Words Without Pictures has just released a print-on-demand book edited by Alex Klein of the website’s fantastic content. Some description of the project for those of you who are unfamiliar:

Words Without Pictures was conceived as a year-long project with monthly themes that were formulated by an editorial team in tandem with contributors to the wordswithoutpictures.org website. The aim was to create spaces where thoughtful and urgent discourse around very current issues for photography could happen.

Each month, beginning at the end of November 2007 and concluding in November 2008, an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator wrote a short, un-illustrated and opinionated essay about an aspect of photography that, in his or her view, was either emerging or in the process of being rephrased. Each essay was available on the website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on the specific topic. Over the course of its month-long “life,” each essay received invited and unsolicited responses. The essays were proposals, from which the respondents picked up and created new strands of inquiry, thereby demonstrating the multidimensionality of each topic.

The book includes textual contributions from from artists and critics including James Welling, Sharon Lockhart, George Baker, Walead Beshty, Allen Ruppersberg, Allan McCollum, Charlie White, Mark Wyse, Darius Himes (Lay Flat contributor!), Shannon Ebner, John Divola, among others. In addition to the book’s essays, conversations, and panel discussions there are also a series of questions and answers about the contemporary state of photography.

Order your copy here.

from “The Bar Mitzvah and Other Tales of Living in Stereo”
© Unknown Photographer

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I’m a fan of Square America, the online archive of vernacular photography. I was happy to see one of their recent installments entitled “The Bar Mitzvah and Other Tales of Living in Stereo,” a collection of stereo-graphs from the ’50s turned into animated .gifs (3D!).

See the collection here.

(via The Exposure Project).

New York, circa 1940
© Helen Levitt

It was just a few days ago that I sat down with a copy of Helen Levitt’s latest monograph. Turning the pages, it was as if I were seeing all of the photographs all for the first time. Few photographers, I remember thinking to myself, are able bring such poetic moments to a hault or so lovingly capture their subjects in the way that Levitt seems to do with ease. Levitt trained with Henri Cartier-Bresson and worked alongside Walker Evans, but her photographs have taken on their own quiet legacy, both for me personally and for many admirers in the photography community.

James Agee once said of Levitt’s photographs that they are “as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know… [her photographs] combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”

It was with much sadness that I heard the news of Levitt’s death yesterday. I hoped some day to have a chance to meet her and thank her for her work, but I am glad to know that she passed away peacefully in her sleep.

Read the New York Times story here.

Mike Mandel sent me an e-mail recently reminding me to see an exhibition of Boston-based photographer Karl Baden’s Covering Photography collection, now up at the Boston Public Library in their Rare Books and Manuscripts exhibition space. The show, titled “Imitation, Influence… and Coincidence,” highlights books from Karl’s collection that either appropriate or seem to be influenced by famous photographs.

“Imitation, Influence… and Coincidence” at the Boston Public Library, 2008
© Karl Baden

BOOK: The Shackle (1976) by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
PHOTOGRAPH: Lovers, Budapest, 1915 by André Kertész
© Karl Baden

BOOK: The Road to Wigan Pier (1956) by George Orwell
PHOTOGRAPH: Three Generations of Welsh Miners, 1950 by Eugene Smith
© Karl Baden

BOOK: La Bâtarde (1976) by Violette Leduc
PHOTOGRAPH: Lovers Quarrel, 1936 by Brassaï
© Karl Baden

BOOK: Caddie Woodlawn (1970) by Carol Ryrie Brink
PHOTOGRAPH: Lucille Burroughs, 1936 by Walker Evans
© Karl Baden

You can read more about the collection and see more sample displays from the exhibition here. But if you’re in Boston, I highly recommend seeing it person. The show will be up until December 31st.

stills from Stranded in Canton, 1973
© William Eggleston

In 1973, William Eggleston picked up a Sony PortaPak and shot the intimate, black and white footage that would become Stranded in Canton, a 76 minute film documenting the soul of Memphis and New Orleans. The film was recently remastered in collaboration with filmmaker Robert Gordon and released by Twin Palms as a book/DVD package. For those of you who haven’t seen the film already, I highly recommend it.

While browsing the Eggleston Trust website the other day, I noticed an update to the “Films” section, which includes 14 short clips from Stranded in Canton. See those right here.

And, if you’re interested, you can backorder the book/DVD here.

cover of How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog, 1974
© Mike Mandel

Very few people are aware of How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog (1974), a self-published book by photographers Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan. Yet, in many ways, the book can be seen as a precursor to their seminal project, Evidence (1977).

Adapted from Sandra Phillips’ introduction to the 2004 edition of Evidence:

In 1974, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, produced their first collaborative book, How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog. This comprised a series of drawings and rather lowbrow photographic illustrations lifted from cheap ads or instructional manuals: the sort you would find on the back of comic books or inside matchbooks or in the pages of the (now defunct) Sunset House catalog. The advertised electric neck warmers, machines to strip corn off the cob, tape to repair the water hose for your car were arranged and cropped, and these wonderfully ordinary, naive pictures were reordered and became a mysterious and funny metaphorical book essentially about sex. Those strange gray pictures which demonstrated how a mechanical nose hair trimmer worked, or how to place potatoes on a metal spike to cook them more efficiently, resembled the collaged work of Jess, or Bruce Conner.

In How to Read Music, however, the pictures were arranged with a respect for the authority of the original image, which, while cropped (and excising the text) retains its identity while at the same time is altered by the anomalous relationship it has with the other pictures. Even though the mechanics they illustrate is decidedly low tech, mop handles, shoulder strap details, the consistent theme is of people using mechanical devices in a kind of banal but utopian association, women smiling giddily as they try on sunshades or telephone receivers. Only toward the end is there even a sense of foreboding: a closeup of a hand gun near a man’s shirtless chest, a man’s face covered with a ski mask except for the eyes and nose, a box of jewels and documents with ghostly flames licking its surface. Not surprisingly, this little book gives clues to the photographic project that immediately followed it…

The actual catalog is very hard to find. In fact, I only heard about it a few years ago because Mike filled in for a class taught by Bill Burke. Well, those of you who haven’t seen it are in for a treat. Mike recently posted some pages from the book on his Flickr page.

Here are a few of them:

page from How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog, 1974
© Mike Mandel

page from How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog, 1974
© Mike Mandel

page from How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog, 1974
© Mike Mandel

page from How to Read Music in One Evening, A Clatworthy Catalog, 1974
© Mike Mandel

See more from How to Read Music in One Evening here.

And, while you’re at it, take a look at Mike’s other projects from the ’70s and ’80s – Mrs. Kilpatric (1973), The Seven Never Before Published Portraits of Edward Weston (1974), Baseball Photographer Trading Cards (1975), Newsroom (1983), Making Good Time (1989) – as well as his billboards and photographic mosaics, which he continues to produce today.

Thanks, Mike!

William Eggleston in Memphis, 2008
© Juergen Teller

If you haven’t already, take a moment to read this article about William Eggleston from the November 2008 issue of W Magazine.

Jeffrey Ladd, author of 5B4, got in touch to inform me of a new publishing company he has started called Errata Editions. Working with publisher Valerie Sonnenthal and editorial director Ed Grazda, Jeffrey is giving creative direction to the project. Errata’s first releases, four books from a series called Books on Books, help get “the content of rare and out of print photobooks into the hands of new generations of photographers,” as Jeffrey wrote to me in the e-mail. Those titles are “currently ‘on press’ in China,” according to his blog post, which offers further explanation of the project:

The Books on Books series is an on-going publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible once again to photobook enthusiasts. Each in this series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or prohibitively expensive for most of us to experience. These are not facsimiles but complete studies of those original masterpieces. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series will span the breadth of practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study into the creation and meanings of these great works of art.

The current titles include:

Photographe de Paris by Eugene Atget
American Photographs by Walker Evans
Fait by Sophie Ristelhueber
In Flagrante by Chris Killip

This looks to be a very promising project. I’m curious to hear what readers think of the idea. But, in any event, I’m looking forward to seeing what else Jeffrey and the team do with Errata.

Find out more and view sample pages from the current titles on the website.

Over the last few years, Edward Burtynsky has been investigating the possibilities of long-term preservation for artifacts in hopes of finding a proper home for the 10,000-year Clock (also known as the “Clock of the Long Now”) and, in turn, has rediscovered a process for producing photographic prints that could resist fading for – no joke – as long as it takes for the Clock to cycle. Burtynsky has proposed the creation of a 10,000-year Gallery to house the Clock alongside a slowly rotated selection of long-life photographs.

If you’re anything like me, you’re getting chills just imagining a gallery space with the Clock (ticking once a year, the century hand advancing once every one hundred years, the cuckoo coming out on the millennium) and photographs lining the walls.

Here’s an excerpt from the Blog of Long Now, explaining more:

Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past. Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, “because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.”

Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn’t work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called “carbon transfer print.” It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone-the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany-and the black ink is carbon.

On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

The popularization of such printing methods would no doubt change the face of the photography. But at present, making just one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000 and only ten artisans in the world have the knowledge and skills to do it correctly, says Burtynsky.

Read the rest of the story here. And check back here for an .mp3 of Burtynsky’s Long Now Seminar, where he discussed the 10,000-year Gallery.

About two years ago, I mentioned my first real encounter with the work of Mike Mandel. At that time, Mike sat in for a class that Bill Burke was teaching and talked about his career. One of the early projects that he discussed was his set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (1975), a collection of portraits of photographers as baseball players with their “stats” on the back. These cards have since become collector’s items in the photography community but rarely do you see a complete set.

Well, as it turns out, Mike himself has put a complete collection on eBay.

Complete set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

As he writes in the listing,

The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards is a photo offset lithographic project that I authored and published in 1975. The project satirized the phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade.

Recently, I have offered complete sets for sale, but they are rare. This is a first edition of all 134 Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (plus one checklist, 135 cards in all). MINT CONDITION, offered for sale directly by the artist. Photographs by Mike Mandel. Texts, statistics and quotes by the respective artists printed on verso. Each card 3-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches. The reverse side for each card enabled the photographer to fill in their own personal data that referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards. In a sense, each photographer’s response provides an insight about how they approached their participation.

Some of the photographers, curators, and critics included are: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Ed Ruscha, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, Robert Cumming, Lewis Baltz, Duane Michals, Edmund Teske, Peter Bunnell, Robert Heinecken, Beaumont Newhall, etc. The cards are stored in archival baseball card pages, no pvc, acid free, 9 cards to a page. The set is collected and sold within a storage binder, black, pure archival polyproylene.

I will sign my card upon request.

Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards: Mike Mandel, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

Have a few thousand to spend? Looking to do it in the next three hours? Then hurry up and place a bid!

[thanks Jason]

UPDATE: The auction sold for $4,049. The person who bought it is probably kicking themselves for not buying the same exact item here for $2,950 (a savings of $1099).