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PDN Book Reviews
Los Alamos Most of us take road trips and come back with a few half-decent snapshots. When William Eggleston took a road trip 30 years ago, he came back with Los Alamos, an essential collection of pictures on which the entire canon of color photography was built. The photographs in Los Alamos were taken in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when Eggleston had just started experimenting with color imagery. Here, in his native Memphis and on various travels through the South, Southwest and California, Eggleston began taking the kind of pictures he is now known for: the perfectly composed salt and pepper shakers on the ledge of a roadside food stand. The sunglassed stranger in a phone booth. A glimpse of a beehive hairdo in a small-town diner. It’s a real treat to see Eggleston’s first color picture: a pompadoured grocery clerk pushing a shopping cart in the gorgeous golden light of early evening. It’s classic Eggleston—a seemingly casual shot, at once accessible and enigmatic. Los Alamos isn’t quite that extensive, but it is substantial. For one thing, it’s physically enormous (measuring about four times the size of his more petite and also recently reissued Guide). It’s also well designed, with impeccably printed plates (which thankfully do not run into the gutter), created using the dye-transfer processes Eggleston pioneered for fine-art work in the Sixties. Viewers got a little taste of the Los Alamos series in The New York Times Magazine’s “Portfolio” last year. The work was exhibited in Cologne and will continue to travel around Europe. The Eggleston revival has brought with it a flurry of new books and press and an increased value in his works at auction. This is all fine and good, but Eggleston has continued working since his heyday in the Seventies. One of these days, it would be nice to see what he’s been up to.
Crossings: Photographs from the U.S.-Mexico Border Everywhere you turn these days, there’s another book about Mexico. It seems to have replaced Cuba as the “it” location for photographers, and the shelves are packed with collections of images that exoticize its poverty and eroticize the sex trade (while posing as social commentary, of course). What a nice surprise, then, Magnum shooter Alex Webb’s new book Crossings is. A collection of 25 years of work on the U.S.-Mexico border, Webb gives us a glimpse of the families who make their homes in this transient region, as well as those trying to get out. He also focuses on all the tourists, street laborers, nightclub girls, old folks and peddlers who make up the rest of the population there. Webb manages to capture both the festive and desperate nature of the region while neither oversentimentalizing nor dehumanizing his subjects. A lush, lyrical collection of rich color images, it’s a book that’s as much about “the aura of the illegal and the illicit” as it is about everyday life.
Shanghai Fresh off publishing a new monograph this past spring, Bettina Rheims gives us an exhaustive collection of lusciously colored portraits of the women of Shanghai. Yet instead of her usual erotic eccentricities, Rheims delivers smiling teenagers on bikes, factory workers, and vibrant older women in traditional dress. There’s a respectful cultural distance here that makes the work somewhat less interesting than her portraits of Western women. Still, there are some arresting portraits, and Rheims is clearly at her best when she concentrates on the female body, whether it’s with photographs of female acrobats or women in various stages of undress. David Maisel: The Lake Project A gorgeous oversize volume of large-scale environmental tableaux for fans of the “new” new topographists like Richard Misrach and Edward Burtynsky. Maisel shoots color aerial photography in the tradition of Emmet Gowin (who was also Maisel’s mentor in the 1980s), focusing here on the polluted regions around Owens Lake, California. The 25 images—vivid, violently colored abstractions—look great, but the absence of picture captions or scientific details means the book lacks the context or heft to elevate it beyond a vague, extended meditation on the region.
Katy Grannan: Model American In 1998, while still an MFA student at Yale University, artist Katy Grannan began placing ads in small-town papers seeking photo subjects. Her portraits of the strangers she discovered–often nude, posed in spartan surroundings–were surprising in their beauty and vulnerability. The pictures were mundane and magnificent at the same time. Five years, and several solo and group exhibits later, comes Grannan’s first monograph, “Model American,” which collects over 70 portraits from the project. But is it a case of too much, too late? While her individual photographs have an undeniable intimacy and directness, they seem to have lost some of their power now that more and more photographers are making similar work. And while it was always a treat to see one of her oversized prints in a gallery setting, the smaller scale and the sheer number of photos included in the book somehow reduces the impact of the individual images. The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 After the somewhat exhaustive Book of 101 Books, The Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, it’s hard to imagine that another compendium of photo books could find a place in the market. Surprisingly, not only is there little overlap between The Photobook and Book of 101 Books, but the new volume serves as a great counterpoint to the first, supplementing the photographic canon with odd and curious additions. Co-author Martin Parr provided many of the books from his own collection, and the result is an idiosyncratic (yet still fairly comprehensive) mix. Organized thematically, the book covers the gamut from ancient travelogues to modernist art pieces to propaganda (one incredible Nazi specimen appropriates classic FSA images for an anti-American and
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