355 .B66 2011
10 dice contained in a box with a map which shall then enable you to find a book to read in the ICP library entirely by the act of chance.

And, this objectness is what sets photobooks apart from the small paperback novels that are now easily adapted to the Kindle and Nook. It is the tangible and the tactile that give the photobook its elevated status as an object to hold (and behold). In postwar Japanese photobooks, this objectness, with its highly attuned attention to every design, image and typographic detail, is the result of a well-regarded collaborative process between photographer and designer. During the 1960s, with the emergence of a distinctive Japanese visual style in design, theater, photography and film, collaborations with inventive designers such as Kohei Sugiura flourished. In both Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History (Vol. I) and Ryuchi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian’s Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s, significant space is allocated to discussions on the important role of the photographer / designer collaboration.

Japan has and continues to be a print culture. Whether the famed woodcuts of the 18^th/19^th century or the current deluge of manga that has kids all over the world consuming books like candy, Japan has a rich history of the printed page. Despite a smart phone centric digital culture, Japan still values the tangible and physicality of the book — with contemporary Japanese photographers continuing to see the book as one of the primary vehicles for presenting their work.  For Japanese photographers, a book is an entity that must have that “considered” balance of all its elements – one that achieves a “rightness” of design that is appropriate to a book’s concept (Parr and Badger 269). During the Provoke Era (late 1960s – ‘70s), many of Sugiura’s designs were responsible for creating this “rightness” as they simultaneously challenged previous notions of photography and the intrinsic nature of what constituted a book. Whether an image placement that pushed the boundaries of the page in a frenzy of movement or covers imbedded with silver discs, books designed by Sugiura are part of what makes touching, reading and looking at a Japanese photobook so special. Fortunately, the International Center of Photography Library has several strong examples of these seminal collaborations in its collection, which affords the opportunity for an in-depth view of all the elements that contribute to the unique objectness of the Japanese photobook.

An early example of Japanese photobook experimentation in which “design meets photography meets text” on the highest level can be seen in Vivo group member Kikuji Kawada’s Chizu / The Map (1965, reprint 2005). Designed by Kohei Sugirua, Chizu is simultaneously a documentary and a multi-tiered conceptual object that takes the subject of the Hiroshima bombing and Japan’s complex relationship with the United States beyond a simple recounting of events. Packaged in a cardboard slipcase and interior foldout black wrapper inscribed with phrases related to the bombing, Sugiura’s design perfectly marries all the elements of the printed page with the Japanese tradition of package design. The cover image on the jacket shows a close-up shot of a flame with a typographic overlay of a poem. Within are gritty high contrast gravures on gate-folded full-bleed pages, which require the reader/viewer to peel away layers in a slow, deliberate process of discovery that reveals fragmentary views of the Hiroshima blast and American postwar “occupation” juxtaposed with abstracted close-ups. The overall visual sensation is visceral – merging the archival, scientific and emotional into an intricate portrayal of a historical event.

Jun Morinaga’s Kawa, Ruiei / River: Its Shadow of Shadows (1978) is another brilliant example of Sugiura’s fine-tuned attention to the “rightness” of the photobook object. Again, through the use of gate-folded pages, Sugiura’s design purposely slows down the reader to give the book the contemplative focus necessary for Morinaga’s brooding images of the dark depths within Tokyo’s rivers from the early ‘60s. Rather than images of translucent light inflected waters, Morinaga’s water is muddy, intense and foreboding. Bits of surface debris and rotting garbage are framed close-up, as air bubbles take on an abstract patterning. As Kaneko and Vartanian point out in their text (220), River: Its Shadow of Shadows is important not only for its design, but for the support it received from its highly respected publisher Kazuhiko Motomura, who is also responsible for the publication of Robert Frank’s The Lines of My Hand (1972) and Flower Is (1987). Morinaga met Motomura through the American photographer W. Eugene Smith, who Morinaga had worked for as an assistant during the 1970s. Smith also wrote the preface to River: Its Shadow of Shadows.

Touching, handling and reading a book designed by Kohei Sugiura is a distinctive experience that delivers the sublime pleasure associated with “objectness.” One immediately senses that the object within one’s hands is not just a simple book, but an art object with a completeness that successfully achieves that precarious (and often missed) synergy between design and concept. With the reader’s experience in mind, Sugirua is continuously concerned with how the merger of text and image will offer an unexpected and new sensation. In a 2006 interview, he stated, “The most important thing is the ability to be surprised. That means to be very sensitive to something new and unusual, and then the surprise comes, the five senses become one. Some big surprise can make you jump. The breath and heartbeat, hearing and singing…The whole body becomes one, and then the jumping…Being surprised is very important for human beings” (Conversation with Kohei Sugiura: Keep the Ability to Be Surprised)

Click to view slideshow.
Other Photobooks Designed by Kohei Sugiura:

Eikoh Hosoe. Barakei / Killed by Roses (1963)
TR654 .H67 1985 (1985 reprint)
Ikko Narahara. Europe: Where Time Has Stopped (1967)
Robert Frank. The Lines of My Hand (1972)
Yutaka Takanashi. Toshi-e / Towards the City (1974)
TR145 . T351 2010 (2010 reprint – Books on Book 6)
Robert Frank. Flower Is (1987)
TR654 .F73 1972

Books Mentioned in the ICP Library

Kikuji Kawada. Chizu / The Map (1965; reprint 2005)
TR655 .K38 2005 (The ICP Library has the 2005 reprint which does not have the original slipcase and wrapper described above.)

Jun Morinaga. Kawa, Rui’ei / River: Its Shadow of Shadows (1978)
TR670 .M67 1978

Further Reading on Kohei Sugiura and other Japanese Photobook designers can be found in the following two books:

Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History, Volume I (2004), page 269.

Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian. Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s (2009), pages 19, 88.

In 1879 George Eastman went to London to obtain a patent for his plate-coating machine. In 1880 he obtained an American patent for the machine, rented a third floor loft in Rochester and began to manufacture dry plates commercially.  The Eastman Dry Plate & Film company was formally established in 1881. George began a lifetime of devotion to photographic research and innovation. Continually creative in his approach of mixing the best business concepts with the latest and greatest technological ideas George Eastman’s Kodak Company made photography available to everyone. Kodak dominated the world of photography for over 100 years.

The Basic Business Principles of Kodak*

• Mass production at a low cost
• International distribution
• Extensive advertising
• Find and meet the needs of customers

Research and the development of new products were key concepts for Kodak and they grew into a huge company.

Some Decisive Kodak Moments:

1884 – announced the production of film in rolls which was to be the basis of motion picture film used by the early filmmakers.
1891 – George Eastman began to produce the Ordinary range of cameras.
1900 – the first Brownie camera announced.
1913 –Kodak announce the first prepackaged dental x-ray film.
1930 – To celebrate the 50th year of Kodak the George Eastman Company offered a special edition camera FREE to any 12 year-old child in the United States or Canada.
Amazingly 557,000 FREE cameras were claimed.
1935 – Kodak introduced Kodachrome, a color reversal stock for movie and slide film.
1963 – Kodak introduce the Instamatic camera.
1966-68 – Kodak film and equipment journeyed aboard Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to map the moon’s surface.
1969 – In July, Apollo 11 astronauts used the lunar stereo close-up camera to photograph the lunar soil. The film was brought back to earth: the camera, designed and built by Kodak, remains on the moon.
1975 –Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer at Kodak, invents the digital camera.
1980 – In the centenary year the Eastman chemicals division announced annual sales of over $1 billion.
1986 – Kodak create the world first megapixel sensor.
2003 – the Kodak EasyShare LS633 Digital Camera enters the scene.

Some indecisive Kodak moments

January, 2004 – Kodak announced that it would stop selling traditional film cameras in Europe and North America.
April 8, 2004 –Kodak was delisted from the Dow Jones Index.
January 2009 – Kodak posted a $137 million fourth-quarter loss and announced plans to cut up to 4,500 jobs.
June 22, 2009 – Kodak announced that it would cease selling Kodachrome colour film after 74 years of production (please see the beautiful work of William Christenberry and his book Kodachromes (TR659 .C47 2010) and the just released William Eggleston Chromes to realize just how beautiful kodachrome was.
September 2011 – Kodak hired law firm Jones Day for restructuring advice and its stock dropped to an all-time low.
January 2012 –Kodak received a warning from the New York Stock Exchange that it could soon be de-listed.
January 19, 2012 – Kodak filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.

*the company had been called the Eastman Kodak Company since 1892 although the name Kodak had been registered in 1888.

Ron Stark’s Delicacies is a humble little book that can be easily looked past because of its physical simplicity. The photographer is almost impossible to find on the Internet, but that doesn’t dismiss his credibility or wonderful contribution to the photography world. Delicacies was published in 1978 and is a “kitchen meditation.” Stark’s photographs of various images of food symbolize simplistic living and the importance of giving tender attention to each facet of life. His food images vary in photographic genre, ranging from classical still lives to lifestyle photographs taken in an array of locations where food is either created or digested.

The book begins with a true-to-scale black and white photograph of an apple, but calling it just an apple is like saying Edward Weston’s peppers are just peppers. Like Weston, he uses the subject to embody something larger than its physical self. In this case, the apple is transformed into an abstracted landscape, reminiscent of an astral vista. Stark uses a large format camera, which allows such intricate detail to the apple skin. The viewer gazes in awe of the star-like patterns formed on the skin. “Stark’s photographs present the mute surprise of humble objects freshly seen.” His photographs will re-introduce you to the delicacy of simple living and bring the joy back to the kitchen. Mmm, just bit an apple…

Photographers Operating at the Intersection of Art and Science

In many ways, art and science are likely bedfellows. Both support a culture of experimentation that is inspired by curiosity, while attracting individuals interested in generating fresh ideas and forging new paths. Consequently, there is a discoverable history of unifying practices, practitioners, and organizations dedicated to artists and scientists dating back to the Lunar Society.The word ‘consilience’ was first used by William Whewellin 1840 in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences to describe the coincidence of one class of facts with another. More recently, E. O. Wilson has made of us the term to describe the linking together of ideas from different disciplines into more comprehensive theories. In his 1998 publication Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson argues that methods employed in integrating the sciences could also be used to promote understanding and communication among the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, thereby fostering a better understanding of ourselves and our world.

Photography has a singular place in this unfolding history. Invented by means of a scientific process that changed the nature of visual representation and thus, art making, our medium has been a natural means of blending the two disciplines since its advent.  Moreover, photographers who have bridged this gap include such iconic figures as Eadweard Muybridge, Margaret Bourke-White, and Berenice Abbott.

In recent decades, new scientific developments have radically changed the manner in which we, as human beings, understand ourselves, down to our three-billion-letter sequence of DNA. Contemporary science permeates our culture in ways that are difficult for artists to ignore. And many artists have mined emerging concepts in neuroscience, nanotechnology, and astrophysics for their own practices. Likewise, the most revolutionary developments in science are often dependent upon the arts. Scientists have moved beyond human sensory perception, from subatomic particles that cannot be seen to alternate dimensions that cannot be visited. Art provides scientists with imagery and analogy and sometimes with a much-needed space in which to explore unanswerable questions and illogical ideas.

Consilience: Photographers Operating at the Intersection of Art and Science, currently on display in the International Center of Photography Library’s window, is a selection of 12 twenty-first century publications that celebrates the creative work of photographers operating at the intersection of art and science, including: Brandon Ballengée, Jim Bell, Mark Dion, Felice Frankel, Joan Fontcuberta, Clifford Ross, A. A. Ruiz, Madeline Schwartzman, David Maisel and Catherine Wagner, James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, Adam Bartos, Michael Burton, Peter Campus, Robert Canali,  Linda Connor, Olafur Eliasson, Vincent Fournier, Stan Gaz, Sharon Harper, Ian Harrison, Tim Hawkinson, Susann Hertrich, Golan Levin, Jason Lazarus, Charles Lindsay, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Phillip Scott Andrews, Greg Stimac, Neilson Tam, Ei Wada, Danielle Wilde, and Clemems Winkler. The photo book provides a comprehensive and accessible venue to explore these photographers’ unique practices.

Currently on view in the ICP Library’s Window:

Ariel Ruiz i Altaba, Embryonic Landscapes

Ariel Ruiz i Altaba is a photographer, molecular biologist, and biochemist. In Embryonic Landscapes, Altaba presents fifteen years of work, in which he combines his solid scientific knowledge with his aesthetic sensibility to capture the external forms of developing embryos and molecular patterns of gene expression in different species that share common developmental mechanisms with man.

Embryonic Landscapes also includes original essays by scientists, philosophers, and artists, including Ariel Ruiz i Altaba’s friend and past collaborator, Joan Fontcuberta. These texts address such topics as the quintessence of photography, the relationship between man and nature, and the similarities and differences between art and science.

Brandon Ballengèe, Malamp: The Occurrence of Deformities in Amphibians

Malamp presents eco-artist and activist Brandon Ballengée’s artistic, scientific, and ecological investigation into mutant amphibians around the world since 1996. The publication of this monograph coincided with The Case of the Deviant Toad, an exhibition at the Royal Institution, and offers the results of Ballengée’s research as the artist in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2006 and 2007, commissioned by Arts Catalyst in England.

Ballengée collects the bodies of mutant amphibians and brings them back to his studio, where he exposes them to a chemical procedure he refers to as clear and stain. He soaks the frogs in a series of chemicals that adhere to different tissues, making them transparent and revealing bizarre bone structures. Alongside these images and Ballengée’s tenderly rendered technical illustrations are texts on Ballengée’s practice from artistic, scientific, and ecological perspectives, including an essay by art critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard; Clare Lilley, Head Curator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Nicola Triscott, Director of the Arts Catalyst; Dr. Stanley K. Sessions, Professor of Biology, Hartwick College; and Dr. Kerry Kriger, Director of Save the Frogs.

Jim Bell, Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet

Jim Bell, NASA geoscientist and lifelong photographer, led the Spirit and Opportunity mobile robot missions to photograph the surface of Mars. Over 150,000 photographs were captured, often at 100 megabytes, on this mission and then sent back across millions of miles of space. Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet is a photographic survey of the surface of Mars, featuring 150 of these images.  The work oddly resembles the photographs of Yosemite Valley captured by Jim Bell’s hero, Ansel Adams and with millions of viewers, these images of Mars are becoming as much a part of our visual lexicon.

Daylight Magazine: Issue 9—Cosmos

Daylight Magazine, edited by ICP-Bard alumnus Michael Itkoff, is dedicated to publishing in-depth photographic essays in collaboration with established and emerging artists, scholars, and journalists. This issue of Daylight features work by photographers, each of whom are interested in in astronomical issues.

Mark Dion, Polar Bear: (Ursus Maritimus)

Mark Dion is well known for integrating scientific presentations into his artistic practice. He has spent his career playing with the formula by which knowledge is produced through cultural institutions to reveal how scientific specimens and cultural objects are used to amplify dominant historical narratives.

Polar Bear: (Ursus Maritimus) presents playful, carefully labeled photographs of stuffed polar bears within dioramas mimicking their natural habitat in Natural History museums, including der Eisbär at the Hessiches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany; the Isbjàrnen at the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, Stockholm, Sweden; and l’Ours Blanc at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France.

Felice Frankel, No Small Matter 

Felice C. Frankelis has received awards and grants for her scientific photography from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Frankelis spent over twenty years photographing objects too small for conventional microscopes. For her book No Small Matter, she collaborated with Harvard chemist George Whitesides in order to offer explanations at the nanoscale.

Joan Fontcuberta, Joan Fontcuberta: Landscapes Without Memory

Joan Fontcuberta is well known for exploring the intersections between art, technology, and science, as they relate to truth and fiction. For Landscapes without Memory, Fontcuberta employed computer software designed for military use to rendering photo-realistic models based on information scanned from two-dimensional sources to create two series, “Landscapes of Landscapes” and “Bodyscapes”.   For these series Fontcuberta asked the software to interpret masterworks, of artist such as Turner, Cézanne, Dalí, and close-up images of his body, as landscapes, transforming them into mountains, forests, and clouds. 

Christina Labey, Lunar Mission: human space flight studies 

Christina Labey, a former ICP education staff member, is an MFA candidate at Parsons, The New School University; the Curatorial and Publications Director of Conveyor Arts; and the Founder and Executive Editor of Conveyor Magazine.

Lunar Mission: human space flight studies is one in her three-part series of photographic zines, each of which is comprised of light sheets of newsprint that are reminiscent of educational pamphlets for astronomy enthusiasts. The zine presents appropriated lunar images, naturally interspersed with Labey’s own stellar black and white photographs, shot here on earth.  Together these images underscore the camera’s ability to obscure the familiar and illustrate the unimaginable.

David Maisel: Library of Dust

Artist David Maisel uses photography to explore the tension between science and mysticism, or as he has described it, between “the verifiable and the unknowable.” Library of Dust includes Maisel’s large format images of copper canisters containing the unclaimed cremated remains of former psychicatric patients of the Oregon State hospital.  In each image Maisel has captured the bizarre chemical reactions that took place as theses canisters colorfully corroded, unnoticed, in the basement of the institution after exposure to repeated instances of flooding.

Clifford Ross, Wave Music

Clifford Ross—inventor, technician, and photographer—designed and constructed the R1, his sixty-pound, six-foot tall, handcrafted, 9×18-inch camera, made from new and recycled parts dating back to the 1940s. MIT Media Lab Director, Michael Hawlry, pronounced an image Ross captured with this camera “the most technically perfect photograph ever made.” Many of Ross’s images are seascapes reminiscent of both Romantic painting and nineteenth-century photographic tinkering. Clifford’s trilogy, Hurricanes, Horizons, and Grain make up the publication Wave Music.

Madeline Schwartzman, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception

See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception is Madeline Schwartzman’s survey of artists and designers examining the relationship between the senses and technology. The book explores the work of both upcoming and established artists who have mined emerging technologies and concepts out of such cutting-edge fields as neuroscience, nanotechnology, and computer engineering, for their own practices. Artists who incorporate lens-based media include James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, Michael Burton, Peter Campus, Olafur Eliasson, Ian Harrison, Tim Hawkinson, Rebbeca Horn, Susann Hertrich, Golan Levin, Ei Wada, Danielle Wilde, and Clemens Winkler.

Catherine Wagner: Trilogy: Reflections on Frankenstein, the Arctic Circle, and the History of Science

Catherine Wagner is a photographer known for her depictions of research laboratories, scientific equipment and experimental specimens.  In 1997, the ICP exhibited Art & Science: Investigating Matter, a selection of Wagner’s images of subjects and objects of laboratory science.

Trilogy: Reflections on Frankenstein, the Arctic Circle, and the History of Science is Wagner’s three-part photographic interpretation of Mary Shelley’s dark tale from a contemporary perspective.

Bibliography:

Ballengée, Brandon, Nicola Triscott, and Miranda Pope. Malamp: The Occurrence of Deformities in Amphibians. London, UK: Arts Catalyst, 2010. Print.

Bell, Jim. Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet. New York: Dutton, 2006. Print.

Daylight Magazine 9: Cosmos. (2011). Print.

Dion, Mark. Polar Bear: (Ursus Maritimus). Köln, Germany: Walther Konig, 2003. Print.

Frankel, Felice, and G M. Whitesides. No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.

Fontcuberta, Joan, and Geoffrey Batchen. Joan Fontcuberta: Landscapes Without Memory. New York: Aperture, 2005. Print.

Ross, Clifford, Arthur C. Danto, and A M. Homes. Wave Music. New York: Aperture, 2005. Print.

Ruiz, i A. A., and Eulalia Bosch. Embryonic Landscapes. Barcelona, Spain: ACTAR, 2001. Print.

Schwartzman, Madeline. See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception. London, UK: Black Dog Publishing, 2011. Print.

Labey, Christina. Lunar Mission: Human Space Flight Studies. Hoboken, NJ: Conveyor Arts, 2011. Print.

Maisel, David, Geoff Manaugh, Terry Toedtemeier, and Michael S. Roth. Library of Dust. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2008. Print.

Wagner, Catherine, and David Bonetti. Trilogy: Reflections on Frankenstein, the Arctic Circle, and the History of Science. San Francisco, CA: Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 2004. Print.

His raucous and slightly irreverent text, which accompanies the images in Sweet Life, describes his first impressions of Japan as he photographed small fishing boats along the southern Japanese island of Kyushu from the deck of a Dutch freighter on his approach from Hong Kong via the East China Sea. As a photographer who was fully engaged with the world around him and saw his photographic subjects as his friends and “co-stars,” van der Elsken wasted no time in meeting many of the most influential Japanese photographers, editors and curators in the 1960s Tokyo scene. Among his early acquaintances was the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, whom he met at a Christmas Eve party held at the offices of the Tokyo-based VIVO photography agency in 1959 (Ortmanns). Until van der Elsken’s death in 1990, he and Hosoe would remain in close contact through a regular correspondence and van der Elsken’s frequent trips to Japan.

It is, in fact, Hosoe who was responsible for the Japanese publication of Sweet Life. After many delays and difficulties finding a publisher for Sweet Life, van der Elsken finally secured a deal with the Harry N. Abrams publishing house. Given van der Elsken’s inventive design for Sweet Life, which includes many large format full-page bleeds, different covers for each foreign language publication, and gravure printing of his dark dramatic black-and-white images, Abrams decided to contain costs by printing in Japan. At the time, van der Elsken did not yet have a publisher for a Japanese edition and was working with Hosoe and several other editors to see if one could be secured. Hosoe, who was also instrumental in supervising the printing process, became one of Sweet Life’s main proponents. It was 1967 and Hosoe was teaching once a month at the Tokyo Photographic College, where he proposed to the director of the college that they finance the publication of 3000 copies of a Japanese edition. In exchange, 2000 copies would be used as a teaching resource and distributed to students at the college; the remaining 1000 would be sent to other interested photographic organizations and schools. In congratulating him on the imminent Japanese publication of Sweet Life, for which Hosoe wrote a commentary, he joked to van der Elsken in a 1968 letter that he and his Tokyo Photographic College students would have to suffer from van der Elsken’s photos as a consequence of now being required to use the book in the classroom (Ortmanns).


The dialogue between Hosoe and van der Elsken was one of mutual respect — an exchange that benefited both and included quite a few critiques and studio visits. On one occasion, shortly after their initial meeting in December 1959, Hosoe invited van der Elsken to his exhibition at the Toshi Center Hall in Tokyo and asked him for feedback on his work. Among van der Elsken’s many observations was the comment that Hosoe’s photographs were purely Japanese in their sensibility. Hosoe was quite taken aback by this statement since he had worked very hard to expunge all “Japaneseness” from his images. However, after some consideration, Hosoe saw the virtue in van der Elsken’s words and approached his next body of work, which included the photobook Otoko to Onna / Man and Woman (1961), with his Japanese roots in full view (Ortmanns). In addition, He also showed his appreciation for van der Elsken’s critique by inviting him to write a commentary for the book, whose images explore a highly charged and austerely staged heterosexuality through a purely Japanese sensibility.


Within the stacks of the ICP Library, there are several other photobooks by Hosoe and van der Elsken that provide small insights into how their friendship and admiration for one another may have influenced their respective work. Of particular interest is van der Elsken’s De Ontdekking van Japan / The Discovery of Japan (1988), a collection of photos taken in Japan over a 30-year period. Similar to Sweet Life, De Ontdekking van Japan is also a travel diary from a very personal perspective. Van der Elsken’s photos do not try to show the stereotypical Japan of travel brochures, but rather use diaristic and cinematic snapshots to reveal the real Japan and daily lives of his friends and “co-stars” in crowded streets, clubs and theaters. Designed to highlight the divide between his earlier and later photos, the book is punctuated at pages 62-63 by a double spread of photographs and text that show many of the people who became his friends and colleagues in Japan. Among these images are glimpses of Eikoh Hosoe accompanied by van der Eksken’s comment that Hosoe is “Mister Japan-photography” – further affirmation of the importance of their friendship and dialogue.


Included in van der Elsken’s De Ontdekking van Japan text that praises Hosoe is a mention of his “wonderful and important books” Barakei / Ordeal by Roses (1963) and Barakei Shinshuban / Ordeal by Roses (1971). The Aperture Foundation reprint of these images can be found in Barakei / Ordeal by Roses: Photographs of Yukio Mishima (1985), which is also in the collection of the ICP Library. An intense and surreal group of images, the book presents the famed dramatist and writer Yukio Mishima in highly staged often homo-erotic scenes that push the boundaries of reality as they verge on a dangerous romantic absurdity. Apparently, upon van der Elsken sending Hosoe his commentary for his earlier Otoko to Onna / Man and Woman (1961) he also included a letter with a note at the end that challenged Hosoe to expand his photographic genre beyond the deceptively simple formality of Otoko to Onna / Man and Woman. The results can be seen in the surreal images of Barakei. It seems Hosoe airmailed one of the first printed copies of Barakei / Ordeal by Roses (1963) to van der Elsken (Ortmanns).

Initially, upon viewing Hosoe and van der Elsken’s images, I had the impression of dramatically different sensibilities: one austere and planned, the other a world traveler’s kaleidoscopic encounter with 60s counterculture and exotic street life. However, threads of their dialogue can be seen in their common interest in the dramatic: Hosoe preferring the drama of the stage and van der Elsken embracing the cinematic narratives that relate to his dual role as a filmmaker and photographer. Both use the camera as a device to capture a drama: for Hosoe that instant is summarized within a clearly defined formality, while for van der Elsken it is an “indecisive moment” (Parr & Badger, The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1) with an improvisational exuberance akin to French New Wave cinema. Without a doubt, both approaches contributed to a rich dialogue between the two photographers and greatly influenced the irreverent and wildly experimental visual aesthetic of the late 1960s and early 70s Japanese Provoke era.
Click to view slideshow.

In writing this post, I am indebted to Dutch photo editor and researcher Frank Ortmanns. He kindly provided me access to his 2007 unpublished master’s thesis Ed van der Elsken’s Japan.

Hosoe:
Otoko to Onna / Man and Woman (1961/2006 Nadiff facsimile)
Barakei / Ordeal by Roses: Photographs of Yukio Mishima (1985) TR654 .H67 1985

Hosoe books not mentioned, but also of interest at ICP Library:
Embrace (1971) TR675 .H67 1971
Embrace (1977-reprint) TR675 .H67 1977
Kamachitai (2005 – reprint) TR654 .H67 2005
Eikoh Hosoe’s Photographic Theater: Ukiyo-e Projections (2004) TR654 .H67 2004

Ed van der Elsken:
Sweet Life (1966) TR790 .E48 1966
De Ontdekking van Japan / The Discovery of Japan (1988) TR820.5.J3 .E48 1988

Ed van der Elsken books not mentioned, but also of interest at ICP Library:
Love on the Left Bank (1956) TR820.5 E48
My Amsterdam (2005) TR659.A57 .E57 2005
Bagara: Photographs of Equatorial Africa (1961) TR790.C33 .E48 1961