Guest Reading Shortlist 2.18.15: Adam Bell

From "Parallel Universe: Tokyo Through Western Eyes" by Russet Lederman © William Klein

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

Today's guest for Reading Shortlist is Adam Bell.

Adam Bell is a photographer and writer. His work has been widely exhibited, and his writing and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Afterimage, The Art Book Review, The Brooklyn Rail, fototazo, Foam Magazine, Lay Flat, photo-eye and Paper-Journal. His books include The Education of a Photographer and the forthcoming Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts. He is currently on the staff and faculty at the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts.

Nataly Castaño helped organize this post.

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Tom McCarthy, London Review of Books, "Writing Machines"
The novelist and writer Tom McCarthy grapples with the thorny issue of realism.

From "Parallel Universe: Tokyo Through Western Eyes" by Russet Lederman

Russet Lederman, "Parallel Universe: Tokyo Through Western Eyes"
Noted collector, writer and scholar Russet Lederman, who's also one of the masterminds behind both 10x10 American Photobooks and 10x10 Japanese Photobooks, looks at a number of well-known, and some not so well known, Western photobooks that look at Tokyo and Japan.

Rebecca Solnit, tomdispatch.com, "Everything's Coming Together While Everything is Falling Apart"
Published in early January, Solnit offers sober, but hopeful words as we move into a new year.

Entre Entree by Stephan Keppel

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, The Great Leap Sideways, "An Illogical Pattern of Translations: Stephan Keppel’s Entre Entree"
Entre Entree by Stephan Keppel was one of my favorite books from 2014, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa's lyrical response captures the fractured beauty of the book.

From Interview Magazine, "Peter Schjeldahl" © Maciek Kobielski

Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine, "Peter Schjeldahl"
This honest and insightful interview with Peter Schjeldahl reflects on his work as a critic and writer.

Quentin Bajac, "The Age of Distraction: Photography and Film"
Just one of many great essays posted on Object:Photo, MoMA's companion site to the current exhibition "Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949," Bajac’s essay does a excellent job elucidating the tumultuous context in which these revolutionary images were made.

Trevor Paglen and Rebeccas Solnit (Part 1 and Part 2)
Hosted at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe in March 2014, this artist talk by Paglen is followed by an interview with Rebecca Solnit. What more can you ask for?

Brian Dillon, "Shadow Waltz"
Although I initially felt it was out of place as part of Fraser's recent book A City of the Mind, Dillion's excellent essay does a wonderful job illuminating the peculiar beauty of Fraser’s work.

Review: Costa by José Pedro Cortes

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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Within landscape photography, the liminal spaces the skirt our cities and communities have long served as a source of fascination not only for what they say about the particular landscape, but our ever conflicted relationship with the natural world, of which we are inextricably a part. They're places of potential contradictions, collisions and confusion, but also potential cliché. In this sense, it's easy to see what drew José Pedro Cortes to the town in Costa (Pierre von Kleist Editions). The beach town in Costa more often than not resembles an abandoned ghost town of the American West than it does an idyllic Mediterranean costal town. Apocalyptic and impressionistic, Costa avoids the trapping of the well-worn genre in which it exists by being fiercely subjective. Forced to follow Cortes through the dunes and cluttered alleyways, we're thrown into the noon sun looking for answers, but going in circles.

The book begins as we head over a dune. Shot from below, the sandy mountain seems insurmountable. Wood and debris hover and jut from its surface impeding our ascent. Climbing over the dune, we are lead down a desolate road. Walking along the meager strip of asphalt, Cortes points out some grass, a snake and a rock, until we reach the town's first buildings. Sealed off with bricks or curtains and often marred with graffiti, the structures are either abandoned or have fallen into disrepair. The streets are empty too, but evidence of inhabitation can be seen in the cars, empty chairs, hung fabric, graffiti and posters that fill and decorate the outdoor spaces. Perhaps everyone has fled this strange landscape or are simply hiding from the oppressive sun. Even the book's cover seems drawn from a foreign or alien landscape—its image of a sickly yellow-green textured earth enticing and repulsing us.

The scrappy costal town of Costa de Caparica sits approximately 14 km outside Lisboa. Hovering on the edge of the beach, the town seems threatened on all sides by the sun, sand and ocean. The sun beats down relentlessly reducing the plants, buildings and ruins to a bleached mirage. The sand surrounds all and seems ready to swallow whole the makeshift houses and huts, whose improvisational nature seems perfectly suited to the shifting and precarious nature of the place. The ocean, barely visible in the distance, lurks over the dunes—its glassy impassivity keeps us on edge.

Sun blanched and raw, Cortes uses both black and white and color to unsettling effect in the work. Images retain or lose color as if drained and sapped by the overpowering sun—fading out and then springing back to life. Alternating between forensic close-ups of plants, snakes and trash and more expansive landscapes and architectural shots, the book's sequencing takes on a bobbing rhythm as its gaze moves up and down. Elemental and foreboding, the landscape offers nowhere to hide. Luckily we have Cortes to lead the way through this world of dazed heat-stroke confusion.

Cortes combines the cool austerity of Lewis Baltz with the poetic nonchalance of JH Engström. An incongruous pairing, but it works. Looking through the book, I was immediately reminded of Baltz's San Quentin Point and Candlestick Point. Like Baltz's almost mechanical eye, Cortes' allows nothing to escape scrutiny, but the work's evidentiary qualities are muted and complicated by its subjective and impressionistic tone. Although the influence of Engström is more noticeable in Cortes' previous book Things Here and Things Still to Come, which included nudes and echoes Engström's own confessional and voyeuristic gaze, Costa shares Engström's relentless exploratory gaze, as well as his often washed out and unstable palette.

Subjects and genres within any medium emerge slowly as the result of a confluence of artists working alone and in tandem, often in response to broader cultural and social changes. Once legitimized, these subjects lure, inspire and influence artists, but also expand the permissible territory of the medium. In the worst case, artists use these subjects and approaches to suggest and posture meaning rather than developing their own language or vision within that terrain. In his attraction to the despoiled landscape of Costa de Caparica, Cortes may follow the pull of an extensive tradition, but he seems to be carving his own path. Too exuberant and fever-pitched to sit calmly in one place or gaze impassively at the landscape, Cortes has given us a vision of a small marginal town that is personal, idiosyncratic and unsettling. Try not to stay out in the sun too long.

Review: Field Trip by Martin Kollar

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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Beyond the safety of the laboratory, studio or classroom, field trips help test theories and assumptions in the real world. They are educational excursions. Coming back with new evidence, they challenge assumptions or simply affirm them. At their best, the provoke us and force us to reground our ideas and beliefs in the world. Collecting photographs taken in Israel between 2009 and 2011, Martin Kollar’s Field Trip offers his own fragmentary field-guide, missives and observations from the politically fraught and culturally complex region. Alien and perplexing, Kollar’s Israel is a land marked with checkpoints, ambiguous structures and oddly unsettling experiments on animals and humans alike. It both questions and affirms our expectations leaving the viewer unsettled and anxious.

Field Work has its origins in a project commission by French photographer Frederic Brenner. Invited along with ten other photographers, including Fazal Sheikh, Wendy Ewald, Stephen Shore, Gilles Peress, Jeff Wall and others, Kollar was asked to photograph the region. Although taken to various locations, Kollar was given great freedom to explore. As he travelled around, he found the country both foreign and remarkably familiar. Harassed at checkpoints and under constant surveillance, Kollar was reminded of his childhood growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, now Slovakia. From the omnipresent surveillance to the militarized landscape, the political and daily absurdities of his youth were drawn into relief when seen along those in Israel.

Visiting locations like the Weizmann Institute of Science, military training sites and kibbutzim, Kollar captured images of strange otherworldly beauty that feel like behind-the-scenes stills from a strange B-movie. Bees swarm through the air and around their hives in one two image spread, a woman lies anxiously under a monstrous dental contraption, birds are measured and animals are pried open with stomach ports or worse. Despite the relentless security, even the animals aren’t safe. Poked, prodded and mangled, the animals have a sense of weary resignation that is mirrored in the portraits of Israeli citizens and soldiers who are seen sleeping, shuffling through the landscape or submitting to experiments. No one is safe and no violation is beyond the pale.

In some ways, it has become a bit of a cliché to speak about the "unknowable" political and cultural complexities of Israel. Unfortunately, this allows for an all too convenient retreat and refusal to take a position or probe more deeply. While an acknowledged subjective approach is always preferable to an assertively false one, the subjective also runs the danger of lapsing into solipsistic obtuseness in the face of the new and unknown. Rather than masking ignorance with claims of complexity, Kollar reveals something that feels both personal and true to his subject and avoids this pitfall. Through the sometimes jarring juxtapositions and decontextualized imagery, the work points to the ways in which the odd realities of a chaotic militarized zone are normalized and coexist with everyday life. Kollar’s odd and haunting images highlight the ways in which the absurd butts up against the beautiful, the horrific against the astonishing and the banal with the casually violent.

Review: Carolyn Drake's "Two Rivers"

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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As organisms dependent on water, it seems axiomatic to highlight its importance. Rivers form the lifeblood of any region or community. Their waters are not merely a source of sustenance for the people, plants and animals, but also a vital and sustaining resource for the local culture and traditions. Once a vibrant region, nourished by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, Central Asia was dramatically transformed when the two rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation by the former Soviet Union. While some areas prospered as cotton became widespread, there were also losers in this agricultural transformation. Once lush agricultural provinces were transformed, new resources were discovered, traditional farming and fishing was increasingly marginalized, lives were irrevocably altered and the massive Aral Sea all but dried up. Carolyn Drake’s new book, Two Rivers, explores the lingering effects of empire and the persistent evolution of culture and religion in the face of these profound changes with grace and beauty.

Divided into eight sections, the book offers a broad and varied look at the region. Guided by the rivers and water, the book begins at the Aral Sea and makes it way through the landscape of Central Asia, visiting countries like Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan among others. Vast and difficult to contain, Central Asia has a rich history, and along with Afghanistan, its southern neighbor, has not only formed a cultural bridge between Asia, the Middle East and Europe, but has also functioned as a geopolitical buffer, pawn and stage for numerous empires. Clear-cut ethnic and cultural boundaries long blurred and crossed are no less clear as the countries struggle to define themselves culturally and politically in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Syncretic religious practices thrive and coexist with institutionalized religion and porous borders leave the often-autocratic governments struggling to maintain control. Developed over the course of six years and numerous journeys to the region, the book offers a nuanced and evocative approach that eschews easy answers or trite reductions.

The book opens with taxidermy specimens from the history museum of Aralsk, a former fishing port on the Aral Sea. The solemn parade of animals, propped against walls or confined to glass cases or jars, signals an elegiac look to the landscape’s past. Displaced and set against the drab interior of a crumbling museum, the frozen and preserved animals offer an idealized capsule of nature that has likely long since disappeared from the landscape. Similarly displaced and forced to adapt to a new landscape, the people throughout the book struggle to maintain traditions that have faded or simply evolved to their new reality – new deserts, rivers diverted and cities starved of once vital natural resources. In one image a tree stands confused and defiant as a river rages around its base – forging a new path forward, racing towards something.

The region’s rich cultural traditions and complex political reality, both past and present, are skillfully presented through readily found contradictions. A ubiquitous oversized head of Lenin, buried in some backroom, is presented alongside a Mesopotamian frieze. A woman shrouded in a floral veil poses against a dramatically lit background and is juxtaposed with a headless statue whose raised arms appear to conjure an explosion of cherry blossoms – a fleeting glimpse of hope. Unlike some work in the region that seems to delight in the visuals of post-Soviet decay, Drake finds moments of levity, joy and mystery while still acknowledging the reality of her subject’s lives and surroundings. Women laugh over a bottle of vodka and young children play in an old swimming pool or by the side of a river. In another image, a young man sits in a café. Seen through a window, the fractured reflections of the chaotic city frame his quiet and pensive face. Throughout the book, Drake makes wonderful use of color and light in her images. Her carefully composed images exhibit a casual ease that belies her mastery of medium.

Designed by Syb Kuiper, the book itself is a confounding, intriguing and brilliant object. Jutting out of the slightly smaller cloth-bound cover, the pages and images seem like they can barely be contained, or as Drake notes, they end abruptly “just like the rivers themselves now end before they reach the Aral Sea.” The images also often spill over the uncut Japanese bound pages breaking up into a staccato like rhythm of color and form. Although the design frustrates any direct viewing of many of the images, it also forces you to slow down and digest the fragmented photographs – moving back and forth between individual pages. Secured to the book with a rubber band is a small pamphlet containing a short essay by the writer Elif Batuman and notes by Drake. Whereas Batuman offers a wonderful essay on the work, Drake’s notes offer unique details about each image, section and sequence. Self-published and funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign, Two Rivers represents the best possibilities of self-publishing – marrying uniquely powerful and evocative work within a striking, unorthodox and beautiful form.

Review: "Disquiet" by Amani Willett

Amani Willett's Disquiet was recently published by Damiani and is available for purchase at photo-eye Bookstore. The book spread images presented here are used with permission from photo-eye.

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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Parenthood has a tendency to disrupt lives in more ways than expected. The joys and excitement are intricately entwined with a host of new worries for your child’s future and the world they will inhabit. Each event has new ramifications not only for your life, but your child. As a recent father, Amani Willet saw his own son born into a turbulent atmosphere of economic collapse and societal unrest. From the global economic crisis to Occupy Wall Street and the ongoing wars abroad, Willet saw the world his son was to inhabit profoundly shift over the few short years of his young life. Like all unexpected events, they raised new questions and put priorities in new, often stark, relief. Disquiet, Willet’s new book, explores this uneasy tension weaving together the personal and political in ways that are rich and rewarding.

The book opens, and is punctuated throughout, with smoky images of the street. Figures lurk in the background, barricades block off exits, fires rage and police move in from the edges, circling the crowds. Although not immediately apparent, it soon becomes clear that the images are from Occupy Wall Street and record the clashes between protestors and police beginning in September 2011 in Downtown Manhattan. There are four such interludes, or chapters, in the book that punctuate the landscapes, urban details and images of Willet’s family that make up the rest of the book. The ethereal smoke and blurred figures provide a chaotic backdrop and build a palpable anxiety throughout the book.

What is especially refreshing about the work is the careful balance of personal and political. Even in the most skilled hands, overtly political art generally devolves into propaganda or forgettable cliché. While there is no stated political agenda within the work, Willet’s work illuminates the ways in which the outside world infiltrates and colors the events of our lives – shaping and molding our moods, actions, hopes and fears, as well as the future. As Marvin Heiferman notes in his eloquent essay at the end of the book, Willet takes a decidedly sentimental approach to his subject – openly acknowledging the love, affection and worries he feels for the multiple generations of his family depicted in his images. Whereas many photographers eschew emotionality for fear of being mawkish, the intimacy of the work enhances its political and emotional impact.

Throughout Disquiet, there is a sense of being on the threshold of change, wary about what is to come and what lies ahead, yet still hopefully moving forward. As the title suggests, there is an overall darkness that permeates the book. Houses hide behind dark branches at night. A lone dog stares down at us from atop a dark stairwell. A pregnant woman looks through a parted bedroom curtain. The same woman sleeps restlessly in a dark room. Her subtle movements at night blurred. A small boy wanders off into the mottled shadows of the woods – the darkness obscuring his face, gaze and ultimate destination. President Obama lectures from a solitary TV in an empty office lobby – speaking to us all, but no one in particular. One of the earliest images in the book is a photographed scrap of paper with a quote by the novelist Julian Barnes, who writes about how something new can emerge from collapse and sets the tone for the book.

Art is not the most reactive medium. In responding to the events around us, it often takes time before truly meaningful work can emerge. Given this delay, it is often easy to dismiss art for not being engaged enough with the world, or for accomplishing so little. The reality is it just responds on its own time and often in unexpected ways. The continuing tragedy of the global economic collapse, the US’s ongoing wars and political gridlock, are far from over, but we are beginning to see engaged work that grapples with these issues in a variety of ways. Rather than turn away from the world, Disquiet captures the palpable anxiety, malaise, confusion and hesitation of a world seemingly out of wack – a world riddled with social inequality, comfortably safe from the endless wars abroad yet under the watchful eye of a globalized surveillance state and anxious of what is to come. Despite all this, there is the desire that family, friends and loved ones surround us, helping us move forward and giving us hope and something new amidst the chaos and smoke.