In 2011, The Guardian published an article that detailed the photobook’s rise as a collectible item and introduced a number of important books in the field. What’s surprising about this article is that it did not appear in the Guardian’s Culture section—instead, it ran in Money, and introduced photobooks as an investment opportunity. The security of this investment might be questionable, but the medium is certainly experiencing a boom. It’s probably an exaggeration to say that zines are on the market for thousands of dollars, but only just: Cristina de Middel’s self-published book The Afronauts, which came out last year, is already being sold for thousands of dollars. In this kind of environment, how should one put together a photobook collection? I talked to New York-based collector Tom Claxton to find out. Claxton, who introduces his books on his site Claxton Projects, is an ideal person to evaluate the state of collecting: his own collection now runs close to 7,000 books. But despite the “silly money” moving around the photobook market, he stresses that the foundation of a collection is less a prospector’s eye—he says nobody is actually buying those copies of The Afronauts, anyway—and more a passion for the medium.

Why collect?

“I love sharing when someone comes to my apartment. I have the very special books or the very delicate books stored, normally by publisher, in black archival boxes, and I open those boxes and those books come out all the time. That’s the beauty of spending so much time and energy on putting this together, is that I want people to see them. And that’s why I started the website—to enable that on a wider scale. It’s something I’m very passionate about.”

Organizing a collection

“I’ve got very eclectic taste, and I find that it can be a burden, because I just amass books on such a scale over the year. I have a kind of spring cleaning at the end of the year; I’ll move on books that I bought on impulse, but that on hindsight aren’t that strong. I tend to manage it geographically: Europe, America, Japan. That seems to be the easiest way of putting things into certain categories. I suppose that, being from Britain, my largest collection would be British photography, and the 80s and 90s is my really passionate era, because that’s when I fell in love with photography.”

Martin Parr’s The Last Resort (Promenade Press, 1986)

Hunting for books

“More than anything, with the boom in photobooks in the last couple of years, you have to invest so much more time sifting through the mediocrity to find the special titles. The more time you invest in that, the more you find those special titles that are out there. I look at a publisher’s site, or a photographer’s site, or an email from a dealer every single day. I think that shows in the books that I would consider are the strongest books of the year that I’ve purchased. It’s like anything: the more you invest in it the more you get out of it.”

Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY

**Where to buy **

“If it’s a new publication, I may go direct to the artist, if possible, or I go to a dealer in the same territory as the artist, because I may be able to get a signed copy. Wherever possible I try to get signed editions. For new releases, Dashwood Books in New York has a very strong eye and a great collection. Harper’s Books, for vintage books in pristine condition. Photo-eye is a very good service, for mainstream books. There’s photobookstore in the UK. There’s a new one, Photobook Corner in Portugal, and I really like what they’re doing. I don’t know how, but they’re very good at signed copies. As I said, I tend to look at websites, and then where possible, contact the photographer—I think this is important, because when I first started, I would never have dreamed of just sending the photographer an email directly, but the vast majority are thrilled to send a signed copy. They’re also earning a lot more money by selling it direct. I very, very, very rarely buy from eBay. In the past I’ve been stung very badly. I would rather buy from someone I have a relationship with.”

How to approach the used market

“With vintage books, say you’re looking at a book that’s been included in The Photobook: A History or one of those books, you’re at least talking $500, probably over $1000 now for many of those books. They’re not books you’re going to be buying all the time. Just sit back, and if there is one of those books that you know sells for $1000 or $1500, and you’re in some store and see it for $400 in OK condition, then, yeah, if you can afford it at the time then go for it. I was in Portland a couple of months ago at Ampersand Gallery, a fantastic gallery, and they had a copy of Ken Schles’ Invisible City, in perfect condition, and it was probably about $500 cheaper than I could buy it anywhere in New York. So it’s just research, constantly doing comparisons, knowing what books go for, and if you can afford it, making that impulse buy when you know that you’re getting a bargain.”

The photobook market today

“There are lots of dealers right now that, when a key book comes out, put it straight away on eBay for extortionary costs. With Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts, that happened very early on, when it was still available in some stores—Martin Parr had picked it up at Arles, and it was straight away hitting $200, even though you could find it for less than $100 in New York. That happens very quickly now. Unfortunately, as soon as there’s a little bit of a buzz online, I think people have this knee-jerk reaction: “Quick, I’ve just got to buy it.” If you just do a little bit of research, you can normally buy them cheaper. There’s this demand now, and when everyone does these best of lists at the end of the year, if the books are not already sold out they go very quickly. For new collectors, it’s sort of like, well, that’s great, but that’s not nurturing a collection around something you’re actually passionate about—a theme, a group of photographers, a movement. Some of the books that I’m most fond of in my collection are actually not worth that much. There isn’t that demand for it. Maybe it’s by an obscure photographer, but it’s key to the collection. I know other collectors who will sit and wait to see what Martin [Parr] or Alec [Soth] say are the best books of the year, and they will go out and pay silly money to have them, but that’s no way to build a collection. It’s like prospecting for gold.”

Cristina De Middel’s The Afronauts (Self Published, 2012)

Dealing with trends in photobook publishing

“More and more publishers are doing these ridiculous, you know, 3 or 4 different covers, and that completely throws it all out the window. I’ll choose my favorite cover, but then what about all these other covers! And another cover might sell out faster! But, you know, it just becomes crazy. This year there have been a few books that have had different covers, and I’m not a fan of those, it puts me in an unhappy place. [laughs] Another minefield is special editions. If it’s an artist that I really like and I love the book, I do occasionally do buy special editions, but this shorthand of just getting the standard book and putting a print in, that I’m not a fan of. It should either be a different board, or a different stock, there should be a lot more effort put into it. Sometimes I’ll justify a purchase by saying that, if I needed to, down the road, I could sell it for 4, 5, 6, 10 times more, even though that’s not what I want to do. I know a lot of collectors that do that. But you can make a lot more money on the standard edition; the special edition is already expensive, so that’s a very small secondary market.”

Handling books

“Books that are a little delicate—a lot of people are doing the Japanese binding, or cardboard covers without dust jackets—straight away you get fingerprints on them, and you get shelf wear. So I keep these books in resealable archival bags, so that when you pull them off the shelf, they’re not rubbing against each other. You can pull the book out, look at it, and then reseal it again. Things to watch out for are the corners, and wear to the boards from the books next to it. Take care when you’re sliding the book into the shelf, too. Predominantly, books of the 90s came with dust jackets. On the whole, they tend to be more conventional in design, and this actually makes them harder-wearing. Recently people are pushing the designs to stand out, with multiple papers, foil embossed covers, and all these elements make them a more vulnerable object.”

Osamu Kanemura’s Spiders Strategy (Osiris, 2001)

Collector’s quirks

“The only slight venture off into the crazy land I do is that, if it’s a really strong book and I completely fall in love with it, I’ll buy two copies and keep one sealed. That is not to sell it on—I don’t sell on the really good books—but it’s a strange sort of collector’s thing. If it’s a really strong book, I’m forever wanting to share it with people, so the better the book the more it tends to get damaged or used, and just knowing that I have this pristine copy somehow satisfies me.”

Events to check out

“The New York Art Book Fair is a phenomenal event. It’s a real cross-section: what’s great about that fair is that while big publishers are there selling large editions, there also people selling homemade zines. It’s a great festival to do research, and to look at what’s being produced across a really wide spectrum. Paris Photo is also a great research event because you can see the work being exhibited and get an understanding of what’s selling, because ultimately that does reflect in the sales of photobooks.”

Final words of advice for aspiring collectors

“Collect something smaller and less expensive! You are collecting these very heavy, very big, very expensive objects, and sometimes they do become a burden. The thought of moving, of shipping the books from London—it’s horrendous. Sometimes you do feel like you’re married these things, that they are your life. A trip, a holiday, is based around a visit to a photographer’s studio, or a book dealer. It becomes an obsession.”

Michael Schmelling’s The Plan (J&L; Books, 2009)

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With the relatively recent passing of Shomei Tomatsu, in May of this year the Japanese magazine Gendai Shiso (Modern Thought) devoted an entire issue to remembrances of this great Japanese photographer. Among the texts to appear in this issue was an interview with Daido Moriyama, who knew Tomatsu well. At one point, the interviewer reminds Moriyama of one of Tomatsu’s famous quotes about Moriyama and his contemporary Takuma Nakahira: “Moriyama is a hatchet, Nakahira is a razor.” The interviewer wonders aloud what kind of knife Tomatsu might be, and Moriyama says with a laugh: “a chainsaw.”

This is more or less an off-hand remark, a wistful joke about Tomatsu, but it might actually be significant in a couple of ways. In the first place, it indicates the respect that Tomatsu commanded in the world of Japanese photography; as Nobuyoshi Araki wrote in a newspaper column shortly after Tomatsu’s passing, he was “the big boss” of the photography world. In other words, he was powerful enough to influence the development of Japanese photography in broad strokes, rather than precise cuts. At the same time, by picking a chainsaw, Moriyama has named a distinctly Western implement, and Tomatsu was particularly conscious of the influence of Western culture in general, and American culture in particular, on Japan.

Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled (Aka-jima, Okinawa), from the series The Pencil of the Sun, 1973

Currently, the Art Institute of Chicago is holding an exhibit of Tomatsu’s works, “Island Life,” which is up until January 5, 2014. The show focuses on the photographs that Tomatsu took in Okinawa, which found itself turned into an American military outpost after World War II. For a group of islands that never considered itself part of Japan in the first place, this situation caused (and continues to cause) no small amount of consternation. Tomatsu’s Okinawa photos are the core of Tomatsu’s work, in that they show his natural gift for composition and his consciousness of the (to say the least) complicated relationship between America and Japan. Even in the two images that are included in this article, it’s possible to see these two sides of Tomatsu’s work, and the show ought to expand even further. For a “chainsaw” photographer, he’s surprisingly subtle.

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We’ve seen a number of Tumblr memes come and go. About two years ago, when this site first launched, “Self Pop Tarts” were something of a craze, and I went so far as to interview the man behind the meme. A Tumblr that just popped up in August, “Photographs rendered in Play-Doh,” does pretty much exactly what it says: the person running the site reproduces well-known photographs in Play-Doh form. This doesn’t seem quite as likely to take off in the same way as the Self Pop Tart meme, if only because the barrier to entry here—a handy supply of Play-Doh, and some free time—is a little bit higher. This reminds me a bit of the recreations of soccer goals using Legos, both because it’s a low-tech way of reproducing an image (or series of images), but also because the material that’s being used is a particularly nostalgic one. In that sense, these images are particularly at home on Tumblr, and although the images haven’t amassed too many notes yet, it only seems a matter of time. Some of the photographs represented so far include W. Eugene Smith:

Play-Doh version of a W. Eugene Smith photograph

Shomei Tomatsu:

Play-Doh version of a Shomei Tomatsu photograph

and Alec Soth:

Play-Doh version of an Alec Soth photograph

Who knows what kind of effect they will produce, but they should be good for a laugh on a Monday, at very least. The person running the site certainly seems to be doing it in good humor, and he or she is taking requests, too. In any case, the images of the Play-Doh are also photographs, so I wonder if someone won’t come along and render them into some other form.

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The Durham Bulls are currently the the AAA affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays. But unlike almost any other minor league baseball team, the Bulls are internationally famous, for their participation in the film Bull Durham, which stars Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. 25 years after the release of Bull Durham, a new project is documenting the minor league franchise. Bull City Summer brings together photographers and writers to follow the Bulls over the course of a season. These visual and textual stories will then be shared online, and, eventually, in a book and exhibition. Here’s an introductory video describing the project.

So, in effect, the project is not trying to capture something in general about the nature of baseball, but rather the specific things that make this particular team, along with its stadium and its fans, special. If the combination of a writer and photographer tackling Americana sounds to you like something that Alec Soth might do, then it may not come as a surprise to learn that Soth is, indeed, participating in the project. There’s a video with Soth showing his experience photographing at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Yet while I imagine that Soth is likely to draw the most direct response from the internet photography crowd, I’m interested in Kate Joyce’s photographs. Joyce has seen the world of the stadium—players, fans and objects of all kinds—in an abstract way, often looking carefully at these subjects in a way that brings out unexpected patterns or textures. A full gallery of Joyce’s work is available on the Bull City Summer site.

An image from Bull City Summer

Bull City Summer is run by Sam Stephenson, who spent most of the last 10 years working on the Jazz Loft Project, an investigation into a building in 1950s New York that played host to many legendary jazz players of the day—as well as photographer Eugene W. Smith, who documented the comings and goings of the building. (I interviewed Stephenson about this project in May of last year.) Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise that Stephenson would move from jazz to baseball, given that these are each closely linked to American culture. I wonder how we’ll see the documents created by Bull City Summer in another 25 years.

An image from Bull City Summer

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If you were to conjure up an image of an “internet-age photographer,” I think the chances are good that the names of certain technologies (Photoshop, Instagram, Google Street View and so on) might come to mind. After all, the development of the internet has led to the digitalization of everything, right? Irish photographer Barry W Hughes is a fascinating counterexample to this line of thinking. Hughes’ series “Ongoing Photographs” is rooted in his obsessive habit of collecting physical objects, yet I would argue that he is very much a photographer of the internet age. Hughes monitors streams of information to look for certain “patterns and coincidences” among the things he’s collected, and then uses the internet to explore these connections further. Through this digital (not to mention idiosyncratic) exploration, he’s connected objects as seemingly unrelated as a bust of Napoleon and a plastic bag full of dead wasps. This might sound like a joke—and it’s true that these images would probably be of little use to a historian—but Hughes has worked out a serious method to stake out his digital observation post above the flow of history.

From “Metastatic”

In your project “Metastatic,” you’ve photographed the screen of a television playing the Howard Hughes-produced film “The Conqueror.” I gather that it is, by any standard, an extremely bad film, but that some people claim that many of the cast and crew later died as a result of exposure to radioactive material in the Utah desert. To make this kind of project it seems like you’ve done a fair amount of research, so I’m curious to hear about how you begin.

I was always interested in history; I was a good history student in school. That continued, and that’s the kind of books that I read—biographies, or books about real situations. As I became a photographer, I learned how coincidences and patterns emerge in the world around you. I was trying to take the idea of patterns and coincidences from my love of history and bring it into the present moment with photography. I listen to news radio quite a lot, and a lot of the stuff I look at on the internet is related to science and history. Once you’ve fine-tuned your brain to recognize these patterns and coincidences, you take the stuff that’s of particular interest to you and work backwards. I’d hesitate to use the word web, but it’s a cross-hatching of ideas, moving backwards from the original point that caught your interest. With “Metastatic” in particular, I was literally sitting on the toilet, there was a movie review on the radio, and this guy mentioned “The Conqueror” as one of the worst films of all time. Just as an aside, he said that they believe that many people died of cancer from that film, which of course is nonsense. I was interested right away, so I went to go research it, one thing led to another, and I found myself researching atomic testing and nuclear power. So it evolves out of that initial discovery, finding points of interest along the way. Metastatic is as much about photography as it is about media and culture and about history and science. The cancer aspect just adds another human element to it, so it’s not just about photography, it’s not just highfalutin conceptualism. I think that’s important, because my work can be very didactic, which puts people off. I get that a lot, especially from some of my friends, like “can you not make a picture about teenagers,” but that bores the living daylights out of me! I’m just not interested in that stuff.

From “Metastatic”

So, how is this project commenting on photography?

There are two things. With “Metastatic” it’s literally a camera on a tripod in a room facing the TV screen. The basis of photography is using light, so when you’re photographing a screen it’s a pure light transfer. Obviously that’s where the static effect comes from, so I’m exploiting that effect for “Metastatic” in a very overt way. In terms of the social aspects, I’m trying to make a reference to appropriation and the current trends in how we use or perceive images. The work functions in those two ways concerning photography: it’s about how we consume photography as well as about how photography actually, physically works.

You said your work can be “didactic.” Are you trying to tell us something about appropriation here?

Hopefully if the viewer has enough awareness, they might get that they’re looking at a photograph of a screen that was produced by taking a photograph. They’re the final receiver; they’re at the end of this process. To me that defines the digital age. In a lot of ways people aren’t really considered people anymore, and you’re not even a consumer because a lot of the time you’re not even paying for it, you’re just a receiver, you’re a vessel for images nowadays. It would be nice if someone would get that, but I can’t be in control of that—it’s not my job to worry about that.

Coalition

You were talking about the interconnectedness of history. When you find a pattern or coincidence, how does the image emerge out of that?

There’s a few ways that happens. I’ve always collected stuff, it seems to be just a compulsive thing. The stuff that’s in “Ongoing Photographs” is all junk that I have lying around. For instance, the one about Napoleon, with the wasps stuck to his hat—there was a wasp nest in the roof of my house, and wasps were flying in to my bedroom all the time, so I kept killing them, but instead of throwing them out, I started putting them in a bag. After a while I had this bag that stank to high heaven, there must have been like 60 dead wasps in this little plastic bag! I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, I just knew that I liked them, so I put them on the shelf with all of the other junk. I had them for maybe a month, two months, and then at the same time, I was in Berlin and London looking for a bust of someone. I didn’t even know who it was gonna be, I just knew it had to be some political leader. So after a couple of months of looking for a suitable bust, I gave up, and then one day quite by chance I went into an antique shop in Dublin, and there was a tiny bust of Napoleon sitting on the shelf. I brought it home, and I started doing lots of research about Napoleon. The story that popped out was about the gold bee being his insignia when he declared himself emperor. So of course when I got to that I said, “OK, I’ve got wasps, would wasps work with Napoleon?” I looked into the science of wasps, and it turns out that all wasps come from one bee, they’re part of the same genus, so a wasp is as good as a bee. After that it’s just a question of figuring out how can I make a nice enough image. When you talk about Napoleon it’s obviously his hat, it not only represents his power, as long as he has that big stupid hat on his head, everyone always knows it’s Napoleon. So I just covered his head with the wasps, and just took a photo of it right on the desk here, that’s all it is. It’s that simple, but that complicated too.

I mean, I was going to ask you to clarify this idea of patterns and coincidences, but I guess that’s it right there…

That’s pretty much how most of this stuff works. I might hear something on the radio, or I might be reading the paper or I might see something on a website. Whatever happens happens, but that’s the magic. You can’t be in a hurry with a lot of these things.

As a historical method, it’s interesting to collect this junk, or dead bees or whatever, and just wait for these things to intersect in some unexpected ways.

I don’t know if it’s being stubborn, or if it’s fate—but what’s the difference? I come from a Catholic country, I had a Catholic upbringing, I don’t think there’s any difference between fate, magic and stubbornness. It’s all pretty much the same thing.

Black and Blue

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Starting tomorrow, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts will present a photography exhibit that’s the first of its kind in America: a survey of women photographers from the Middle East. “She Who Tells a Story,” which has a particular focus on photographers from Iran, will be up until January 12, 2014. This show looks to be something of a revelation: “She Who Tells a Story” and its catalog represent an excellent opportunity for American audiences to learn about a tradition of photography that (to my knowledge, at least) has had little exposure up until now.

“Maral Afsharian,” 2010

I could hardly call myself an expert on the activity of women photographers from the Middle East, and one of the goals of this exhibit is to offer some context for how to look at these photographs. Some Western audiences have seen this work in a reductive way. In a foreword to the catalog, curator and critic Michket Krifa discusses how culturally-charged objects, and the veil in particular, have been used to draw overly simplified conclusions about the situation of women in Muslim countries. In discussing the work of Iranian photographer Shirin Neshat, she writes: “very quickly, her photographs prompted Western art critics to search for an aesthetics of the veil, often with a desire to see her works solely as a critique of the Iranian regime and, more broadly, of Islam.” In short, Krifa says, “they distorted her artistic singularity into an anthropological curiosity.” Clearly, one challenge of the exhibit is avoid producing this sort of reading.

This means that the curator of the exhibit has the somewhat difficult task of showing the broader community or tradition of female photographers in the region, while also showing how these photographers stand on their own. Yet this is not just a task for the curator: the audience must also meet the exhibit halfway, by looking at the works included here as individual expressions, rather than as the necessary result of a certain political or cultural situation. Keeping all that in mind, I’d like to look at a few of the works featured in the show.

Untitled, from “Qajar,” 1998

I’m drawn to “Qajar,” a series from 1998 by Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian. She’s taken sepia-toned photographs of young women in a traditional studio setting, but in each image they are holding something that breaks up the otherwise stately feeling: a can of Pepsi, a boombox, dark sunglasses. Each object was officially banned under the Iranian government, and in one image, the subject is holding an issue of a newspaper (also banned) to which Ghadirian and her husband contributed. Perhaps these images are well-suited to a Western audience, given the humorous disconnect between, say, a can of Pepsi and the luxurious backdrop. Still, the work raises more serious questions about private and public life in Iran–and given that the name “Qajar” refers to a fruitful period of Persian culture, it also puts itself in dialogue with the larger tradition of Iranian photography.

Newsha Tavakolian’s series “Listen” also addresses the restrictions of life in Iran. Tavakolian started photographing at a young age, and she eventually became one of the few women working at the top of the Iranian photojournalism world. Her photographs had been published in news outlets all over the world (there’s a short interview with her on the New York Times Lens blog) but her press card was revoked in the run-up to the 2009 Iranian elections. Without this public forum, she turned to a more artistic photographic practice. To produce “Listen,” she invited six female Iranian singers to perform in a studio. Under the restrictions of the Iranian Revolution, these singers are unable to perform or record on their own, and so the soundless nature of photographs reflects their own situation as performers. When the work is exhibited, Tavakolian also shows videos of the women as they sing, but these videos play in silence. For a photographer who was forced to leave her main profession, it seems like Tavakolian has made an extremely smooth transition to the art world.

“Azita Akhavan,” 2010

While the works of Ghadirian and Tavakolian are quite personal, Rania Matar’s series “A Girl and Her Room” is closer to traditional documentary photography. Matar is a Lebanese-born photographer who currently lives in Boston. Her work depicts teenage girls both in America and in the Middle East. Matar says that she wants her subject to “pose herself as she wishes,” so in some sense, these photographs could be seen as self-portraits. At the same time, the objects that surround these young women are revealing: the difference between the conditions of Alia (Beirut, Lebanon) and Mariam (a Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre, Lebanon) are quite stark. This project might recall the work of JeongMee Yoon, who photographed boys and girls in Korea and America with their gender-coded objects. Yoon’s work is surprising for the sheer volume of objects she documented, yet it seems clear that the goal of Matar’s project is not to draw out material differences between various regions of the world. Instead, the photographs explore questions of identity without trying to push for a pan-regionalism (let alone a globalism).

“Bisan, Bethlehem, West Bank”

Much like the subjects of Matar’s series, there are no sweeping statements to be made about “female photographers in the Middle East”–the individuality of each artist bears this out. Perhaps the lack of an easy explanation for “She Who Tells a Story” is what will make it a valuable contribution to the American (if not Western) understanding of photography from the Middle East in general.

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It’s no secret that we’re in the middle of a photobook boom, and of course I enjoy photobooks myself. One of the most annoying things about photobooks, though, is when a photo is printed across the gutter: as the pages curve inwards, they drag the image down into the (seeming) abyss between the two pages. It’s difficult to look at a photograph when there’s a gap running through it. Some books avoid this problem through a sewn (rather than glued) binding, which allows the book to lay perfectly flat. Still, plenty of books don’t use sewn binding, and the lack of this binding has prevented me from purchasing books in the past–to name one example, Daido Moriyama’s “Color” is an otherwise excellent book which is spoiled by images printed across the gutter. Taiwanese photographer I-Hsuen Chen has produced a book, In Between, that plays around with this issue. Will multiplying a pet peeve make it bearable?

In Between , 2013

In Between is a book that shows photographs in such a way that the most compelling part of the image–the point to which your eye would be naturally drawn–is buried in the gap created by the binding of the pages. Clearly, the binding has been designed to make these gaps more prominent, turning what’s normally a flaw into a device that structures the entire book. The photographs here are “personal intimate memories,” snapshots that Chen took during his time in America. There are people in every image, but the binding obstructs our ability to see anyone’s face clearly. Chen allowed me to run one “flat” image from In Between, and I think it’s not a coincidence that in this image, the two subjects have their back turned to the camera.

This work exists only in book form; in other words, apart from the one image above, Chen does not show the images on their own. He says that he would consider the project “as a sculpture rather then a regular photo book,” given that “it involves a physical engagement with this three dimensional object of seen and unseen part of images.” The book itself is 240 pages, which could mean a lot of frustration for someone like me! Still, this is obviously not a production oversight, given that the blank spot is meant to conceal what would allow the viewer to identify with the image. From Chen’s perspective, he says that this point corresponds to “the deepest spot in my memory.” Chen also expresses this point as the “studium” of the image, quoting in this way from Roland Barthes’ famous book on photography, Camera Lucida. We might be tempted to think that In Between is only an exercise in formalism, then, but that’s not quite the case.

In Between , 2013

Last year, I featured Chen’s project “Nowhere in Taiwan,” which is a documentary project on his home country with a humorous streak. Chen has been trained in America (he studied photography at Pratt) so it’s clear that he approaches his projects with the typical seriousness of American photography grads. However, while I often get the sense that many of these students have tried to hermetically separate themselves from any suggestion of humor, Chen has not lost his light touch. Indeed, he says that In Between “actually started off as a joke,” using “the weakness of perfect binding to make a joke in book form.” It’s nice to see someone who can quote Barthes without taking themselves too seriously. I may never come to accept images disappearing into the gutter, but I’ll certainly remember this playful project next time I see it.

In Between , 2013

In Between can be purchased directly from Chen through his website.

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We’re now a few months on from Tumblr’s acquisition by Yahoo!. While a few changes have shown up in the service, it continues to function as one of the largest engine rooms of the internet’s vast content-circulating apparatus. Many of us feed words and pictures into this machine, but what does it produce? For the last year and a half, I’ve tried to investigate this question in my column “Behind the Notes,” which consists of interviews with photographers who’ve had their photos go viral on Tumblr.

The project started when I posted a friend’s photograph to my own Tumblr before going to bed, and woke up to find that it had accumulated 3,000 notes (a cumulative count of likes and reblogs). I was curious to know more about why certain photos bounce around Tumblr, and more importantly, whether this activity impacts the photographers in real life. The idea of “Behind the Notes” was simple: find photographs that were popular on Tumblr, then ask the photographers whether anything had come from this experience.

There was nothing scientific about this study, but I would tentatively suggest that nostalgia is a major factor in Tumblr popularity, and that its benefits to photographers do not lie in viral success. But bet’s look a little closer.

After a making a few posts in the series, it seemed like 10,000 notes would be a good cutoff point. I was only interested in images that seemed out of place in this rarified Tumblr air, which, to be a bit cynical, involves some combination of Nikes, weed or partial female nudity. What is a photograph of a bookshelf or a rather plain unmade bed doing there? Each time I profiled an image, I would take a screenshot of a couple of places it had been reblogged, in order to get some sort of idea of the context in which the image was now appearing. This often led to somewhat strange combinations, like a photograph of 80s skater kids showing up next to a big cupcake. Apart from such cheap thrills, looking through dozens of Tumblrs at a time was an educational experience, in the sense that it educated me about the way that Tumblr users interact with content. I was fascinated to find an entire blog devoted to photographs of boats and oceans, and another which showed photos of the White Stripes—and Bay Area highways. Whatever you’re into, there’s a Tumblr for that.

An ocean-only Tumblr (now deleted)

Of course there are literary circles, music circles and “serious photo” circles on Tumblr, but to hit 10,000 notes, you need to reach teens. The link between these collections is a longing for objects or experiences: in short, a nostalgia, especially for something unremembered. Every image that I wrote about was endlessly blogged and reblogged by teenagers, and looking through the most recent notes on a photo I was “studying,” I could often see what country’s teens were reblogging it at that time. To be really successful, an image needs a certain vacantness, so that the viewer can meet it halfway, and “fill in” something of their own. One Tumblr user even takes images (like Joachim Robert’s Paris cityscape) and adds quotes to them.

Valerio Loi’s vials, which could have been made into energy drinks

I found that very few photographers had received any personal contact as a result of their Tumblr success. Still, when an image gets above 50,000 notes, it is clearly being shown to at least a few hundred thousand people, if not more. A photo of a smoking grandma that we posted on the American Photo Tumblr a year ago is still generating lots of reblogs. By now it’s almost reached 90,000 notes, and it’s not far-fetched to think that more than a million people have seen it. In that sense, it’s somewhat surprising that photographers received such little personal response. Over the course of 12 columns, I only heard of one meaningful commercial inquiry, a bizarre proposal to make a line of energy drinks based on vials that Valerio Loi had made and photographed. He didn’t take up the offer.

Of course, exposure on Tumblr can certainly help photographers to build up a fanbase—David Brandon Geeting seems to have done this very well—but perhaps there is just not much value in a single burst of popularity. At the 10,000 note level, images are being passed around for their emotional effect rather than an artistic expression. The frequency with which some users post images can be shocking; this is one normal way of consumption online, though. I don’t believe that Tumblr has fundamentally changed the way that we want to see things, but rather allowed these desires to be expressed clearly.

As many others have complained, lost in all of this is the idea of the “author.” I understand that complains of photographers who have had their name erased from their own work. The Tumblr users who are removing author information are doing it unconsciously, and this indifference might show that what the photographers see as their work, the users see as raw material. Still, I highly recommend that anyone harboring skepticism (if not ill will!) towards Tumblr take a look at the words of 14-year-old Sunanda Carmela. Despite being the youngest out of any photographer I talked to, Sunanda was the most philosophical about Tumblr and its relationship to photographers:

“I think this photo catered to the vintage-hipster blogs of Tumblr. Most, if not all photos in this blog style are taken with a film camera, or better yet a disposable one (which I used to take this photo). For most of these blogs it’s not necessarily about the picture itself but about how all the pictures will look next to each other on the actual blog page. After being on Tumblr for a little over a year and half now, I’ve found that people don’t really care THAT much about who took the photo; they just want to see a nice photo. That’s why I’m not really surprised that no one contacted me on a personal level.”

Personally, I’m glad to have heard Sunanda’s words, and it gives me no small measure of hope that the youngest person I interviewed had the clearest insight into the medium. Perhaps we should give Tumblr teens more credit after all.

Kids Playing

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It might be the middle of summer now, but in just a couple of months we’ll be in the full swing of the hectic photography event season. Most of the focus will be on European countries, where the highest-profile events—Unseen Photo Fair (Amsterdam), Fotobook Festival (Kassel, Germany) and Paris Photo—all take place. This week, though, there’s another international photography event that’s worth your attention: the fourth annual Lima Photo, which is happening between from August 7 – 11. It’s highly possible that you don’t live anywhere near Peru, or South America in general, but even so, it’s worth taking a look at this event.

I’m interested in Lima Photo for a very simple reason: it’s a good way to see what’s happening in a part of the world that is only just beginning to receive worldwide attention. Aperture has recently published The Latin American Photobook, which offers a history of photography in the region, but can you name any contemporary South American photographer? Even a couple minutes on the Lima Photo site will give you some answers. I spent some time going through the list of exhibitors for Lima Photo and clicking through to their websites, and found a number of exciting photographers. In this post I’m going to highlight two galleries from Lima, 80M2 and Galería El Ojo Ajeno.

From “1st of May Camp”

80M2 represents a number of young artists, most of whom are from Peru. You could say it’s a very contemporary gallery, in that many of the artists on their roster approach photography as a “tool” rather than a means to create beautiful images. Daniela Ortiz is an artist with such an approach: she often uses photography as a way to make a political or social statement. One project that jumped out to me is “Campamento 1ro de Mayo” (“1st of May Camp”), created with Xose Quiroga. To realize this project, the pair photographed the pristine houses of managers at a mining company, enlarged these photos and then pasted them on the side of the more humble residencies of the miners. Ortiz is currently based in Barcelona, and she has created a number of projects that directly address the issues facing immigrants in Spain. She has a surprising number of projects on her website, which is well worth a look. Meanwhile, Arturo Kameya is a more traditional photographer on the 80M2 roster. His series “The Tip of the Iceberg” is a work of “straight” photography, though his subject is a former prison on the island of El Frontón.

From “The Tip of the Iceberg”

Galería El Ojo Ajeno is an institution related to the Center for the Image in Lima, an organization promoting photography. If the artists in 80M2 are mixing other genres or tendencies, Galería El Ojo Ajeno seems to be more purely photographic. Camila Rodrigo is a good example of these photographers. The projects up on her site show that she is working with the snapshot, and the title of one series, “Cordial Lies,” indicates that she has a sense of humor about her work.

From “Cordial Lies”

Nearly everyone I found on these sites was born in the 1980s, and I’m impressed that the galleries are working with such young artists. It certainly bodes well for the future of photography in South America.

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Earlier in the week, when I introduced a young Japanese photographer named Go Itami, I thought about his work in terms of the way that his photographs might relate to the larger tradition of Japanese photography. I put forth Robert Frank’s “The Americans” as an example of a Western work that has challenged (or stimulated) the photographers to come after it. Perhaps Curran Hatleberg’s photos could be seen as a response to “The Americans,” given that his projects, “The Crowded Edge” and “Dogwood,” were also taken over the course of road trips through America. You could see Hatleberg as an heir to the tradition of road trip photography in general, and road trip snapshot photography in particular. This viewpoint, however, would probably sell Hatleberg’s work short.

Denver, CO

In a revealing interview on The Great Leap Sideways, Hatleberg explained the way that he produces his photographs. All snapshot photographers rely to some extent on a relationship (however fleeting) with their subject, but Hatleberg often cultivates a much more involved connection with the people he photographs. “The types of encounters I have vary case to case, but almost everyone is a stranger, at least initially. […] Some meetings expire in under five minutes without any attachment beyond the passing experience; some last days and more complex, problematic relationships develop.” The photograph above (“Denver, CO”) was the result of one of these more intense experiences: it’s well worth looking at the interview to find out more.

Steps (Number 03)

This method of producing work is notable, but I’m also very impressed with the way that Hatleberg has edited his photos. I had a conversation the other day about how it’s easy to look at a snapshot and think that it took only a moment to produce. In reality, it takes time to edit down one’s photographs, but this labor is never visible in the final project. Beyond choosing the most spectacular or beautiful moments, it seems that Hatleberg has picked out photographs in which certain elements in the frame are not quite perfect. Often times there’s a spare limb off to the side, or a general roughness about the composition of the image that lends it spontaneity. Still, the series are balanced with quieter moments.

Camaro

Hatleberg expresses his own relationship to Frank and other forerunners through a shared belief “that daily life holds an endless supply of revealing and relevant dramatic possibility.” Of course he’s some way off from approaching Frank’s status, but it’s telling that Hatleberg can already see him as a peer.

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