Reading Shortlist: 11.19.17

© Wheeland Photography, from the article Couple Encounters a Black Metal Band in Woods During Engagement Shoot

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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Daniel C. Blight, American Suburb X, Incoming: Photography, Contemporary Art, Whiteness. Another attack on Richard Mosse's Incoming. It's important to read pieces that you react strongly and negatively towards, just as it's important to see art you hate. This piece is problematic on multiple levels, from the smug academicism to its quizzical attempts to create art-making recipes:

the baseline theoretical strategy of any conceptual artist making political work should be one of complete and utter rejection of the following things: emotional transformation, unique visuality, the novel use of technology, dramatic strategies of display and installation, and awe-inspiring visual or aural effects. These things are, in short, a description of "fireworks" art.

Tim Clark, 1000 Words, David Campany. In this case 1000 Words is about 7000 Words, but the lengthy, sometimes wandering interview is ultimately a very engaging conversation with one of today's great thinkers on photography.

Ben Crair, New Republic, 'Then I Found Myself Seeing Pictures All the Time.'  A 2013 article on Stephen Shore that explains his importance within the contexts of photographic and cultural history. Explains his conceptual intents well.

Untitled © Constant Anée

Anna Heyward, The New Yorker, The Opposite of a Muse. Isabelle Mège may have out Sophie Calle-ed Sophie Calle. She has pursued and convinced around 300 photographers to make a portrait of her during the last three decades.

Eliza Murphy, ABC News, Couple Encounters a Black Metal Band in Woods During Engagement Shoot. I find it enraging that I'm already married and that this will not happen to me.

Robert Frank on photographing The Americans, SFMOMA. Frank talks about how he made a few images from The Americans in a rare video interview.

Kodak 'Investigating What it Would Take' to Bring Back Kodachrome. The rewriting of the "film revival" narrative continues.

Ariel Levy, Catherine Opie,  The New Yorker, All-American Subversive. A check-in with Opie who's settled in to middle age as an artist, teacher, mother and wife.

Ashley McNelis, Aperture, Jason Fulford Can’t Be Contained. All you ever wanted to know about Mr. Fulford with questions that do a good job of elevating the conversation and then getting out of the way to let Fulford respond fully.

Tracy Staedter, Live Science, Tiny, Lens-Free Camera Could Hide in Clothes, Glasses. Lensless cameras so small they can be woven into clothes. People will one day very soon laugh at the quaint privacy concerns we had with cell phone cameras you could actually see.

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.