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Beyond Maps and Atlases. By Bertien Van Manen.
Mack, 2016.

Beyond Maps and Atlases

Reviewed by Blake Andrews

Beyond Maps and Atlases
Photographs by Bertien Van Manen
Mack, London, England, 2016. 60 pp., 32 color illustrations, 10¼x11½".

Bertien Van Manen, who recently turned 74, has been photographing for a good long while. I don't want to say she has it down to a routine — on the contrary, she is still full of surprises. But at this point she knows what works for her and what doesn't, and what works very well is to spend a while in a distant foreign place, embed sequentially in local homes, and shoot offhand moments using a simple point-n-shoot film camera. Van Manen grew up in a Dutch mining town and is drawn to plain rural communities. "I'm mostly interested in people who don't act like they're interesting," she says. She's covered China, Russia, and Appalachia in this fashion. The specific locales fade in importance. What shines through is her wonderful style, a sort of anti-professional approach incorporating chance, misexposure, crude flash, intimacy, and an eye for the poetic.

Beyond Maps and Atlases. By Bertien Van Manen. Mack, 2016.

In the past few years Van Manen has turned her gaze to Ireland. The resulting book of photographs, Beyond Maps and Atlases straddles the line between the familiar and the mythic. On one hand they show the Ireland ingrained in popular consciousness: verdant, pastoral, and hemmed in by dark seas. But this isn't the Ireland of pop photojournalism. Instead, Van Manen has twisted the material in her inimitable way into a land of murk, serendipity, salt-of-the-earth characters, and, ultimately, bright beautiful open spaces. She's tapped into the secret subterranean tunnel connecting Russia to Appalachia to The Emerald Isle.

Beyond Maps and Atlases. By Bertien Van Manen. Mack, 2016

Even if Van Manen's photos make the world feel smaller, this book is more physically imposing book than her previous efforts. It's roughly a third larger than Moonshine or Let's Sit Down Before We Go, and far bigger than Easter and Oak Trees. There's a subtle island effect at work in the layout. The photos are wider than before, and float on expansive white pages. The very first image — a diver about to hit the water — invites the reader to plunge right in. A few images of wet spray immerse the reader, followed by several pages of dark brooding scenes.

Beyond Maps and Atlases. By Bertien Van Manen. Mack, 2016

By the time the reader gets his or her head above water they're halfway through the book. After a brief interlude of intimate candid portraits and more lush murk, the viewpoint recedes and brightens, helped along by a nicely light-leaked frame. The scene is set for the last four images — wide-open beaches in open sun. It's the light at end of the tunnel. The mood is transformed. But, but… I thought I was looking at Ireland… What happened to Ireland?

One clue to the project's disparate nature might be found in the Seamus Heaney poem A Herbal:

As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof
…
Where can it be found again, 
An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases
…

The last two lines lend themselves perfectly as the title, beyond / Maps and atlases…, a phrase which captures the remote, fantastical aspect of Ireland. But it's Heaney's verse leading up to that title which is maybe more instructive, a series of discordant forces held in tension. For me they hint at the shifting nature of the Van Manen's photos. This book takes the reader on an unsettled journey from blue sky to cloud and back again, maybe to the edge of life.

Beyond Maps and Atlases. By Bertien Van Manen. Mack, 2016

"At first," she writes, "working in Ireland I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. My husband had died. I dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere. I was guided by a feeling and a search, a longing for some kind of meaning in a place of myths and legends. There was mystery and endlessness at the edge of a land beyond which is nothing but a vast expanse."

Beyond Maps and Atlases. By Bertien Van Manen. Mack, 2016

So Van Manen was grappling with demons beyond photography. Her husband had died! And after life comes… what? Who knows? For a photographer, tapping into that elsewhere world beyond maps and atlases is quite a challenge. Because the raw material for any documentary project is the world of existence, the known world. Afterwards maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe not. Perhaps the tunnels all connect somewhere on a bright beach with horses. Your guess is as good as mine, or Van Manen's.—BLAKE ANDREWS

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BLAKE ANDREWS is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

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The Middle of Somewhere. By Sam Harris. Ceiba, 2015.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Daniel Boetker-Smith who has selected The Middle of Somewhere by Sam Harris from Ceiba.

"Publishers ceiba are fast becoming one of the most dynamic and talked about photobook makers around. In 2015 ceiba, run by Eva Maria Kunz, released The Middle of Somewhere, which was shortlisted for Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Award 2015, a finalist at GuatePhoto Festival and won a Lucie Award. The book is Sam Harris’ chronicle of a decade or so of his family’s life, encompassing a journey from England to Australia (via India), and a spiritual and visceral exploration of the realities and magic of childhood and family.

The simple beauty of this book is centered around a diaristic thematic; it looks and feels like a handmade journal that’s been improvised and decorated as the miles have accrued. On further exploration, The Middle of Somewhere is much more than this; a smart collaborative process has resulted in a book that reaches beyond the everyday, and talks of breathing in and experiencing moments in a way that is unafraid and raw. Harris’ wife and daughters are central in the book, we rarely see the photographer himself, and there are notes, scribbles, and drawings by his family throughout that gives the sense that each copy of this book must be somehow unique. The way the book is constructed, the detail that is incorporated, and the attention to the tactile experience suggests that there is only one of these books in the world, an edition of 1. There is a sense of holding something precious in your hands. This plays with how the viewer experiences the narrative presented, it's like being given someone’s treasured family photo album to leaf through, delicately and slowly, wary of damage. It also, somehow, feels like this could be your family, your childhood, your memories.

This feeling is enhanced further by the photographs themselves; in the images we rarely move beyond arms length from the subjects. Apart from a couple of landscapes the majority of photographs place us firmly within the family boundaries, for the duration of the book we become part of the Harris clan. We see, through the course of the book, his daughters growing, and we see their changing relationship to their surroundings from the privileged position of their father, right there, guiding them through. This book is a gift from a hippy father to his daughters.

I was asked by someone yesterday to describe Harris’ book in one sentence, I said without thinking: 'it's like looking at a Super-8 film in book form.' This is a unique and special book."—Daniel Boetker-Smith

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The Middle of Somewhere. By Sam Harris. Ceiba, 2015.

Daniel Boetker-Smith is a writer, curator, educator and artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the Director of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive, a not-for-profit organization established in 2013 to promote and share the books of photographers from the Asia-Pacific region at festivals, galleries, and institutions all over the world. He regularly writes on photography for a number of online and print publications. He is also coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Prize and a Founder of Photobook Melbourne, the only international photobook festival in the Asia-Pacific region. Daniel is the Course Director at the Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

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March 28/42 17 Years, 2015 – © Amy Friend

Are we stardust?This question is posed by Canadian photographer Amy Friend as an image title for one of her new works in the Dare alla Luce series, and yet also serves to aptly represent the underlying theme and tone contained within the project. Originally introduced to the Photographer's Showcase in 2014, Friend began work on Dare alla Luce in 2012 by first attempting to embroider vintage photographs, but while holding one image up she quickly realized the light pouring though the photograph's pierced surface was more dynamic. Quickly pivoting the project to rephotograph the effects created by her technique, Friend's Dare alla Luce has complex relationships with light, permanence, nostalgia, and memory as they relate to common photographic practice. photo-eye Gallery's Lucas Shaffer recently interviewed Amy Friend to find out more about the series, how it has evolved, and where it is headed.

Are we Stardust?, 2014 – © Amy Friend

Lucas Shaffer:     How is the project progressing? What has changed since you first started making these images?

Amy Friend:     The project is ready to become “something else” — what I mean by this is I am responding to the photographs differently than a few years ago when the project began. I have become more and more interested in the light and less interested in the what is occupied in the photographs. Now to contradict myself, I am also more intrigued by the individuals I come across in the photos. There is a certain essence to an image that hits you and won’t let you go. I allow guttural responses to remain. I love the quick jolt and unexpected response it instigates.

LS:     Why is the light of greater interest for you? How do you view the light in your images and what is it doing?

AF:     There are many consistencies in the process of making this work with the light being the most constant element. As I consider my methodologies in this series and in earlier work, light has a strong weight in terms of concept and application. In the Dare alla Luce series we encounter light several times — the light that reflected off of the subjects in the original image (as it is necessary to create the image), again as it filters through the manipulated perforations in the photos and it is present in the final image. This amalgamation is interesting to me. Aside from this description, it is the layering of meaning that occurs when we look at photographs. They change with each “visitation” and that is where the idea of light as a portal comes forward. Light mediates meaning; it plays with the technical aspects of photography, the theories that reference how light is “an umbilical cord.” But, most of all I am interested in its potential for multiple “reads,” it keeps my interest as it disallows a full viewing of the original image and (I think) lures us to consider the source of the light.

Before the War, 2014 – © Amy Friend

LS:     On your website your statement lists the work in paradoxical terms – the images are “fragments of everything and nothing.” Can you elaborate on that statement?

AF:     I view these photographs (somewhat) as a marker of an entire life, an “I have been here” statement and yet everything else is lost. Most, if not all information about the photograph is absent. This is sometimes a consequence of the “seller,” they remove photos from an album and they are dispersed. We see only a fragment of a much larger history. I relate this to life in general, we, those of us that are here now, only experience an infinitesimal piece of existence, whatever that means.

LS:     Are your images attempting to illuminate a connection between people that is outside the present? The here and now?

AF:     In a way, yes… but what I am most interested in is the complexity of time and the layers of meaning that occur when you engage with a visual form of the past — in this case a photograph. I am interested in how we negotiate the meeting of “here and now” and “the past.”

LS:     I see these images as an intriguing combination of nostalgia and the supernatural. Are you thinking about either of these while making the pictures?

Isolde, 2015 – © Amy Friend

AF:     Yes, I think the work beckons this type of encounter. I see myself in the work. I am reminded of those I have loved. I mourn and celebrate during the process. Yet I am always thinking about the medium of photography. It is so specific.

LS:     What do you mean by that?

AF:     Photography brings with it a certain type of encounter. With that said, this encounter is nuanced by the actual subjects and technical processes related to the photographs. The connection to the “real” is of course questioned but still an unshakeable layer that is tied to the medium.

LS:     I think that is interesting because the source images, especially the people, in your work feel familiar yet anonymous. Can you speak to that?

AF:     They are all anonymous to me, (although, I have worked with “familial archives” in the past). I wonder if that familiarity comes from my own preference for the photos I choose to work with or for what is available in the market? It may also be that these images are all of everyday people, as far as I know. That commonality may be what feels familiar? As I write this, I think about my choices and how I genuinely am curious about the people in the photos and about the photographer who shot the image as well. I see them from multiple points of view.

LS:     What do you like most about making these images? What keeps the project going for you?

AF:     I am interested in the subtle fluctuations of my focus with each piece. As I have searched for the photos I work with, I have also learned a great deal about what is collected and why. It is interesting to learn about this vernacular aspect from my point of view.

Atlantic City 1948 (Part 2), 2014 – © Amy Friend

LS:     What’s next? Where is Dare alla Luce headed?

AF:     I have reached a place with this work where I will slow down with it and let it rest for a while. I have been so immersed in it for a few years now that I am ready to do something new. I know there is unfinished business with the ideas I have, but I like to let things ferment. Time will tell where it goes, but I know, as I mentioned earlier, that the “light” is at the forefront of my thoughts for the new chapter of this work. As for what is next specifically? I am in the throws of exhibiting and continuing to work on a new series titled Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life. I have some of the work up on my website now and I will update that with more work shortly. This new work was shot off of projections on a selection of vintage mirrors.

LS:     Who are your favorite artists? Is there any one in particular you’re drawn to for inspiration.

AF:     Oh gosh, I am inspired by so many things and artists. I will just set down a random list as it suits the way that my own thoughts work when it comes to inspiration. Anish Kapoor, Petah Coyne, rain, stars, water, my daughter’s fascination with the moon, Susan Derges, John Chiara, Masao Yamamoto, birds, dirt, sky, Chris, McCaw, Sara Anne Johnson, Osheen Harruthoonyan, Lhasa De Sela, Pablo Neruda…

Winter, 1931, 2013 – © Amy Friend

View Dare alla Luce - Portfolio 1 (2014)

View Dare alla Luce – Portfolio 2 (2016)

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For additional information, and to purchase prints, please contact Gallery Director Anne Kelly at 505-988-5152 x 121 or anne@photoeye.com.

Umbra. By Viviane Sassen. Prestel, 2015.

Umbra
Reviewed by Christopher J. Johnson

Umbra
Photographs by Viviane Sassen
Prestel, Lakewood, USA, 2015. 196 pp., 200 color illustrations, 10¼x13¾".

Shadow, we are told, is the theme.

Shadow accentuating people, objects, even concepts, and allowing them to emerge. But not just shadow — Umbra — which is the darker-most inner region of a shadow; in other words — the shadow’s deepest, even coldest, point.

Yet shadow in this book is not shadow, rather it is an absence. Most of Viviane Sassen’s images employ shadow as if to apply a negative space – not shadow, but the absence of color, of volume of form or some more socio- or emotional actuality (an actuality like a void such as the dead create).

A well-known image of Sassen’s is contained in this edition of Umbra; it shows a grave dug into an almost rust-colored earth. The grave is open, it is like an enflamed wound with the red earth that has been displaced by the gravedigger ridging its sides – the maw of the grave reminds us not of the rest of the dead, but of their absence, the void they create; the rich earth remains, but the world is different and less full.

Umbra. By Viviane Sassen. Prestel, 2015.

And this photograph expresses Sassen’s use of something deeper than shadow; perhaps the coldness of shadow is a better description, the cold of absence. In landscapes she overlays colored transparent surfaces, creating red squares and black voids in the African desert reminding us of heat and, with the black, oblique synonyms for absence: hunger, thirst, inflexibility.

For Sassen color and dark and shade are tools to be gathered and applied; this material is something like a wattage that she uses to amplify, modify or control her images. In her fashion photography, startlingly painted bodies (bright blues, greens, reddish pinks) accentuate the model’s contours and highlight the clothing. The effect makes her models more like hangers or mannequins. In Umbra color is used to express the breadth of life — an absence to express life’s richness.

Umbra. By Viviane Sassen. Prestel, 2015.

The book’s construction encourages explorations of the hidden. Even the mysteriousness of the book’s form furthers meaning — images and poems are hidden between page that are only half-cut, the tops of the pages are still connected, causing one to lift them apart to discover their contents in a similar way to how one would lift up a stone to look at what lies beneath. Once a reader can move past the strangeness (and the desire to cut the top crease of the pages), the construction reveals itself to be clever in how it forces us to interact with the subject matter at a level almost on par with it.

Umbra. By Viviane Sassen. Prestel, 2015.

For those enamored with the previous edition of Umbra, a sort of loose-plate portfolio set by Oodee Books, this book may not satisfy you in the same way. That collection contained the poems found in Prestel’s edition, but only 11 images (whereas this new edition contains 200 images) and though both have a sense of intimacy within their engagement, they are very different. The Oodee edition makes you feel like you’ve got something precious and valuable in your hands; the Prestel edition (and this suits me more) is like having a mystery in your hands, or better yet a dioramic experience with depth beyond a two-dimensional photograph.—CHRISTOPHER J. JOHNSON

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CHRISTOPHER J. JOHNSON lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where is manager of photo-eye Bookstore. Aside from this he is a writer for the Meow Wolf art collective and book critic for The CFile Foundation. His first book of poetry, &luckier, will be released by the University of Colorado in November 2016.

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Darkened Days
Photographs by Simone Kappeler
The Douglas Hyde Gallery

~~$37.00~~$22.95

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"Simone Kappeler's photographs reflect the atmosphere and moods of the people and landscapes she encounters at home in Switzerland and abroad on her travels. Typically her images have a dreamlike quality and an intense or melancholy tone; they are often meditations on loss and the passing of time."—from the publisher

State
By Paolo Woods and Arnaud Robert
Elysee

~~$72.00~~$50.00

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"This book focuses on photographer Paolo Woods’ work in Haiti where he has settled in 2010. With an journalistic ambition and with the journalist and writer Arnaud Robert, he draws on the universal aspect of a national adventure that concerns us more than we think. Haiti is a contradiction, a nation particularly proud of its history, language and singular culture, however with a somewhat absent and dysfunctional state. 'State' deals with a fundamental issue: what occurs in a society in which the government is inefficient and the state fails to provide basic services to its population?"—from the publisher

Sete #12
Photographs by Christopher Anderson
Images En Manœuvres Editions

~~$45.00~~$19.95

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"In Sete, they’ve heard it all before. To get to the heart of this city, it is worth finding the right tempo, to slide into its rhythm, to find the right pitch. There is plenty of music in Sete, music of many kinds. Attuned to the ebb and flow of the tide, carried away by gusts of wind, lulled by the shimmering light of the pond, sidling through the tiny hilly streets leading towards the crublands, winding their way down the railroad, reminded of Italy while celebrating love and romance, or busting out the brass and percussion in time for the joust. Generally, when we think of images, when we look at them and try to tame them, it’s the idea–or the reality–of silence that imposes itself. Yet, when Christopher Anderson crossed through Sète, it is more a noise, rather than a rhythm, that immediately imposes itself."—from the publisher

Colossal Youth
Photographs by Andreas Weinand
Peperoni Books

~~$36.50~~ $29.95

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"While the first episode of the “Simpsons” is broadcasted in the USA, Florence Griffith-Joyner wins three Olympic gold medals in Seoul, the Berlin Wall falls and Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web, the storm of youth rages within the clique, going full blast. The emotional dizziness in the cosmos of invincibility, love, sex, drugs, alcohol, refusal, crash and resignation is always greater than the world out there."—from the publisher

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Hanezawa Gardens. By Anders Edstrom.
Mack, 2015.

Hanezawa Gardens

Reviewed by George Slade

Hanezawa Gardens
Photographs by Anders Edstrom
Mack, London, England, 2015. In English. 323 pp., 224 color illustrations, 8 ¼x10".

The opening pages of Hanezawa Garden seemed quite unpromising. The dedication, “for my Mother” — pretty generic. And what could be more banal as an opening spread than verso: a badly exposed image of shadowy people in what might be a hotel lobby or bar, center-weighted autofocus scooting past the two putative human subjects to land on and expose for the post-modernist vase/lamp in the background, and recto: a comparable photo, flash-lit, adequately exposed and focused, more legible but only marginally more interesting for the gain. Both images seemingly from the same underwhelming event, captured on film processed, for all we know, by big-box one-hour photo circa 1982. The kind of photos that may have seemed important at the moment, but lose whatever import they had once the trip is over and the “memories” come back from the processor.

Well, don’t judge a book by its cover, or its first half signature. First impressions, in this case, are unquestionably deceiving. Maybe intentionally so. All of the above gain significance as we read further into Edström’s subtle, ingenious narrative.

Hanezawa Gardens. By Anders Edstrom. Mack, 2015.

Turn to the second spread. An ordinary, but well-seen and -exposed nighttime view along a snowy lane, tire tracks and footprints suggesting the lightness of the precipitation and confirming the truly pedestrian aspect of the image. Halation at the top of the frame, an attention-grabber issuing from a streetlight, hovers above a shadowy, indistinct hillside. The recto is graced with a day-lit image of imminent architectural ruin, the kind of decomposition photography loves to record, present here in an Asian vernacular. Admittedly, a reader may have been predisposed toward that accent, given “Hanezawa” in the book’s title and the opening pair of photographs, set in an apparently Asian environment. Nonetheless, it’s there to see — which, as I think about it, is a fine mantra with which to approach this book (and a lot of the most gratifying photography too, though that’s the subject for another essay elsewhere). Just look. Just look!

Hanezawa Gardens. By Anders Edstrom. Mack, 2015.

So many movies have opening scenes that, upon reviewing, offer a narrative overture, a compression and foreshadowing of things to come in the work as a whole. Edström has exquisitely emulated that trope in this book. In four pages he has set the scene for the subsequent evolution of the book.

The story, as it unfolds page by page, is one of change. A dilapidated, largely overgrown piece of developed property is transformed into new construction. Fences and tarps go up, intruding on the night scene of the beginning. Heavy equipment arrives to usher in the new by razing the old. Edström has shown us how natural processes were doing the work, but all those meetings in hotel lobbies and around shiny architectural models insinuate that waiting for eventual decay won’t meet deadlines.

Hanezawa Gardens. By Anders Edstrom. Mack, 2015.

That brilliant street light in the second-spread photograph signaled the point of contention, the target for developers. Those of us who love worn-in things, especially those that reveal natural materials and building modes as do the spaces recorded in the first two-thirds of Hanezawa Garden, know the fate of that hillside lot all too well.

Hanezawa Gardens. By Anders Edstrom. Mack, 2015.

Edström builds the story, clue by linking clue. Those opening spread images take on weight as foreshadowings of the disruption to come. Use your best three-dimensional visual memory to unfold this origami narrative. As the building disappears, the story grows. Read carefully, then return to the beginning and read again. Read forward and backward. Stop on a spread, then reverse direction. Find the clues. The images tell the story; they lay out the space, including the streets around the hillside lot, in a bread-crumb diagram. There is no cinematic establishing shot, no overall view that gives us the whole scene. That point-of-view would have involved some extraordinary mechanics, a helicopter, hot-air balloon, cherry-picker crane, or a friendly god. This is, again, a pedestrian view, a tale of dismantling assembled detail by detail.

Hanezawa Gardens. By Anders Edstrom. Mack, 2015.

I must admit, I don’t always read essays in photography books. (Another topic for another essay elsewhere.) I like to let the photographs do the talking. In this case, the photographs speak so eloquently I read the essay in order to ascertain and amplify the structure in which they have achieved such potency. Without revealing much of C. W. Winter’s text (contained in a booklet loosely inserted in the back, indicative perhaps of its ancillary, expository relationship to the book’s essence), I will offer the following excerpt as an enticement.

Winter closely regards an image well into Hanezawa Garden and describes its effects. “Through this passage” — the photograph as passage — “one can begin to discover a sense of duration and resistance that is so central to Edström’s project. A patience. A waiting. A refusal of the speed of the dominant economy.” Please emulate this mode as you encounter Edström’s “project.” Don’t just see. Look. And reap the pleasures of patience.—GEORGE SLADE

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GEORGE SLADE, a longtime contributor to photo-eye, is a photography writer, curator, historian and consultant. He can be found online at http://rephotographica-slade.blogspot.com/

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My Last Day At Seventeen. By Doug Dubois. aperture, 2015.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Christian Michael Filardo who has selected My Last Day At Seventeen by Doug Dubois from Aperture.

"My Last Day At Seventeen brings me back to Earth. It’s a coming-of-age story that transcends the concept of borders; a memoir for those who know we’re only getting older. In My Last Day At Seventeen, US-born photographer Doug Dubois examines the lives of youth growing up in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. Behind the camera Dubois isn’t the enemy he’s the ally. We start the book by surveying our cast, a few portraits and some shots of the streets, people hanging around outside. Guns are pointed at the camera, children wrestle in front of fires and jump off docks, while others casually roll something to smoke. Despite the intensity, the images are charming, intimate, and warm. Dubois has isolated a moment in time; the adults are gone, and characters emerge.

Dubois rewards us with details, a pair of lavender Nikes, a red straw; he’s setting the mood. Dubois is a veteran — the light is always right, the colors saturated and beautiful. These photos move quickly; boys flip off the camera, dirty clothes fill a bathtub, a girl carves the shape of a star into her forearm with a sharp object, while a young man lifts up his shirt to reveal a tattoo of Christ’s head wrapped in banners reading 'Only God Can Judge Me.' It’s hard not to linger on most images in this hardbound monograph. I can’t imagine them outside of book form. They require more than just a glance, more than just a few minutes. This body of work is one that belongs between a front and back cover.

The photographs are accompanied by graphic illustrations by Patrick Lynch that depict what feel like personal stories of area youth. Lynch’s comics and Dubois’ images are sandwiched between one another throughout the book and create a loose narrative that helps give voice to some of the photographed individuals, divides the photographic sequences up into smaller groups and encourages the viewer to slow down for a moment.

At once, a single image feels joyful, nostalgic, and chaotic. Dubois is unpacking something here; he exists alongside these stories, and it feels like he’s been here before. For a moment the decadence and glory of being young stands still and Dubois presents us with what feels like the truth. This is required reading."—Christian Michael Filardo

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My Last Day At Seventeen. By Doug Dubois. aperture, 2015.

Christian Michael Filardo is a photographer and composer living and working in Santa Fe, NM. Filardo has worked for VICE magazine, Believer Magazine, the Phoenix New Times, and is the current shipping manager at photo-eye Bookstore. He is a recent recipient of an honorarium in new music from Oberlin College’s Modern Music Guild. Filardo’s first book, Say My Last Name Softly, a collaboration with Marie Claire Bryant will be released in April 2016 on Holy Page Records.

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The Potato Eaters, 2014– © Richard Tuschman

Richard Tuschman is a storyteller. In his latest series, Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz, Tuschman expands on the convincing and cinematic narrative style he established with Hopper Meditations. Tuschman stages the series in 1930s Krakow focusing on the plight of a Jewish family in pre-war Poland. photo-eye reached out to Tuschman for details regarding the inspiration to the work, his unique photographic technique, and the progression of his style. Prints from Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz are available now in small limited editions and will be on view this fall in a full-scale exhibition at photo-eye Gallery.

Pale Light, 2015– © Richard Tuschman

"Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz is a novella told in staged photographs. It portrays an episode in the life of a fictional Jewish family living in Krakow, Poland in the year 1930. Set in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz, the series was inspired by visits to Krakow, where my wife, Ewa, grew up and attended University. This is also not far from where many of my own East European Jewish ancestors lived before immigrating to America around 1900. The project is my attempt to visually weave together narrative fiction with strands of both cultural and family history, while paying homage to painters I love, like Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Balthus, and Di Chirico, as well as photographers like Bill Brandt.

Couple in the Street, 2014– © Richard Tuschman

Dreamlike and poetic in style, Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz tells a tale primarily of loss. Death, the fraying of family bonds, and feelings of grief haunt many of the images, but these are also punctuated by moments of love, longing, and tenderness. The neighborhood of Kazimierz itself is a metaphor for loss and decay. As described in 1935 by the Jewish historian, Meir Balaban, by then the Jews remaining in the 'once vibrant' neighborhood of Kazimierz were 'only the poor and the ultra-conservative.' And while the series takes place some years before the death camps of the Holocaust, a growing darkness is apparent, along with the underlying awareness that most likely and tragically, the fates of all of the characters are doomed by history.

Like Hopper Meditations, my previous series, the images in Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz were created by digitally marrying dollhouse-size dioramas with live models. First, I built, painted and photographed the sets in my studio. I then photographed the live models against a plain backdrop, and lastly, made the digital composites in Photoshop. This way of working affords me control over the elements of set design, lighting, and composition. All of these aspects are significantly inspired by both theatre and cinema, as well as the artists I mentioned. While I strive to make the miniature sets as convincing as possible, they deviate just enough from reality to enhance the theatrical, slightly surreal mood.

The Dream, 2014– © Richard Tuschman

In an attempt to both depart from and build upon Hopper Meditations in which each image contained its own discrete story, all of the images in Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz are linked to a larger narrative arc. While I have a particular sequence of events in my own mind, I like to think of this story as open-ended, perhaps as movie stills from an unseen motion picture. Thus, each viewer is left to ponder and interpret each image, to fill in the gaps between the images, or to rearrange their chronological sequence. It is my hope that in this way, the pictures in Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz reflect the fleeting, fluid nature of both memory, and of dreams."–Richard Tuschman

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View Hopper Meditations

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For more information and to purchase prints please contact Gallery Director Anne Kelly at 505-988-5152 x 121.