This is not a "best photobooks" list. We heard a rumor that the photo community is getting sick of them. Next year, perhaps. Jokes aside, we opted to move away from the aforementioned language we've used in the past. There's too many to count, and the notion that our small team would have the umbrella-eyes to survey enough photobooks and narrow down a truly democratic list of favorites is unrealistic, at best. In its place, we compiled some "really good" photography books we enjoyed this past year (excluding our own Humble Cats, which of course, it would be in bad taste to include, right?) Some we own, some not yet, but we've poured through them all enviously. We encourage you to check them out and support the artists by purchasing them.
Without further ado....
In his ongoing series The Aristocrats, photo-based artist Jayson Bimber combines crude digital retouching with references to art-historical tableaus as a means to critique systems of wealth in the United States and abroad. He scans found images from fashion magazines and advertisements, creating montages that are as equally unsettling as they are seductive. Bimber's techniques highlight an umbrella of contemporary concerns ranging from political corruption to sinister puppeteering in the upper echelons of the commercial fine art market. Like the famous joke "The Aristocrats" from which this series' title is derived, it intentionally lacks a punchline or true narrative structure, bringing to light the absurdity of its content, in essence, a "joke about jokes."
I spoke with Bimber to learn more about his process and ideas.
Interview by Jon Feinstein
Beginning in the 1980s, theorists including Allan Sekula and Jon Tagg initiated critical work that analyzed the organization, purpose, and consumption of photographic archives. In doing so, they implicated the medium as a tool of state surveillance and control deployed against often vulnerable populations.
The points asserted by Sekula and Tagg about photographs within an archival setting encouraged numerous artists to utilize archives as the source or focus of substantive work. Those now-familiar lines of inquiry are widened, and the interpretation of archival material in photographic form expanded in Recollected: Photography and the Archive, a group installation that was on view at the Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University through November 16.
Exhibition Review by Roula Seikaly
He may not tell you this directly, but Nathaniel Ward's photographs are about the subtlety of defeat. They are brimming with quiet, often painful metaphors, buried as footnotes in photos of people and the land. From the ghostly large format color photographs of hallways, classrooms and bathrooms in American schools Ward made a decade ago, to To Turn the Mountains into Glass, politically agnostic black and white pictures made while traversing Israel's charged landscape, his work is riddled with introspective pause. And it's consistently quite beautiful. Ward's latest exhibition, A Nationless Place, on view through March, 2018 at the Ford Foundation Gallery at New York Live Arts adds a new layer to his methodologies by integrating sweeping swatches of text beside his photos of sometimes-confusing slices of landscape and human experience. Unlike explanatory "exhibition text" you might expect in a themed group-show retrospective, it functions as a piece of the art unto itself. I spoke with Ward to learn more.
Interview by Jon Feinstein
A View of One’s Own, on view through December 10th at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, presents a curious story told threefold: three women photographers: Esther Boise Van Deman, Georgina Masson and Jeannette Montgomery Barron each visit Rome for three different purposes in three different eras, produce three wholly different interpretations of the Eternal City in three different photographic media. The curation offers competing impulses of record-keeping, seduction, and stream-of-consciousness insights, which, at first glance, would seem to provide rich fodder for the exhibition. However, the execution of the show is fundamentally flawed in that for the most part, each artist is kept within her own view, so to speak: the photographs are presented in discrete chronological collections in the gallery space, which ultimately robs the viewer of the opportunity to evaluate just how each woman’s unique version of the same city responds to the others.
Exhibition Review by Deborah Krieger