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Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Best Ph Books of 2015
The Best Photo Books of 2015
Writing about photography, reading about photography and thinking about how to take photographs are seamless activities for me. They inform one another in ways I can’t fully separate. A great photo book, even more than an exhibition, is where these things all come together. A photo book costs a lot of money to make and is unlikely to sell very many copies. But it is as essential a part of the culture as a good jazz album or a book of poems; and it possibly has as dedicated and fractious an audience as those modestly popular genres. There’s still such consolation and excitement in the swish of paper and the smell of ink, in the fact of stitching and the solidity of a hardcover. I didn’t acquire too many photo books this year — only about a hundred, all told — but I made an effort to seek out a wide variety. These are eight I particularly liked.
“I am at war with the obvious,” Eggleston declares in his afterword for this massive compendium of pictures shot in the 1980s. He makes good on the promise. These photographs all have the look and feel we have come to expect of Eggleston’s work: an uncanny balance of the arbitrary and the meticulous, conveyed in vivid, almost painfully intense color. The images are democratic in the sense of how varied and inclusive they are. Eggleston shoots parked cars, flower vases, cemeteries, gas stations and piles of dirt, and each photograph in these long, glorious sequences (there are 10 volumes in all, with titles like “Pittsburgh,” “Berlin” and “The Pastoral”) merits its place. There are few photographers whose images I would wish to see more than a thousand of in a single sitting. Eggleston is easily in that class.
Thomas’s photographs share the funky complexity of the paintings for which she’s better known. Pattern interweaves with pattern, foreground and background tussle without resolution and color gallops through these images, most of them portraits and many of them featuring collage. Thomas is a playful and intense explorer of the self-presentation of beautiful women. She draws on the great Malian photographer Seydou Keita’s celebratory approach to portraiture, and at the same time offers a riposte to the Orientalizing gaze of paintings like Manet’s “Olympia.” The black skin of these glammed-up superheroes is often the only thing in these photos that is not a riot of ornament and color, but blackness as photographed by Thomas is a riot all its own.
The curator David Campany’s new book accompanies an exhibition of the same name, and proceeds in a free-associative manner. This “speculative history” obsessively considers things that look similar, work in similar ways, are made of the same substance or are linked to one another by faint but undeniable threads. Its starting point is Man Ray’s 1920 photograph of about a year’s worth of dust gathered on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture “The Large Glass.” But the book somehow wends its way to aerial reconnaissance photography, abstract landscapes, forensics, American dust storms, artists’ videos and the Iraq War. The cumulative effect is brilliant, almost novelistic, and the book comes with a removable insert featuring an equally brilliant essay by Campany.
Dayanita Singh often describes the photobook as her primary medium. What she goes for in the form — and what she richly achieves in “Museum of Chance,” her latest — is a kind of narrative that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. In collaboration with the famously detail-oriented publisher Gerhard Steidl, Singh brings together a variety of her photographs and through them conveys a mysterious and uncannily coherent story. The printing in this book is exemplary: The black tones are rich and profound, the whites subtle and creamy. Singh’s story in “Museum of Chance” has something to do with breezes, white curtains, rooms full of dusty files, Bollywood actors, musicians at rehearsal, night phantoms. But like a tightly edited song cycle, the project is impossible to reduce to its synopsis. It unfolds, one page after the other, like a dream.
“Kim” is Kim Kardashian West, and “Selfish” is her book of hundreds of her selfies. She doesn’t waste time refuting the predictable accusations. She instead goes full-bore on the project, with artful and convincing obsessiveness. Many of the pictures are imperfect, taken in low light, and with lurid colors — which is part of why they are good photos. West’s aesthetic is an amateur’s, sure, but it also owes something to the likes of Jürgen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans. The captions are very funny, too. At the beginning of one section, she writes: “I don’t think I’ve ever taken as many selfies as I did in Thailand. It’s one of the prettiest places I’ve ever traveled to!” This is followed by shot after shot of her face, or of herself in a bikini, and very little background. West has cracked the Oscar Wilde code: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
You’re never quite sure what you’re looking at in Letinsky’s “Ill Form and Full Void.” Are these photographs of stains? Are they photographs of fruit? Or photographs of photographs? Her carefully assembled still lives query the gap between things and pictures of things. There are pages ripped from magazines like Good Housekeeping and Martha Stewart Living, as well as her own past work, art made by her friends and actual objects, all set in expanses of white space. There’s more going on here than simple trompe l’oeil. Letinsky updates the vanitas still life for the 21st century, with lessons drawn from the Dutch masters — leftovers and dirty utensils signal the ephemerality of earthly pleasures — and a vigorous dash of Cy Twombly along the way: tendril, splash, tight little knots of inscrutable color.
Xu Yong had a camera with him on June 4, 1989, during the protests in Tiananmen Square. He took many photographs that day, but he did not print or publish them. But what makes the appearance of these images in book form remarkable is hinted at in the title, “Negatives”: Xu has presented the photos in the form of enlarged negatives. (The photos can be viewed as positives through the camera of a cellphone, with “invert colors” switched on in the phone’s settings.) The negatives have a ghostly tinge, and effectively introduce a distance into our viewing of the events of that still-resonant day. Though Xu himself is careful to disavow any political intent, the long wait to publish the book, as well as the fact of its being published in Hong Kong, makes clear the ongoing censorship faced by the Chinese pro-democracy movement.
Fazal Sheikh’s “Erasure Trilogy” takes on one of the most difficult and sensitive contemporary subjects — the Israeli occupation of Palestine — with seriousness, candor and depth. The project is published as three hardback volumes of photographs and an accompanying softcover insert of explanatory text.In one volume, Sheikh, a New Yorker who has spent his career photographing displaced people around the world,uses aerial photography to look at efforts to make the “desert bloom” through afforestation projects on land in the Negev, from which Bedouins have been expelled. In another, he photographs Israelis and Palestinians of different ages, one for each year since the nakba of 1948. A third volume, titled “Memory Trace,” is an exploration of the ruins of Palestinian villages and other physical evidence of destruction and loss. “Erasure Trilogy” is a challenging and meticulous work of witness about a serious historical wrong.
Steidl, 438 pages.
The Times Magazine’s Photo Department’s Favorite Photo Books of 2015
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