Review: Songbook by Alec Soth

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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Songbook by Alec Soth (MACK, 2015)

I want to invite you to dance. Yes, you. Here, I'll show you. Like this. 

Tender, innocuous words, yet full of vulnerability, Soth's latest work begins with an invitation. Arms held out, the dance beginning, we're invited to relearn songs we've forgotten or maybe never knew we knew. In many ways, it's hard to write something new about Soth. One of the most celebrated contemporary photographers, Soth's work builds on a long, and rich tradition of American photography—Walker Evans to Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Diane Arbus, and more. With each project, Soth has plumbed the American landscape to create works that are deeply personal, but universally resonant. Compiled from Soth's collaborative work with Brad Zellar on the Little Brown Mushroom Dispatches (2012-2014), as well as work as a freelance photographer for Magnum and personal work, Songbook is a tender, but heartbreaking anthology of love songs, ballads, choral anthems, and sing-alongs masquerading as photographs that speak about our yearning for both individual expression and communal connection.

Photographs rely on context, yet often thrive in its absence. While the images in Soth's latest book are closely modeled after newspaper photography of the likes of Weegee or any number of nameless small-town newspaper photographers, here they are presented without their original context. As part of the LBM Dispatches the images were accompanied by pithy and insightful texts by Brad Zellar and in other settings by essays, such as the work from The New York Times. Stripped of their original context, Soth's photographs have a heightened mystery. Although there are often signifiers that place them in the present, the appearance of anachronistic dress or environments confound any easy assessment of their age or provenance. This tone is furthered by Soth's use of black-and white in place of his signature color. Although the images vary in approach and style, the more event and documentary oriented images, like those of conferences, events or church gatherings, reminded me of Bill Wood's Business, a show at the International Center for Photography and also a book by Marvin Heiferman and Diane Keaton, which featured the work of Bill Wood, a commercial photography from the late-30s to 70s in Fort Worth, Texas. Self-consciously modeled on photographers like Wood, Soth and Zellar reported on many local events including self-help conferences, church socials, and town dances. Attempting to see beyond what is often assumed to be American monoculture, they looked for the local. As Zellar put it, "we wanted to see how folks were faring outside the ersatz, isolating communities of office hives and cyber space."




 

In addition to small town photojournalism, the key visual reference for Songbook, is Evidence, the ur-photobook of decontextualized archival photographs by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan from 1977. Shorn from their original text and accompanying archival context, Mandel and Sultan's images suggest a myriad of possible meanings. Like the odd images used by Mandel and Sultan, Soth's black-and-white images often utilize a strong flash, which not only freezes his subjects, but also places them under a clinical gaze and asks us to look more closely. References to Evidence can be seen throughout the book, but are most present in the more peculiar imagery. In one such image, a man wearing a baseball cap has pushed all his hair over his face and resembles Cousin It from the Addams Family. In another, two hands, cut off by the frame, toss a rock that's frozen mid-air. My personal favorite is a vertical photograph that shows a couple from behind sitting on a bed. Turned towards each other for a kiss, both their faces are obscured. Like a found photograph from the 50s, the image is a vexing puzzle.

Bound in a green fabric, the book is embossed with the title on the cover and the music and lyrics from Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's "Dancing in the Dark" on the back. As the lyrics on the back cover instruct, "slowly, and with much expression." These are appropriate instructions for approaching the book. Generously proportioned, the book resembles the oversized songbook it references right down to its semi-soft cover. Throughout the book are fragments of song lyrics that guide us along. They help maintain a beat, and bring us back to the melody at hand. Like the images they accompany, they are drawn from the longer songs and offer their own mysterious allure. Save the few lyrics and a brilliant quote by Eugene Ionesco at the end, there is no text in the book. Thankfully, there is a LBM Dispatches book in the works that will include the excellent writing of Brad Zellar, whose writings and collaboration Soth acknowledges in the book as the unseen presence behind almost all the work.




 

Despite the sense of loneliness that often pervades the work, the people depicted in Songbook are never ridiculed or patronized by Soth's camera. Although Soth acknowledges their quixotic search for fulfillment, expression and connection, each image seems to be recognition not only of that same longing in Soth, but also an invitation to recognize it within ourselves. This is a theme that is present in much of Soth's work from his breakthrough book Sleeping By The Mississippi to NIAGRA, and more recently, Broken Manual, his darkest work. It is also what makes his work so very American. Soth acknowledges the fragile but powerful bonds that unite us as a nation, while also recognizing our fierce independence. While Soth may bend the narrative of his images to fit his vision, he's created a story that speaks to our post-recession and socially anxious age. In the end, all artists frame a version of reality to tell a large truth. Whether or not that truth resonates is what matters. Fans of his work have no doubt snatched up this book already and don't need to be persuaded, but the work may also appeal to people who don't know his work, or were not persuaded by his previous books. Admirably, Soth has refused to rest on his laurels and has continued to challenge himself. In this new work, Soth continues to explore familiar territory, but shifts directions again. Like the dancer who opens the book, he's asking us to follow, dance and sing along.

The Fiction of Content

Guardia Civil from the series "Spanish Village" © W. Eugene Smith

A friend getting started in photography after abandoning a previous career wrote to me recently. No texts should be presented with photographs, he asserted, because the images should be able to convey their content completely. Accompanying photography with text was a sign that the images lacked something. He's from Philly, so I'm correcting his English to present his argument to you.

His comments are common and raise two fundamental questions of our medium: can photography alone communicate an idea clearly and what is the expected role of text provided by the photographer (or a selected surrogate writer) in terms of presenting content?

The observer can receive many ideas from staring at a photograph. It's part of why we look. The possibility of communicating an exact thematic agenda strictly through the image is a separate question.

Photography alone communicates specific ideas from creator to observer poorly, like catching the news through the crackle of static. Why? First, photography presents a truth value it does not actually have. Ron Jude said it well in a recent interview with Mark Alice Durant when he talked about "the space between what photographs promise to deliver and what is actually communicated."

This is probably part of what caused a lot of us to fall in love with photography and tattoo a Rolleiflex on our leg: it is reality as quicksilver, it's the manipulation of reality through lens choice, framing, exposure, and other decisions necessary to create a two dimensional image from three-dimensional reality, and the creation of an image that retains the trace of reality, yet becomes something else. That "something else" is sometimes close to where it began, sometimes very far from it.  Photography cannot communicate specific ideas well because while it works with reality as its source, it is mediated and ultimately muted by all that is stripped from it through this process of converting real life observations to ink or silver gelatin on a piece of paper.

As a vehicle of reality photography is an unreliable witness, perhaps especially because it retains this reality trace. It's a very good liar. It contains recognizable traces of the reality from which it started its path of transmutation, yet ultimately remains linked to reality through formal traces, not an actual physical connection.

Second, photography communicates specific ideas poorly because no matter how exacting the photographer is in their use of visual signifiers, he or she cannot control their audience once a photograph is released into the public sphere, they cannot control the context in which it is seen and cannot determine the social context it performs within. Context determines a reading of any object and context inherently changes. This results in a photograph evolving meaning over time and between viewing spaces. This idea was explored at length on this site here so I'll avoid retyping it out at length again, but in a sentence, a photograph can change meaning for us based on how it's printed, if it's seen online or in print, the information we know about its maker, if it's seen during war or peace and a myriad of other contextual factors.

If photography cannot communicate concrete ideas clearly because it is an unreliable witness and the visual elements it uses to convey meaning change based on how, when and why we view it, then just what does that tell us about the role of text provided by the photographer to accompany their images?

It depends on the intended use of the image. If the goal is to communicate a specific narrative or story, I think we've given up completely on the idea photography can do that and simply written out what it is that images can't tell us – see Agee and Evans, Lange and Taylor. Reread Szarkowski talking about futility of W. Eugene Smith's work to show the life and poverty of Deleitosa, Spain in 17 images which he believed strained the medium beyond its capabilities.

For more contemporary examples, we have the Sochi Project and the long essay that accompanies the photographs in LaToya Ruby Frazier's The Notion of Family. Look at the Everyday (Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc) projects and how images they post are often accompanied by a long (for Instagram) text that describes the image.

In this way, we see confirmation in the opposite: the limited capacity of photography to communicate the specific can be seen in what text is asked to do. We also see that in contemporary photojournalism and documentary photography the belief in photography to be strong enough to carry the specific has collapsed. The limited capacities of photography to communicate information are supported by text (as well as video clips, found object scans, historical documents, you name it). Its role is clear.

On the other end of the spectrum from this type of observational photography, text is also embedded in the presentation of conceptual work for reasons that seem clear, so I'm going to avoid getting into it here for brevity's sake.

This leads me to talk about the way text functions with all the work in the middle of the spectrum and the reason why I sat down to type this out to you'se guys (sorry, I lived in Philly for a while too). The work I am referring to is contemporary art photography made largely in the observation-documentary mode. It's much of the work seen on independent sites, including this one. It's the work Carl Gunhouse describes as being spawned from a cross of work by Alec Soth and Roe Ethridge.

Photographers in this dominant vein are commonly writing about elements in the work that just aren't there. They are overreaching with the texts on their own work, trying to make their photography do more than it can, staking claims it can't sustain. They are using text to string together a bunch of images and using text to take responsibility for their themes instead of being exacting from their work. The result is a diminishing of the photography as the observer discovers it cannot do what the text wishes it did.

This is the "Fiction of Content," the textual invention of what is in the photography.

One can guess at the reasons for this trend: the dominance of "the project," the demand by photography distributors for thematic coherence in the project, the expectation that the project be accompanied by a strong statement that avoids generalities and the rise of intellectualism in photography generally in the last four decades.

The expectation of the accompanying statement creates an inherent risk for this type of work - we are asked to be specific with words about photography that in many cases aims to evoke rather than describe. For many photographers, the temptation is too strong - the statement becomes a quicksand of false claims. Statements can illuminate. Many photographers do their photography proud with their writing. Read the accompanying texts at galleries, read the press releases from major presses, read the essays at the back of the photobook, however, and look at the work afterwards and tell me how much of what is claimed by the text is actually in the images. Often, it's very little. While specific examples are called for, I'm going to chicken out. No need to pick fights.

I disagree with my friend from Philly. Text accompanying photography, even when it's not working on a specific, observational narrative, has a place, but the goal of good writing about one's photography or about the photography of others for a website, photobook or gallery is to leave the observer with questions and excitement about the work that they can then dig into the work to satisfy. It's goal is to resonate with and accompany the images, to work in parallel. It is not the goal of writing accompanying texts to explain the work so that we are left feeling we know the work before we've seen it or, worse and more common these days, to say more than the photography itself does.

Reading Shortlist 1.20.15

From "LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Dawoud Bey"

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.

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David Campany, The 'Photobook': What’s in a name? Campany is a favorite photography writer and here he lays out a history of the photobook and references a series of further readings on the subject. He also weighs in on Parr and Badger's The Photobook: a history series.

Diane Arbus talks with Studs Terkel (March 28, 1973). A conversation between Diane Arbus and Studs Terkel in 1973 about her wealthy upbringing, the relationship of money and art and also, sadly in retrospect, about suicide.

From "Lick Creek Line" © Ron Jude

Mark Alice Durant, Saint-Lucy, Ron Jude. One of the better interviews I've read recently, Durant asks Jude about the space between what photographs promise to deliver and what is actually communicated, the photobook versus the book of photographs, Jude's press A-Jump Books and a whole lot more.

LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Dawoud Bey. An hour conversation focused on Frazier's newly published "The Notion of Family." Frazier shows perhaps a surprising faith in the continued power of the documentary tradition.

Le Luxe, 2011 © Roe Ethridge, 

Carl Gunhouse, Light Leaked, What's Going on with Photography? Gunhouse with a thought-provoking investigation of contemporary practice happening at the junction of work created a decade ago by Alec Soth and Roe Ethridge. He also suggests, "The old battles are dead."

Loring Knoblauch, Collector Daily, In Defense of Ferocity. A collector's challenge to other collectors to buy difficult, emotional, raw photography and the reasons why.

Allen Murabayashi, Peta Pixel, 8 Legal Cases Every Photographer Should Know. Everyone's least favorite important subject, your rights as a photographer, as illustrated by eight important legal cases.

oatmeal.com, Should You Buy a Selfie Stick? For those of you still unsure of whether or not a selfie stick is for you, this handy buyer's guide will help you decide.

The Tavis Smiley Show, Thomas Allen Harris & Deborah Willis — "Through a Lens Darkly". A short audio interview sketching out the African-American experience in photography as both subject and creator.

From the series, "The Grey Line" © Kristine Potter

Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergenic, The Downside of Art Going Viral. Kristine Potter published images from her series "The Grey Line" which explores the movement from civilian to military officer, on Buzzfeed. The images went viral and were subject to homophobic slurs which pushed her to ask for their removal. The interview tackles the complicated question of the context for viewing images.

Reading Shortlist 11.7.14

Still from the video "The Archive of Modern Conflict"

Six weeks of vacation has left me with a lot of reading to catch up on so I'll start the site back up with a Reading Shortlist post. 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.

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Blake Andrews, B, Carving the Rubble. Andrews presents a level-headed navigation of both Winogrand's legacy and the critical reaction to it.

Aperture, LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Dawoud Bey. The conversation focuses around Frazier's work and first monograph.

Adam Bell, Paper Journal, Ricardo Cases – El Porqué de las Naranjas. Bell's reviews continue to elucidate with the cleanest of writing.

Jonathan Blaustein, A Photo Editor, Interview with Mishka Henner, Parts 1 and 2. An interview as insightful as it is funny covering, among other things, print-on-demand, the planet Earth as Picasso's guitar and the 21st century hustle, as Blaustein dubs it.

Carl Gunhouse, Light Leaked, "What’s going on with Photography". Gunhouse looks at art history to trace the lines that have lead us to today's historical moment in photography and makes his bet on which two contemporary photographers will be remembered by history. Hint: I'm not one.

From the article "Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era?" by Jeremy Lybarger
Image © Celia Shapiro, Timothy McVeigh, 06/11/2001, from the series "Last Supper" 

Jeremy Lybarger, Mother Jones, Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era? This is an ancient piece (for the Internet) and has been much discussed, but if you've never read it, it shows Fred Ritchin at his most lucid and convincing and I would say Ritchin is the most forward thinking voice in public conversation on photography today.

Steven Naifeh, Vanity Fair, NCIS: Provence: The Van Gogh Mystery. A forensics-based reexamination of Van Gogh's "suicide" concludes it wasn't a suicide after all.

David Walker, PDN Online, Photo Blogs Are Proliferating: How Photographers Can Make the Most of Them. Interesting for a one-stop comparative look at fees paid by major (corporate) photo blogs and a good reminder to actively consider where you publish your work instead of posting anywhere that will let you.

Richard West, Source Photographic Review, The Archive of Modern Conflict. A 15-minute video looking inside the archives and a conversation on access and the meaning of the collection with curator and editor Timothy Prus.

Independently Published Photobooks: Cristina De Middel

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

Post by Antone Dolezal

Following Cristina De Middel's highly successful self-published book The Afronauts, the Archive of Modern Conflict and Editorial RM have teamed up to publish her new book Party. Using Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s widely distributed communist propaganda publication the Little Red Book as a narrative structure; De Middel takes us through a dark and humorous journey of hypocrisy and failed Utopia. Party combines reconstructed text from Mao's handbook and the artist's own photographs taken during her travels through China. Party can be seen as both a comment about China's political façade and as an intimate diary that insinuates the artist's own lost hopes and desires.

In the second installment of Independently Published Photobooks (first installment here), De Middel discusses the evolution of her own publishing and creative process and gives insight into how to fund and market an indie photobook.

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© Cristina De Middel, from The Afronauts

Antone Dolezal: We met briefly a few years ago when I worked for photo-eye Bookstore and you were in town for Review Santa Fe. You had come in to show your then new self-published book The Afronauts and at the time you had mentioned you had boxes of your book sitting at your home. It couldn't have been more than a few months later and your project had become one of those rare sensations that a lot of people in the photography world were talking about. What do you think were the contributing factors that led your work to take off in the way that it did?

Cristina De Middel: I think there were several reasons. The first being I did a campaign, a crowdfunding, but not using any of the standard platforms, just through Facebook. One of the ways I funded the book project was through selling special editions that came with a print. The special edition was set to 50 and I managed to sell 30 before the book was made. Making it available through Facebook helped a lot of people know about the story when the book came out.

Definitely going to portfolio reviews helped. The most important one was the Arles festival in France. At this point the book was made; it was weird because many people who go to portfolio reviews are at a different stage and I was just there because, in a way, I was buying the time of the reviewers so they could get a copy of the book. The reviews were basically giving the reviewer a book. Everybody is at Arles and what happened was one of the reviewers showed it to Martin Parr and then he contacted me the day after and that was the changing point with the whole thing because once Martin Parr started saying that is one of the best books of the year, then it just became viral and everybody went crazy about it and I sold the 600 books I had in a matter of two months.

© Cristina De Middel, from The Afronauts

AD: Did Martin give you any advice on how to get those books out into the world?

CDM: Yes, Martin gave me advice and a lot of the things he had suggested were things I already had done, such as getting it in the hands of reviewers. Another good piece of advice I had received was from a very good friend who is a photographer, Ricardo Cases, who did the book on pigeons in Spain (Paloma al Aire). He sent me a list of people I should send the book to to get a review, such as Alec Soth, and some of the photobook blogs. So, I sent about 10-15 books to a number of these places. Martin really showed the book to very important people that opened the market a lot and promoted the book at a level I could never have done by myself.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

AD: Your new book, Party, takes a very different approach to storytelling than that of The Afronauts. There is still an imaginative quality to the work in Party, but the mood has turned a darker corner. I'm curious to hear what led you to China to photograph this series?

CDM: Well, the thing is that the pictures that are now in the book Party were taken before The Afronauts, so I wasn't that much into staging and working in fiction. I was in China because I took a sabbatical for a year from my job as a photojournalist at a newspaper and instead of complaining about how bad the market is and how hard it is to be a photographer, which is what most photojournalists do, I said ok, instead of complaining, just take a year and do the things the way you think you should do them and if it doesn’t work then you can complain!

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

I went to China because it was a very special moment for me because of some personal problems and I needed to get away as far as I could, so I was just enjoying and rediscovering photography after many years of photojournalism.

So after I published The Afronauts and the whole thing had changed for me, I wanted to publish a book with this material I had from China. I took the Mao book because I thought it was the perfect platform and the perfect structure for the message I had about China. But this book is chronologically before The Afronauts.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

AD: While the individual photographs in this book contain a very intimate quality, the series seems to be mostly found scenes. What was your process of photographing for this series?

CDM: It was really about going back to the beginning for me: the reason why I started taking pictures, reacting to things that I didn't understand and documenting the small parts that surround me. Like street photography mixed with personal diary. So with Party there is no production, no staging, nothing. It's walking, meeting people, following stories and taking pictures that suggest a bigger idea through the small details. I came back from China with 3,000 images that I liked, but there was no story behind it. So, I used the Mao book to give a structure to the series.

Everything I thought about China was that communism is really a big joke, so I made the whole thing into a funny game. But the book can be read as a political statement, which it is - I am using one of the strongest political books that there is. The book can also be read as a personal diary because it revolved around a very sentimental break-up; you know those moments in life when you don't believe in anything and it is the failure of a utopia? So it can be read on two levels, as a political statement, but also as a personal diary to reflect the failure of a dream.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

AD: There is also a quality of transformation in the book, both with you and also in the whole Chinese society that is portrayed. It is certainly a metaphor for your personal experience as well.

CDM: Yes, it was a perfect journey for me; it was exactly what I needed.

AD: So you didn’t have an initial idea of what you were trying to convey when you began photographing?

CDM: I had the big picture. China is one of the last communist countries and it is still ruled by a Communist party but at the same time it is one of the most aggressive economic powers and a capitalist society, so it is hypocrisy. That was the big idea, to try and document this by little parts and to confront the traditional China and bring the basis of the statements and formal system to real life by adapting the Little Red Book to my own opinion and turning it into something that comically made sense.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

AD: You use Mao's Little Red Book as a structure to tie in the photographs. In fact, you omit words from the LRB and choose to tell your own experience of Chinese culture through your use of selected text. The language you choose has an underlying and allusive sense of conflict and suppression that hints at the country's past and even current realities, but also convey certain personal undercurrents. Could you elaborate on your decision to use Mao's LRB as a structural format for expressing your personal experience during your time in China?

CDM: You go to China and you know it's a communist country, but you find out it's not at all, it's completely the opposite. So it was about adapting the reading of that book and turning it into something more honest. You could make a lot of sentences, the combinations are infinite, but I chose the ones that support this simple idea that China is formally communist, but it actually is not. It was a very funny exercise to do.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

AD: Party was published through the Archive of Modern Conflict and Editorial RM. How did it come about to collaborate with these publishers?

CDM: The Archive of Modern Conflict contacted me right after publishing The Afronauts because it is the kind of story they like. And since then we have been collaborating on many different things. Most of the projects I am involved with now are related to archives I have found with them. So it is this huge support and I love the way they work and we get along very well. And with Ramón from RM we are just friends, we met after The Afronauts. My experience has always been through self-publishing and I have everything under control… I decide everything, so basically I just want to work with friends that would respect my decisions. I guess I couldn't work with any publisher because I know exactly what I want and it can become a bit difficult. So, I just work with friends that will say, 'Ok, whatever Cristina!' So at the moment I am very lucky, it's a very funny and enjoyable process to work with these two people.

AD: AMC is probably my favorite photobook publisher at the moment. And I know that is a pretty bold statement, but it seems serendipitous considering your personal conflict and the conflict presented in your new work that it would be published with AMC.

CDM: AMC approaches different subjects in a wide variety of ways. They have a more open mind than most of the market. Maybe it's because they don’t have to struggle for economic support, but they have a system in which they are allowed to be brave and more experimental. It is a blessing for me; working with them gives me complete freedom. It was definitely the best thing that happened to me after the success of The Afronauts.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

AD: Do you see yourself continuing to self-publish in the future?

CDM: Yes, I really like the self-publishing process. It is a funny thing to do, it means a lot of work, but now I have a certain structure and I can work in a different way.

AD: What advice would you give to photographers who are pursuing self-publishing?

CDM: I think the best advice would be that publishing a photobook doesn't have to be rooted in your equation from the very beginning. You have to be honest when doing the series and consider – as it happened to me - that you might have to talk about this series for two or three years. So you need to be really really sure about what you did.

With some series and some projects it's not a good idea to do a book. The best way of showing your story or sharing your idea could be an exhibition, multi-media, a video game, I don't know, there are so many possibilities. So make sure that the book is actually the best platform for the series. Once you are sure, just try to be as visible as you can. Submit your work to all of the competitions, go to portfolio reviews, be active on Facebook, and really make your work visible. You have to be very active at being self-employed.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

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Cristina De Middel (Spain, 1975) is a photographer based in London that has been working for different newspapers in Spain and with NGO's such as Doctors Without Borders or the Spanish Red Cross for more than eight years.

She combines her strictly documentary assignments with more personal projects that have been awarded and exhibited in several occasions (incuding PhotoFolio Arles 2012, Deutsche Börse Prize and the Infinty Award from the ICP in New York).

This B-side of Cristina's work deliberately asks the audience to question the language and the veracity of photography as a document, and plays with reconstructions or archetypes that blur the border between reality and fiction.

Antone Dolezal is a New Mexico based artist and writer who primarily makes work about the American social landscape and its relationship to history and folklore. His work has been featured on NPR, Oxford American, Huffington Post and PDN Online and his writing has appeared in photo-eye, Ahorn and Fraction Magazine. Antone recently published his first photobook Spook Light Chronicles vol. 1 with collaborating artist Lara Shipley. Vol. 2 is available for pre-order.

© Cristina De Middel, from Party

Narrative and Photography

Photography's relationship with narrative has been heavily questioned for several decades and continues to provoke donnybrooks and end friendships. It's a relationship that has been particularly interesting for me to consider recently as I work on two photobooks.

The experience of doing so has led me to an unexpected conclusion: there are ways to consider the question of narrative in photography in which photography can be presented as the most powerful narrative vehicle in the arts. This is because a series of photographs has a strong and unique relationship with the way we form memories and, subsequently, how we string together memories to create our life narratives.

Before I start, I should say that if there are two basic ways to think about narrative in photography – either being provided all at once (Rejlander, Crewdson, Wall) or in parts (as in the photobook or serial photographic essays) - this essay references the second of these ways.

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I think it's worth briefly reflecting on how differently narrative has been talked about by a handful of important contributors to the conversation on photography.

John Szarkowski challenged the ability of photography to explain large-scale public subjects in both the preface to The Photographer's Eye (1966) and in Mirrors and Windows (1978). In The Photographer's Eye he wrote, "Photography has never been successful at narrative" and he declared the fields of photojournalism and documentary non-effectual in Mirrors and Windows writing, "Photography's failure to explain large public issues has become increasingly clear...Most issues of importance cannot be photographed." He believed attempts to photograph World War II were unable to explain events without heavy captioning and that W. Eugene Smith's efforts to characterize the historic culture of the Spanish village Deleitosa in seventeen photographs pushed the medium beyond its capacity.

In a 2010 interview with current Museum of Modern Art Director of Photography Quentin Bajac, Luc Delahaye shows how the critical questioning of narrative's role in photography has continued. He said, "The refusal of narration in photography probably leads to a 'vision' of the world, not to mention richer formal possibilities."

Other photographic thinkers such as Charlotte Cotton and Alec Soth, on the other hand, have accepted the potential for narrative in photography. In The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Cotton explores the idea of narrative in tableau photography and she also discusses how - in contrast - most mid-20th century narrative photography played out sequentially. Soth, in a 2013 conversation at Paris Photo Los Angeles with Roe Ethridge remarked, "I actually want to continue to tell stories. And I'm trying to figure out how to do that with photography because it's not always natural to the medium."

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I wonder if the conversation can't be shaken up by moving its focus from results to process; that is to say, away from whether it's possible to convey a particular narrative to another person through photography to whether photography can actively involve both the photographer and observer in creating narrative.

To do so, let's first mention movies and literature which would seem the most narrative-friendly artistic vehicles. Beginning, middle, end. Linear progression. Large amounts of information spread across a few hours of images and sound or reading hundreds of pages of description and dialogue. A story may double back on itself or include flashbacks, but at the end of the work of cinema or literature, almost inevitably a particular story has been conveyed to the viewer or reader by the director or author.

The observer, however, is frequently in a passive, receptive mode in terms of narrative creation – that is to say, we receive the given narrative. We may have to make leaps of thought and keep up with the twists, but generally we are doing so in order to receive a singular, specific narrative from the director or author that is driven by a rich density of data.

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Think of a memory you have of a particular event, an important one. Where you were when the Challenger exploded? What do you remember of your high school graduation? Your first day of work?

What do you remember about that day or that moment?

What form do those memories take?

I’ve had a number of conversations the last few months with people about this question. There are a lot of constants that have come out of those conversations. There is almost never sound or dialogue as we replay memories in our minds of an event and frequently the visual images we have are either stills or something approaching soundless GIFs - several seconds of action that stops and might loop. Frequently an entire event is represented by a single still image. The image or images are often seen from something approximating a camera's viewpoint.

What apparently never happens is a cinematic or literary presentation of narrative – a coherent thread resembling a movie complete with sounds progressing forward through a fixed duration of time or a similarly linear literary presentation of narrative with dialogue and descriptions.

Our narrative memories of a single event, then, are a single image or a handful of still images or a GIF, almost always without sound or spoken dialogues - unless it was crucial to the story, like car tires skidding before an accident – that we piece together in our mind and, frequently, see from the perspective of a camera. Our minds seem to be built in some ways to use still images as signifiers of events or moments, to index an entire event with a snapshot.

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Moving outwards, think about the memories you have of last year. What were your highlights? What was memorable? Important?

As I type this, my mind slowly begins to remember my own year…in October I went to visit my parents in Florida. Was that the only time I went to the States last year? No! I was in New York and Philadelphia in the summer. I have a vision of Yaron's son Oren dancing at a BBQ. A still view of The New York Times news center. Alberto standing in the rain, taking a break from helping me grade the backyard in Philadelphia. Laying on the inflatable bed at Amani's waiting for Ana to arrive.

Where else did I go…I went to the Darién Gap…was that last year? Yes, it was in Janu…Febru…January. Who did I go with? Simon! An image of him and Luisa walking out of the hotel in Acandí. A man falling from a cliff into a swimming hole, miraculously not hurting himself. On the Darién trip I met Juan Pablo…which reminds me of standing outside his house at night in San Félix later in the year, so high in the mountains that the clouds formed around me as I stood outside at night. I have a short loop memory of a cloud forming...and a still image of the mural painted on his house.

Slowly, the year fills out more and more as I type. Images of people and places begin to create memories of events and represent them. All of these single images or small groups of images that represent events are then threaded together into the year's narrative. Some narrative structure begins to take place, but only to a point. I can't remember the sequence within many events or the sequence of a series of events. I am forgetting some of the big moments of the year while overemphasizing details. Some things that I remember probably happened the year before.

In short, the year doesn't come together from January to December clearly. I recall still images that represent specific events and connect them, then try to run a line through them as best I can to begin to form a narrative of my year from them. Large gaps of information exist between these images, however; most of the year is inaccessible to me already. Ultimately the whole year's narrative is defined by a few dozen distinct still images that represent events strung together in some kind of order that's most likely not actually very sequential in relation to how they were lived. They are loosely connected - mostly by having been lived by me - and distanced by a lot of empty space between them.

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The artistic experience that most closely resembles this sewing together of memory-images into a narrative is making or looking at photographic projects, exhibitions or books. It closely duplicates how we create and reference our memories and then turn memories into our personal narratives. While the photobook or exhibition usually present a given sequence, we have to actively make sense of that series of still images through associations, across large gaps of information, without implication of duration, without informative dialogue, music, or effects, while relying on - as compared to a movie or novel - a very small amount of information. It is we, the observer, who create duration, fill gaps, imagine sound, create logic and relationship and ultimately imagine narrative.

This relationship places the observer of the photographic exhibition, essay or photobook actively in a role that simulates how we build narrative from our own life memories. This similarity makes forming narratives from photographic works a powerful experience for the observer in the process of interpreting photographs - as well, I should add, as for the creator in the process of making the photographic project.

As a last, practical, note, a project that doesn’t give enough images or spreads them too far apart can leave us unable to connect them, creating an opaque project we can't enter by refusing us the process of narrative construction. In turn, a project that connects the dots itself for us looses the special narrative privilege of photography we've identified and more closely approximates the dictated narrative of cinema or literature. Mark Steinmetz has said it well: "Photographers who are too controlling come up with pictures where the viewer has little free will - the experience of looking at the photo is over-determined and so there's not so much lasting pleasure."

A balanced sequence, in turn, gives us the dots spaced just enough apart to allow us to participate by connecting them for ourselves, to form our own conclusion of meaning of the work as active participants, and to tap photography's powerful mimesis of how we form our own life narratives from memories. This unique overlap makes narrative one of photography's strengths, not one of its weaknesses.

Reading Shortlist 12.18.13

© Georgina Berkeley, untitled page from the Berkeley Album (1867/71), from the exhibition "Playing with Pictures:
The Art of the Victorian Photocollage"

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.

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AGMA Magazine, Playing With Pictures: The Art of the Victorian Photocollage." Some impressive works in this post of early mixed media work from high society women in the 1860s and 1870s. (Click on the words "Playing With Pictures" to get the gallery of images to open up.)

Laurie Anderson, Rolling Stone, Laurie Anderson's Farewell to Lou Reed. Nothing at all to do with photography, but a lot to do with life.

Capa at 100, International Center of Photography. A half-hour radio interview which is the only recording known of Robert Capa's voice. He discusses a trip to Russia, how a couple of his most famous images were made and how he came up with his name. Also includes one of the most awkward, non sequitur product placements I've ever heard.

© Jane Cooper, Original Caption: "This Area Is Known as Gay Hill near Stockbridge, Vermont. The Farm Was
Originally Built in the 1800's by Ephraim Twitchell, the Famous Vermont Bridge Builder 03/1974"

DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency. This Flickr page of the U.S. National Archives houses over 15,000 images from the EPA funded Documerica project. The project, ongoing between 1971-1977, entailed contracting freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities and everyday life in the 1970s. Photographers included David Alan Harvey and Danny Lyon.

© Barcroft Media via Getty Images

The Guardian, Liu Bolin, invisible man - in pictures. Not really photography either (beyond documenting his performances via the camera), but man, this guy is impressive.

Andrew Reid, EOSHD, Consumer DSLRs "dead in five years" I'm generally not very interested in talking about gear or gear articles and the points here may be a little extreme, but the coming changes to the camera market and camera development are going to affect all of us.

Sightsmap. Fascinating map of the density of photographs taken around the world.

Alec Soth, Little Brown Mushroom Blog, Popsicle #46: The letters of Sergio Larrain. Soth explores the idea of photographers giving up on photography through Aperture's Sergio Lorrain.

Susan Worsham, Fresh Air on Tumblr, Conversations with Margaret Daniel. I've been putting this hour-long audio compilation on while scanning or doing post-production the last month, just listening to Daniel talk. She could talk about anything and I'd listen.

Michael Zhang, PetaPixel, Video: Photographer Has Camera Lens Stolen From Around His Neck. Welp, that...that sucks.

Review: "A New York Minute" iBook, by Stephen Shore

Post by Martin Brink

As much as I like Stephen Shore's photographs, I also like the fact that he constantly challenges himself. From his black and white documentation of Andy Warhol's "The Factory" as a young kid, to the color snapshots in American Surfaces, to the perfectly composed 8x10 work in Uncommon Places, to the 83 artist books made between 2003-2008, each one shot in a day and printed using a print on demand service. Stephen’s career sums up his curiosity about "the new" and his unwillingness to repeat himself.

Therefore, when it was announced that the A New York Minute iBook would be released, it wasn't a surprise. Logically he would make a "digital photo book," and he made one with content and a concept suited for the digital medium. He didn't just base it on an existing physical book or choose to show his signature photographs in digital form. There are lots of younger photographers out there obsessed with physical books and prints, but with a huge disinterest in anything digital. That Shore, born 1947, is exploring this area before many of his younger peers is a mystery.

A New York Minute contains 16 short films, all under a minute long, shot in the streets of New York. The scenes range from still life, sidewalks with people passing by, traffic, people coming up and down the subway stations. It's easy to draw a comparison to Alec Soth's video piece Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, also consisting of a collection of short films, but instead edited and sequenced into one video. I like that I can flick through the films in Shore's iBook, to have a clear separation between them, instead of seeing one long video of clips. That said, I do think that Soth’s material is of higher quality, at least technically. I don't know when Shore’s videos were filmed, but I wish they were higher res. Maybe it was a conscious decision, or a way to keep the file size down, or it might just be down to the camera he used. Nonetheless, I enjoy the films, and although it's a collection of short films you're flicking through, it feels fluid and natural. Maybe because of the simple design and the lack of sound and text (except from the foreword by Luc Sante).

For me, the highlight is on page 14, where we see a quite stunning street scene with a fast food salesman setting up his stand in the foreground, a lady smoking her cigarette in the background, while people and cars are passing by. Many of the scenes in the iBook reminds me of how we observe things, maybe more so than photographs do.

A New York Minute isn't without its faults, but I do think it's worth getting if you can display it. It's $8.99, and really, that’s less than what we pay for getting most books shipped to us. Recommended.

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Martin Brink is a Swedish photographer and artist. He's also the former founder and editor of The Digital Photobook.

¿Qué está pasando en la fotografía actualmente en Colombia?

In August I had the great pleasure of meeting up with Alec Soth, photographer and publisher behind Little Brown Mushroom Books, during his visit to Colombia for the opening of his show Dog Days Bogotá.

During our conversation we found a mutual interest in learning more about contemporary photography in Colombia. What are the trends and traditions here? What events, institutions and venues are there for photographers? Who deserves particular recognition for their photography?

We are hoping you, our readers, will help us to gather information so that we can compile and share it on our sites in the coming weeks.

Please send a note – in English or Spanish – with your thoughts: fototazo@gmail.com

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¿Que está pasando en la fotografía contemporánea actualmente en Colombia?

En agosto tuve el placer de conocer a Alec Soth, fotógrafo y dueño de la editorial Little Brown Mushroom Books, durante su visita a Colombia para la inauguración de su exposición Dog Days Bogotá.

Durante nuestra conversación, descubrimos que tenemos el mutuo interés de aprender más sobre la fotografía contemporánea en Colombia. ¿Cuáles son las tendencias y tradiciones aquí en Colombia? ¿Cuáles son los eventos, las instituciones y los lugares para los fotógrafos? ¿Quién merece más reconocimiento por su fotografía?

Esperamos que ustedes, nuestros lectores, nos ayuden a recopilar información para que podamos compartirla en nuestras páginas en las próximas semanas.

Por favor, envíenos un correo - en Inglés o Español - con sus pensamientos: fototazo@gmail.com

The Cliché in Photography

© Irina Rozovsky, from the series "My Mother and Other Things from the Sky"

As an undergraduate painting student at Boston’s MassArt, I studied under a recent teaching arrival who created his own ad lib studio rules on the first day of class instead of doing the typical reciting of the official rules handout. Among his spontaneously created rules: try not to do drugs in the studio. An...interesting first interaction, perhaps, but the professor turned out over the course of the year to be a sort of sensei: slow and calm with an incisive eye.

During one particular mid-semester class we sat to critique the paintings of a student who had returned to college at a late middle age. He had placed on the wall – yet again – a handful of paintings of his cats. Most of the students in the room felt a degree of anguish looking out over the paintings, embarrassed for him and struggling to maintain a conversation while inwardly frustrated that we, the serious painters, were stuck critiquing a guy painting his fucking cats.

The professor understood well what the dynamics were in the room - and the real problem at hand. He moved to address it in a few well-drawn sentences.

He pointed out that the majority of us – most of whom were creating brainy abstract work created with inspiration from Radiohead and wine we’d snuck into the studio (hey, inspiration-in-a-five-dollar-box isn't what he meant by drugs) for all-night painting sessions - were in terms of content painting very similarly to each other and also very much within a branch of Abstract Expressionism developed 40 years prior. He asked us if our work at this point in history was really any more or less derivative or cliché than painting your cats.

This revelation-via-rhetorical-question was no less stunning to me at that moment than a 10-year-old believing the woman on stage has actually been sawn in half: all of the "serious" painters working together late nights were painting more or less on par in terms of the collective and historic art conversation as cat man.

All of this is to getting me to ask: HDR photos of city skylines? The rainbow at sunset? Pigeons? How are they more cliché and more predicable than the 6x6 or 6x7 blank-eyed camera-staring portrait? Or Grahamesque two- or three-image sequences? Or massive 50 by 60 inch prints of Chinese landscapes - preferably of a misty, polluted river - in a Chelsea gallery? Is a cliché in one area of photography or inside one community really any different than the clichés of another? When and how does visual language lose power - or even meaning - through repetition? Who defines cliché and how does the process work?

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We create a collective definition of beauty and value in contemporary aesthetics by socially negotiating a definition between each other in a singular cultural context. The art world works to define aesthetics, but so too do other communities. I was reminded of this by a great aunt of my wife who, paging through a copy of Alec Soth’s Dog Days Bogotá pulled from my shelf, was shocked by how ugly the images were. She, on the other hand, loves contemporary paintings of Jesus Christ and high-key paintings of flowers that I – best guess here – imagine Alec Soth may not love so much, at least not unironically.

There's not a single global visual language any more than there’s a single spoken language. Cliché is a community identification arrived upon within a given context of aesthetic navigation. Perhaps counterintuitively, there are no universal clichés. Universal clichés would require alignments between interpretations of visual ideas in a myriad of contextual spaces, a virtual impossibility. Aesthetic reception varies widely based on viewing context: some Japanese pop songs may seem sentimental to a US audience, for example, whereas minimalism may seem profoundly simple through the lens of popular culture.

Instead, ideas of cliché shift between cultural and physical spaces, not just between classes and educational backgrounds - as in differences between high and popular culture - but also between countries, parts of the same country, rural and urban, generations, subcultures, ethnic groupings…the list is long. These differences are only problematic when a community applies their own sense of tired and trite to the visual language of another community. The understandings of a visual element are not universal - reading an element of one context with the understanding of another is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way we interact with images.

Cliché not only shifts between communities but also changes through time. Think of visual ideas as paths. As a path becomes congested, the visual expression or element experiences a reduction in meaning and impact by use. Alternatively, as paths become abandoned, the grass and trees grow back and it can suddenly seem a fresh visual idea again, appealing in the limited traffic that passes through it. I've seen this recently, for example, in conversations I’ve had with a number of photographers who are interested in black and white because it seems new again.

Another function of time in relation to cliché is the measure of how long an idea takes to tire. The acceleration of life in contemporary society coupled with our culture of cool jaded cynicism in the West has - empirically - created a problem in which ideas tire more quickly than in the past. It seems that we are more quickly dismissing ideas as exhausted than previously and that there is almost a power and status generated by being one of the first to declare something "dead" or "over."

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The sense of cliché can come from a number of different parts within the image making process. Clichéd images can be called as such based on the expression of a subject in terms of technique (think paint on velvet) or form (think centrally placed, "objective"-style architectural images), but also based on the subject matter itself. I would argue that the expression is more the determinant of cliché than the subject matter of the image, although all three parts of the picture making process - technique, form, content - can deliver you to the doorstep.

To make my point, consider the lead image by Irina Rozovsky. If I tell you pigeons are a cliché of street photography, you'd probably nod your head. In the right hands, however, the expression and idea of the image of a pigeon can be profound, despite the sea of images of pigeons. The bird, caught between resting and flight, falling without stretching its wings, seems unfamiliar again, seems suddenly a vital way to discuss the easily crossed line between life and death, the seeming lack of gravity in the image a way to evoke questions about the nature of reality itself, the white napkin on the ground below echoing the shape of the pigeon gives an idea of time as we imagine it as a prevision of the fallen bird on the concrete.

The lesson of my painting teacher holds true with the image by Rozovsky - it's not the cat or the pigeon as subject that marks cliché; it's the treatment we give it and what we use it to say. Expression overrides subject matter frequently, though not always.

That being said, some areas of art and photography are harder to work within than others in regards to ideas of repetition which leads to - at its extreme - cliché. That is to say, some paths are more historically trodden than others. Larry Sultan in a critique once talked with us about the heavy history of landscape, how its very long tradition within visual arts means finding a vision within it that can contribute to the conversation is that much harder. On the other hand, new paths push visual language in new directions and are fundamental to the process of expanding ideas of photography, but we quickly in contemporary life reach a sense of cliché – witness Google Street View projects – without more to the project than technique and form.

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The same professor I began this piece with told me once that if what I am doing is currently out of fashion in galleries, wait a while and it will be in fashion again. This idea of aesthetic cycles seems to me an important part of the conversation around "progress" in visual arts discussed in a series of posts last year on this site. Cycles as a model, however, doesn’t quite provide space for the importance of images and projects that strengthen and expand our ways of using photography more than others when re-passing through an established area of the medium. Instead, the model of a spiral works better. We retrace similar concepts and aesthetic predilections periodically, but at the same time we do so in different ways so that while they overlap they are not actually going through the same space.

I think that's how we can look at an interesting question - why is one subject a motif or tradition while another is a cliché? A motif or tradition retraces a point without going over the exact point again, but instead moves over the point at a different place in space as a spiral going either forward or backward. A cliché, alternatively, doesn't expand forward or backward through space, but rather repeats the circle exactly.

Practically for photographers, what this means is the vital importance of being culturally aware of what is going on around you. This is an argument to know other photographers, to complement and expand on their statements while not repeating them. It's also an argument, perhaps, to look to expression as a guide for expanding photography as much as to content - a project doesn't need to rely on obscure subject matter from uncovered areas of the world. It needs, more than anything, to be thought through personally and deeply to arrive at our own vision - the one thing we can truly guarantee is not cliché.

Interview: Doug DuBois, Part I

© Doug DuBois, studio at MacDowell Colony

This is a different type of interview, a summary of several conversations extended over six weeks with current Guggenheim Fellow Doug DuBois while he works at the MacDowell Colony to turn his photographic series titled My Last Day at Seventeen into a book.

This is the first of two posts that will follow DuBois through his process of editing and sequencing images for the book, providing a window into his ideas and working methods. Images and additional information provided by DuBois will augment the three posts.

My Last Day at Seventeen is comprised of portraits, staged tableaus and spontaneous photographs made over a period of four summers in a small housing estate in the town of Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. The images as a whole speak about coming of age in Ireland during the current economic downturn. For some background on his project, take a few minutes to watch a clip about My Last Day at Seventeen on the program Imeall (Gaelic for "The Edge") on Ireland's TG4 and also read through "Snapshots from the rough edges" by Aidan Dunne in the Irish Times. Some of the images from the project can also be found here.

DuBois teaches at Syracuse University and at the International Limited Residency Program at the Hartford Art School. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including shows at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art and Higher Pictures in New York and galleries in Europe and Japan. His images belong to the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The San Francisco Museum of Art as well as many others. In addition to the Guggenheim, he now has received two MacDowell Colony residencies, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, a Yaddo Fellowship, and a Light Work Grant in Photography among other awards and grants. A monograph of his photographs titled ...All the Days and Nights was published by Aperture in 2009.

He arrived at MacDowell on December 21st and the first two conversations summarized here in this post took place on December 30th and January 2nd. Bracketed text inside of quotes represent an approximation of DuBois' words...our Skype connections have not always been ideal and the audio recordings of the conversations reflect that.

© Doug DuBois, Adams Studio at MacDowell Colony

BACKGROUND
DuBois was also at MacDowell Colony in 2003. During that initial residency, he worked for the first time on editing a book of photographs, beginning work on what eventually would become ...All the Days and Nights.

Before he began his first residency at MacDowell, he sought out the advice of Jim Goldberg and others about their editing process and spent a month in his studio at MacDowell culling single frames from hundreds of contact sheets and arranging them in what he thought was a coherent sequence. When DuBois left, however, he says the book dummy he produced was "an absolute piece of shit. It was terrible." The reason? He didn’t realize how critical it was to test edits and sequences by showing the maquette to others. At MacDowell he got caught up alone in his thoughts; when he began to share it, he realized it made little sense. He had to start over. He says, though, it wasn't time wasted: "You have to let yourself make a really bad book, with some reeeeeally bad edits and sequences. It’s very important." He doesn’t expect to have the book finished upon leaving this time, just to have something. Changes will continue as he starts to show the first copy of the maquette after his residency.

The images from My Last Day at Seventeen were made over four consecutive summers. As a photographer he cycles between periods of shooting and editing, and as a self-professed poor multi-tasker, he typically works on one project at a time. He carried a Mamiya 7, Mamiya RZ, a 4x5 view camera, a DSLR, and lights, using the four cameras interchangeably based on the situation. The digital camera served largely to test lighting and take snapshots.

I asked how he decided it's time to put down the cameras and craft the book. How is he sure he has the images he needs at this point and that the book will come together?

He responds:

One of the signs, not the only sign, but one of the signs of when a project is nearing completion is that you begin to repeat images. It’s like, 'Oh yeah, I've already made that picture'...I also felt I was wearing out my welcome. The first time in the neighborhood I was a somewhat exotic American with a camera - either that or a fuckin' perv which I was called repeatedly during my first few weeks there - and I could kind of milk that, people were nice to me because I was a visitor and interested in their lives. When I returned each summer, I entered the fabric and the rhythms of the neighborhood, which was good, but I also became a pain in the ass. 'Oh fuck, here comes that American, he’s going to want to take pictures.' You know? And I could see that people sometimes tried to avoid me. Also it was hard to ask the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, who had originally invited me for a month-long residency in 2009, to put me up in their artists' apartment for 5 or 6 weeks each summer. After four years of this, I think I hold the record for their longest residency. I was incredibly fortunate that the director, Peg Amison, the staff and members of the Irish Arts Council remained generous, helpful, and enthusiastic about the project for so long.

With shooting finished, then, DuBois arrives at MacDowell to make the images into a book.

© Doug DuBois, Sign-in board, Adams Studio

REFERENCES
I ask DuBois about the books and other reference material he's brought to MacDowell and he quickly mentions Ron Jude's Lick Creek Line, citing how Jude smartly plays with time and sequence in the book, Viviane Sassen's Parasomnia for its activation of the page itself by running images beyond one page onto the next, as well as Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, Jackie Nickerson, Susan Lipper, and John Gossage because they make great books.

A number of the books he has brought with him are there because he likes how the photographers have fit the rectangles of the photographs inside the rectangle of the page. And when a book has a shape and size that feels right, he measures. Why reinvent the wheel?

He subsequently sent an email with his complete list of reference materials:

Photo Books:
Ron Jude: Lick Creek Line, Emmet
Jackie Nickerson: Faith
Viviane Sassen: Parasomnia
Mark Power: The Sound of Two Songs
John Gossage: The Pond
Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi
Susan Lipper: Grapevine
Mark Steinmetz: South Central
Christian Patterson: Redheaded Peckerwood
Tobias Zielony: Trona: Armpit of America
Gregory Halpern: A
Thomas Struth: Stanger and Friends
Ken Schles: Oculus
Chris Killip: Seacoal
Christophe Agou: In the Face of Silence
J. Carrier: Elementary Calculus
Leonie Hampton: In the Shadow of Things

Other Books:
Claire Keegan: Antartica, Walk in the Blue Fields, Foster
The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story
Tod Papageorge: Core Curriculum
Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
Ariella Azoulay: The Civil Contract of Photography
MacDowell reading – poems of Honor Moore

Music:
My hard drive w/ 90 gigs -- Lots of jazz, Bach, Brazilian, Latin, whatever…

Films:
Watching what I can from the MacDowell Library
Natalia Almada: El Velador, El General
Dee Rees: Pariah
Lots of Jem Cohen

FIRST DAYS AND GENERAL WORKING PROCESS
Using what he learned during his first residency, DuBois comes to MacDowell with all of his contact sheets scanned at a resolution that allows him to pull any frame he wants and drop it into a page-layout program – he uses InDesign to create scaled down page spreads to fit on 8 1/2" x 11" paper.

Even though he hasn’t had an extended opportunity to engage with the images, he has been loosely, but consistently, editing the scanned negatives in Lightroom over the four years he has been shooting the project. He has already gone back and looked for any missed possibilities and the last pass almost doubled the number of images under consideration. Four years has changed how he views the original images significantly.

DuBois has the clearance to use the images he's working with. He built up a good level of trust with his subjects and informally involved them in decisions on which images to include in a recent exhibition at the Sirius Arts Centre, just a short walk from the neighborhood where most of the work was shot. He also brought back images every summer, giving away 100s of prints and gauging reactions. Because he was working with minors and outside of the United States, he secured the necessary releases and talked to the parents and adults involved with their lives.

His first step at MacDowell is to take three days to print out a modest-sized image of absolutely every photograph he’s thinking about using - 100s of images - on an HP color laser printer he’s brought, which he says is cheaper and faster than using an inkjet.

When the prints are done, he makes about 25 piles of the images based on very obvious, denotative criteria – such as Roisin, Kevin, Eirn, and other various people – just so he can find the images. Then DuBois starts to play with the images, and they go in and out of their original piles as he begins to edit.

© Doug DuBois, Image piles

With the images laid out on table, he can work quickly, shifting images around. The playing is a kind of "indulgence." He says, "Maybe it's like a writer trying to write everyday: you just do it, and you try not to think too hard about it." He has an eight-foot table and plenty of wall-space to work with the images. Given that in Lightroom he can fluidly and easily group images together as "collections" and then print out the collections as contact sheets for reference - for example "fights," "houses," or "close-up portraits" - he doesn’t actually have to make certain piles in order to find and work with the images. Once he has a sequence he wants to hold on to, he logs the sequence on Lightroom, the images go back to their piles, and he starts again.

After three or four passes through the images and contact sheets, he told himself he's got to get beyond the "singular image." He began to print out all the frames of a given situation and to think sequentially. He obsessed on two groups of sequential images: one of a drinking spot as well as another of a bonfire. He focused on what he says will probably be a complete tangent: 70 medium format images shot at a distance – like a landscape - of a group of 15- and 16-year olds "bush drinking."

When he wants more permanence, or wants to contemplate an image or group of images for a while, he pins them to the wall and he has done so with each of the 70 frames in this sequence. [see image below] He thought of it originally as a landscape or panorama, but now he's fascinated with how the figures move through the landscape, form groups, and break apart, only to have more kids arrive and the cycle start again. One of the boys recently committed suicide and DuBois can't help but track his movement among the groups. He studies the patterns in their movement and tries to figure out how to represent them on a page. "I’m really interested in trying to do something explicitly filmic. Sequences are at the top of my head right now, and how to work sequences in a book." He considers a landscape orientation as a possible solution, even though he has more general interest in books that have a portrait orientation.

© Doug DuBois, Exploring a sequence of images

In his process, DuBois goes back and forth between sequenced, small-print images and page layouts. The more content driven editing happens when he plays with the images on the table, looking at what photographs say next to each other. He then moves to the computer to drop the images into page spreads and look at the sequence on a more formal level. When he has a sequence of something that interests him, he prints it out to see how it reads when turning the pages.

There is a big difference, he comments, between looking at a spread and turning the page. "I can never get the rhythm from looking at a spread. I have to spit it out as a book, tape it up, and turn the page." He makes a number of tiny accordion style mini-books, just watching the rhythm of the pages as he flips through. He audibly calls out the sounds of the images as he goes to help him understand if the sequence is working. A sequence that sounds like "da-dee-da-DUM-da" might work, whereas a more even "dum-dum-da-dum-dum" might signal a sequence that’s too even and flat.

"It’s not like any of those steps are exclusive of the other, it's not like you don't think about content when you're turning the pages and all that," he says, but each part of the process tends to focus on one aspect of editing more than others.

By deciding to work with more explicitly filmic sequences he has created an interesting design challenge. How can he establish the rhythm along the page, how close should the images be to each other? Should they be on the left or right of the spread or both? Should he activate the page itself by wrapping images around the page edge? Should he consider a sequence like a flip book?

When he had a dummy of ...All the Days and Nights that he thought was very close to a finished book, he produced an accordion book to full-scale and watched how people looked at it. He noted their body language to see where they paused and to see where they moved through rapidly; it gave a lot of information about readability, pacing, and interest. When the maquette of the new book gets to a more advanced stage, he'll do the same thing.

EARLY EDITING PROGRESS AND CONSIDERATIONS
As far as quantity of images for the book, he's not thinking about it at this early stage. He's working very intuitively right now, trying to make use of everything and letting one image lead to another. By our second conversation, he already has a number of these sequences – he's 35-40 pages into a book layout. "It's likely to be this totally Baroque, overblown piece of shit, but things will be on the page. Then I'll say, 'OK, that’s working, I'm going to hold on to that, that’s NOT working, we’re going to break that up. That would be better before this...' Until I place them on a page and begin to rough things out, I’m not quite sure what it is."

Also in our second conversation, DuBois says he's feeling kind of queasy about his progress. The book has no shape yet, he still doesn't really have an end, or even really a beginning other than the bonfire sequence [discussed below] which seems like an interesting way to set things off: there’s conflict, fire, and house - all sorts of metaphors can be drawn from that combination. He's just starting to write down themes,  organize images in Lightroom, and produce contact sheets that are thematic. He's done one on "house," for example, and one on "play/sports." At this point he is also focused on finding transitional images, ones that might bridge evolving themes and connect sequences.

Chronology is another point he's trying to decide how to navigate. Over the course of four years, the physical appearance of his adolescent subjects changed dramatically. How can he handle the temporal narrative structure inherent in the sequential pages of a book in relation to time passing in the images? Does he want to preserve or play with the linear age narrative? Would shuffling that narrative be unnecessarily confusing...or would it be interesting? If at the end he decides not to preserve the chronology of the images, he will need to establish another kind of thematic as the main sequencing criteria.

Photographers can edit and work like writers, DuBois suggests. Some agonize over every word, some write rapidly, getting things out and on the page to edit and refine later. At this point, he falls firmly in the second category and what he really wants is to get the images and ideas flowing early on, to "vomit out some sequences and themes." Then, during the next stages - hopefully - he will be polishing these messy fragments into a finished book.

IDEAS ON NARRATIVE AND BOOK STRUCTURE
DuBois believes narrative is inherent to the book format, which is not to say the book must present a story with a coherent plot. He suggests the photobook should be read like a book of text, not just arbitrarily paged through, and that it engages narrative in a way that is difficult to accomplish, for example, in a gallery exhibition. The narrative goal is to sustain multiple readings, remain complex, and maintain a certain ambiguity that beckons you back to the work again and again. Hopefully, he says, the most interesting and complex themes will be implicit rather than explicit, although there will be some compelling and explicit ideas that will sustain the narrative framework of the book.

In ...All the Days and Nights, DuBois says, "I was very conscious to leave key images out and allow space for the viewer to create the story. I think photographs work best that way. I've always maintained that the narrative is really located between the images. You're really trying to push the reader to think about what happens between images - to imagine, to project...to fill that space with some kind of story. Those gaps are critical."

© Doug DuBois, Sequence 1 (Click for full size)

© Doug DuBois, Sequence 2 (Click for full size)

© Doug DuBois, Sequence 3 (Click for full size)

EARLY SEQUENCE EXAMPLE
In a PDF of a three-page spreads that DuBois sends, we can see an early attempt at a filmic sequence for My Last Day at Seventeen that he is considering as the book opening. On the first spread of the sequence, he has a single image placed on the right page, with half-an-inch from the edge of the image (purple border) to the edge of a page. The half-inch reference point is a formal device that interests him and sets a standard for the following pages. On the second spread of the sequence, on the left page DuBois has let the image move all the way to the edge of the page; on the facing page, we have two images, centered, both bleeds, one to the book gutter, one to the edge of the page, again with a half-inch space between the two. In the last page of the spread, we have the half-inch border from image to page maintained, but the image moved to the left page, leaving the right page empty. The first and last pages would be, as in the PDF spreads above, empty to serve as section breaks.

The framing of the images, the kids, and sequence all move from left to right. There's a good rhythm to the sequence, as it becomes apparent that the kids, who appear to be hugging in the first image, are actually wrestling - and moving closer and closer to the fire. DuBois is trying to figure out how to activate the gutter and also the edges, as well as how to think of the image frame itself while using the rectangle of the book. He wants to keep it dynamic.

There is a strong, singular bonfire image, below, which will appear much later in the book - at a distance from the opening sequence. He knows that he could end the 5-frame sequence with this image, the best bonfire shot, as a big, full-bleed exclamation point. If he leaves that final image separate and apart from the others, however, the sequence remains open-ended and the bonfire becomes an important thread stretched throughout the book instead of a simple prelude to the work as a whole. The idea is to have images refer to other images, both sequentially and at a distance, threading the themes and narrative of the book together.

© Doug DuBois, Bonfire, Russell Heights, Cobh, IRE 2011

Part 2 of this interview will be published in the coming weeks.