PhotoBook Journal How We Live | Thinking About Photography

PhotoBook Journal

As always, I am very grateful to PhotoBook Journal with selections from editor Lee Halvorsen and their team of Contributing Editors on books exploring how we live. I encourage you to use the links to read the full versions of their thoughtful reviews.

Cheryomuski by Nikolay Bakharev

Publisher: Stanley/Barker

Review by Brian Arnold

Imagine, if you will, a couple stripped down to their underwear, together leaning against a tree along a lakeside beach in Cheryomushki, Siberia. It’s hard to determine the variety of tree but it bends like it was designed to cradle the woman. The couple looks a little intoxicated, giving the scene a Dionysian feel of a beach holiday. The woman looks us in the eye holding a hardboiled egg, as if she’s offering it to us, tempting us to join the party; wearing only a soggy bra and panties, this token has clear sexual overtones. The man, his finger perfectly illuminated by a sun beam falling between the canopy of leaves, points to something just outside of the frame. Together they look free and comfortable, delighting in one another’s company and sexuality.

This picture, found in the new monograph of Nikolay Bakharev, Cheryomushki, is one of many that describe lakeside social life in a factory town in southwest Siberia in the early 1980s. I was a teenager in the 1980s, the Reagan years, and remember this as the height of the Cold War. Regularly we were inundated with rhetoric about the evils of the East, communism characterized as an existential threat to our civilization...

Use this link to read the rest of the review, additional images and information.

Meat, Fish, and Aubergine Caviar by Alex Blanco

Review by Hans Hickerson

Photobooks are a great medium for telling stories, but also for re-creating emotional landscapes. Alex Blanco’s Meat, Fish, and Aubergine Caviar does both and also mixes in memories, cookbook recipes, and idealized fantasy.

If this sounds like a lot it is because the book operates simultaneously on several levels, like flavors married together in a recipe. In the case of Meat, Fish, and Aubergine Caviar, the dish is delicious. It is an audacious mixture of sweet and savory, rich with overlapping nuances that texture the photo / culinary experience.

The visual themes are established in the opening pages. You see photos of a table laid for a meal, vegetables used to make aubergine caviar, and Blanco’s mother posing in a dress filled with tomatoes. In a short text, Blanco evokes her memories of living in communal housing in Odessa as a young girl and the Odessa Black Sea lifestyle, and she explains why she left at age sixteen...

Use this link to read the rest of the review, additional images and information

Máze by Céline Clanet

Review by Douglas Stockdale

With recent social-political events in the United States, I felt it was overdue to review Céline Clanet Photolucida book award, Máze, published in 2009. Clanet’s subject are the individuals and landscape of Norway’s Lapland, a culture that spans four countries far above the Artic Circle, and specifically the Sámi village of Máze.

Lapland is a place that is “challenging and potentially disorienting nature of its remote and wild landscapes”. I would agree with Awen Jones, who wrote the book’s Afterword, that Clanet’s oeuvre “seems to share a documentary vision and a conceptual approach”.

Her cultural portrait is of a Sámi society, which has adapted to the modern times of cell phone, snowmobiles, trailers and traditional houses, while the reindeer are still an ever-present part of their lives. Their colorful cultural garments are now reserved for special occasions, instead we see down snow-suits worn to deal with the snow, ice and inclement weather of the Artic...

Use this link to read the rest of the review, for additional images and information

Within the Bittersweet by Allison Grant

Review by Hans Hickerson

Woven into the pages of Allison Grant’s almost family album Within the Bittersweet are questions that pack a punch. What future are we giving our children? What will the land that they inherit look like? Will they grow up physically scarred by the way we have treated our environment? How can we protect them? What should we do? Grant’s response as an artist and mother is her photobook Within the Bittersweet.

“Bittersweet” is an especially apt name. The photographs are by turns bitter and sweet. They depict poison and protection, danger and safety, evil and innocence.

The recipe for the book’s secret sauce involves roughly two parts children / loved ones and one part nature, sprinkled with one part industrial pollution. You turn the pages and view children playing in a creek, for example, and then you see a polluted creek. You see a young girl on a path and then a road leading to a coal mine. You see a child swimming and then a coal “washing pond.” You see a child at home after school and then smoke rising from a chemical fire burning next to her school.

Use the link to read the rest of the review, additional images and information.

Searching for Sivagami by Hannah Modigh

Review by Hans Hickerson

When are photographs not really about what is depicted but about something else? It happens often in photobooks when editorial direction establishes intentionality and context that frame the viewing experience, and Hannah Modigh’s Searching for Sivagami is a great example.

The book is simple and focused. The photos are of Indian women and views of India, not grandiose tourist photographs but quiet scenes and details of public and domestic life. But the actual person or place or object is not the subject. We do not know who or where or sometimes what they are. They are not what you are thinking about when you look at the book because you are thinking about something else, about the theme introduced earlier, via written texts, and the photographs are mostly the backdrop for its development, a visual echo chamber of sorts.

Use this link to read the rest of the review, view additional images and information

High & Lonesome by Nathan Pearce

Review by Hans Hickerson

If you haven’t visited Fairfield, Illinois, you might be excused for thinking it looks like Nathan Pearce’s photographs. I hadn’t, so I googled Fairfield and traveled down Main Street via Street View. I did not spot any vegan restaurants, food carts, indie record stores, e-bike shops, or comedy clubs. But I did see Pampered Paws Pet Wash, JJ’s Package Store, Faith Holiness Church, Dairy Queen, Joe’s Body Shop, Frontier Community College, Tyree’s Tax Service, Carolyn’s Hair Designs, and Lemond Chevrolet, among other places.

None of them appear in the fifty-one black-and-white photographs in High and Lonesome. You see no prosperous preachers or farm equipment salesmen, no chatty dollar store clerks or pumped-up high school sports teams. No quilting shows or canning contests either, although you can imagine them appearing in the book as icons of the rural Midwest.Use this link to read the full review, view additional images and information.

Next Artist