Shane Lavalette

Jessica Backhaus’ latest monograph Once, Still & Forever is a painterly reflection on time, place, and emotion. Those familiar with Backhaus’ earlier titles Jesus and the Cherries, What Still Remains, One Day in November, or I Wanted to See the World know of her inquiring eye, and will be charmed by her continued exploration of the world’s most delicate fragments.

Before I even opened the book I marveled at the opalescent cloth on the cover, which shimmers purple from one direction and green from another. I may have a bit of object lust when in the proximity of deliberately designed photobooks but I found the same sort of magic and wonder present in Backhaus’ photographs as I entered the pages. Her abstractions of the everyday are imbued with meaning and emotion in a way that is often difficult to put words to, but always marvelous to view. As Backhaus herself explains it, “My photographs are like a mosaic, a puzzle that evokes the beauty of ordinary moments often ignored, as well as the residue of loves past and memories forgotten.”

A window painted with plants, a reel of weathered twine. The rain soaked rails of a train lead us further. Strange and familiar fruits. Glass bottles, vessels of the past. Refractions, reflections—spaces of silence and of sound, artifacts of darkness and golden light. What is vast becomes small, and what is small becomes vast. Backhaus paints with the layers of the world, finding strokes of beauty in the otherwise mundane. She reminds us of the power of looking and the importance of affection, present in every frame. She reminds us, ultimately, of our own existence.

Returning to her homeland of Germany after spending twenty-two years away was full of mixed emotions, anticipation and uncertainty. In Once, Still & Forever, Backhaus exposes the sorrows and joys of human experience through her own. By her side we discover that finding answers takes time, and that hardship can be one of life’s greatest gifts.

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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, March 28, 2013.
Once, Still & Forever can be purchased here.

As co-founder of the publishing house J&L Books and author of a handful of titles of his own including Sunbird (J&L, 2000), Crushed (J&L, 2003) and Raising Frogs for $$$ (J&L, 2006), Jason Fulford is certainly no stranger to the photobook. This holds true in viewing his latest publication, The Mushroom Collector (Soon Institute, 2010).

Like a scavenger hunt for something intangible, Fulford links together a series of photographs in numbered chronology, beginning decidedly on the book’s dust jacket: “1. It all started when Ted gave me the mushroom pictures,” reads the text beneath a postcard picturing Russula Pectinoides and a book of matches. Ted had discovered these ‘mushroom pictures’ in a box at a flea market before deciding to pass them on. Unassuming at first, over time the anonymous images began to resonate with Fulford in a way that he simply could not ignore, eventually informing his daily photographic practice.

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

Fulford’s pure fascination with imagery is likely what affords him the ability to create such splendor out of the otherwise overlooked. Combining the original flea market pictures with his own photographs and text, flipping through the book is a bit like watching him think out loud. As if images were words themselves, Fulford builds a visual vocabulary – assembling sentences out of a series of situations, exploring the significance of photographs and the relationships that arise in the space between them. While he attempts to make sense of his own images through the ‘filter’ of the mushroom pictures, the reader encounters a variety of scenes: an image of 29 cents in change on a tile floor, a garage door and cement driveway, a folded piece of construction paper, a dark stairwell, a shadow of a rock, the sun setting over a sailboat, experiments with sealife and an imaginary circus. Moving back and forth between ‘reality’ and ‘abstraction’ the scenes are specific observations but also seem to pose as questions.

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

The mushroom pictures traveled with Fulford when he went down South and worked on an island off the coast of Florida. Working in and out of his studio (sometimes bringing objects from the outside world in to be photographed), each image he made functioned as a sort of ‘rehearsal’ for the next. The reader connects the dots with the bits of text that accompany images, along with a sense of serendipity that I believe Fulford was, conscious of it or not, deeply in tune with. Just as the first was found on the front, the last image is printed on the back of the dust cover, suggesting that the idea cannot be contained within a single publication. In fact, Fulford has since continued the project while in residence at The Soon Institute in Amsterdam. Images 111-171 are currently archived online and another, pocket-sized book was just published to serve as the “Appendix.”

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

spread from The Mushroom Collector, 2010
© Jason Fulford / The Soon Institute

It’s rare and refreshing to experience a photographic project that is so playful. Involving experimentation, accidents and discovery, after looking through the book once it’s just as delightful to loop back for another read. Whether you’re familiar with Jason Fulford’s work or not, The Mushroom Collector is bound to intrigue.

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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, March 12, 2011.
The Mushroom Collector can be purchased here.

In the spirit of his oeuvre, Roe Ethridge‘s Farewell Horse is at first encounter both seductive and elusive. The book itself, bound in natural cloth with a tipped-in photograph on the cover, is structured in three distinct and seemingly unrelated parts – the central one being black and white photographs of wild horses. These horses, I researched and discovered, were at one time domesticated but later abandoned on Cumberland Island off of Georgia’s coast. Outtakes from a magazine shoot (from which many of Ethridge’s fine art images derive), the feral animals are pictured intimately against palm trees, vinyl siding and on the beach. The photographs immediately imply a situation fraught with solitude yet occasionally reveal moments of glory.

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

In conversation with the work of Thomas Ruff, Michael Schmidt, Christopher Williams and other artists who are interested in the language and conventions of the medium, Ethridge embraces the arbitrariness of the image. “For me, serendipity and intention are both necessary,” he has said of his work, which comes through in his practice. By arranging and rearranging his photographs in various edits and contexts, Ethridge continually reveals their elasticity and reminds us of the possibility for new meanings later down the road.

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

Between 1995 and 1997, Ethridge made the thirteen blurry black and white photographs of flower arrangements that follow the horses. At that time, he just graduated from college and owned a 4×5 camera body but no lens. With little money, he rigged a pinhole lens and photographed the still lifes using “modified textiles” (cheap patterned fabric that he painted on) as backdrops. Ethridge traces his inspiration for these works to both the Bechers and Matisse, which is surprisingly apparent. The studies are at once dreary and sublime.

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

spread from Farewell Horse, 2009
© Roe Ethridge / Rat Hole Gallery

The color photographs that begin the book elicit an eerie sense of mystery. Their subject matter is rather ordinary, even familiar, perhaps scenes from Ethridge’s own daily life: a red checkered umbrella, an empty chair, the shadow of a fence, a snowy picture overlooking part of the Williamsburg bridge. Farewell Horse offers no accompanying text, just these sets of photographs for the viewer to reflect upon. It isn’t long before we realize that part of the point is this search for significance. Opportunely, Ethridge’s photographs have a distinctive ability to reveal the layers of meaning that lie beyond the surface if only we’re willing to really look.

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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, February 15, 2010.
Farewell Horse can be purchased here.

Guardians of Solitude, 2009
© Laura McPhee / Iris Editions Ltd.

Iris Editions Ltd., the collaborative effort of NYC-based Kristopher Graves and London-based Sergio Fernández, has released the first of what is likely to be a remarkable series of luxury edition large-format books. At a scale of about 16×20 in (41×51 cm) and beautifully bound in black cloth with her name embossed on the cover, Laura McPhee‘s Guardians of Solitude is easily one of largest and certainly among the most lavish photo books I have ever encountered.

spread from Guardians of Solitude, 2009
© Laura McPhee / Iris Editions Ltd.

spread from Guardians of Solitude, 2009
© Laura McPhee / Iris Editions Ltd.

Much like viewing an artist’s portfolio, the book is “read” by spreading it out on a table and carefully turning the oversized pages. McPhee’s photographs in the book were all made in 2008 in three canyons of the White Cloud Mountains in central Idaho, an area that just three years earlier encountered a wildfire that destroyed over 40,000 acres of forest. McPhee focuses her 8×10 camera on this forest and in particular, the somber often blackened trees that still stand amongst the re-growth. The 30 color plates in the book have been given a stunning edit and are printed with an attention to detail that makes it difficult to separate them from exhibition quality prints, perhaps one of the principal draws of the book.

spread from Guardians of Solitude, 2009
© Laura McPhee / Iris Editions Ltd.

Despite this, I can’t help wondering what is lost with the excessive scale. Might some readers find the book’s exotic format distracting? Is there a large scale that still provides intimacy? One thing is for sure: this new series of books reminds us of the uncharted possibilities of photographic monographs. They will no doubt woo collectors and captivate book lovers such as myself.

Soon to come from Iris Editions Ltd. are books by Lois Conner, David Hilliard, Abelardo Morell and Matthew Pillsbury.

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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, November 30, 2009.
Guardians of Solitude can be purchased here.

With an open-ended book commission from Charlotte Cotton of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, artist Shannon Ebner worked with the innovative design team Dexter Sinister (a.k.a. David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey) to produce what is perhaps one of the most intriguing photographic books to surface this year.

Though elegantly printed and designed, Ebner did not intend to produce a standard artist monograph and the non-traditional structure of The Sun as Error makes this very clear; each page is broken into quadrants and numbered to facilitate their reading. The book does not just include the photographs that we have seen already, but also a number of illustrational diagrams (on such subjects as optics and optical illusions, sign language, handwriting and cartography, among others), various photographic experiments culled from the artist’s archive as well as an explanatory “Contents” section. Eventually we encounter a beautiful sequence of rigid black and white photographs of letters made from cinder blocks, arranged across spreads to spell words: DAY / DONE / GONE / SUN / GO / LAKE / GO / HILL / GO / TREE / ALL / GOOD / PEACE / SLEEP / GREAT / MYSTERY / HERE. For me, this is the highlight of Ebner’s imaginative investigations, and as with most of the book, this poetry is left to the reader to interpret.

spread from The Sun as Error, 2009
© Shannon Ebner / LACMA

spread from The Sun as Error, 2009
© Shannon Ebner / LACMA

spread from The Sun as Error, 2009
© Shannon Ebner / LACMA

The sun is a central symbol in the book and is encountered through text, its literal depiction and through our own consideration of the limitations and processes of the photographic medium, which Ebner underscores at different stages in the book. Another is the asterisk gracing the cover in the form of a bright yellow screenprint (a homage to the graphic designer Muriel Cooper, co-founder of MIT’s “Visual Language Workshop” in 1975), which is of course a mark of reference and aesthetically rather solar in itself. These notions of reference and multiple meanings seem to be a large part of Ebner’s conceptual motivation for the book, and indeed her photographs in general.

With The Sun as Error, Shannon Ebner sophisticatedly exposes the layers of meaning in photography that are often alluded to but rarely addressed with such vigor. The juxtaposition and interplay of the variety of elements within the book offer new dimensions to her already multifarious and complex images. In collaboration with Dexter Sinister, she has produced a striking object that promotes many readings and is, above all, a considered investigation into the intricate language of photography.

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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, October 27, 2009.
The Sun as Error can be purchased here.