Photo Books

Like most regular reviewers, I don’t pay for the photobooks I get from publishers and distributors, but I buy plenty of other books—impulsively, compulsively—that I rarely find space for here. Many of these are modestly scaled limited editions, pamphlets and booklets published by the artists themselves; others are heftier and more expensively produced. Most are devoted to one body of work or a series of images conceived for the printed page. What they have in common are immediacy, idiosyncrasy, and (despite the occasional big budget) do-it-yourself spunk. With printed matter already being treated as a thing of the past, the proliferation of artists books, photo-driven zines, and all manner of alternative press material is not just reassuring, it’s cause for celebration.

Among many reasons to be cheerful: Anne Collier’s Woman With a Camera (35mm) (Hassla), which turns 18 frames of Faye Dunaway peering over her Nikon in Eyes of Laura Mars into a cool but intensely charged flip book. So Alone I Keep the Wolves at Bay (PauWau Publications), the latest in Andreas Laszlo Konrath’s empathetic tributes to disaffected youth, nods to both Larry Clark and Jim Goldberg without imitating either. (Konrath’s two previous booklets, J.O.E. and Made in Brooklyn, are also worth searching out.) Amanda Marsalis’s Lost at Sea (self-published), a handsomely designed sequence of Polaroid images, would not suffer by comparison to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Thousand; its landscapes and still lifes are evidence of a similarly alert sensitivity to color, light, and the evanescent sublime. The blurry, hidden-camera photographs in Christopher Russell’s Landscape (Kolapsomal Press) were taken in a wooded area where men cruise for sex. When they find it, it’s sometimes in groups that recall the explosive eroticism of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park, but when a solitary figure floats ghost-like into the frame, flashbacks to Blow-Up’s mysterious tangle of sex and murder in a park darken the already anxious mood.

Several artists have taken Ed Ruscha’s early books as inspiration for self-published take-offs of those famous titles. Eric Doeringer, known for his “bootleg” copies of contemporary art, pulls off the shrewdest homage in two titles, Some Los Angeles Apartments (which includes his own photographs of Ruscha’s buildings, many little changed since 1965) and Real Estate Opportunities (pictures of the buildings that now fill Ruscha’s empty lots). Like Doeringer, Michalis Pichler duplicates the typography and scale of Ruscha’s original for his Twentysix Gasoline Stations, but calls it quits after 16 color shots of nearly identical sites in the German countryside—appropriation interruptus. In a rather less faithful variation on the formula, Charles Johnstone’s Thirtyfour Basketball Courts, color photographs taken in Manhattan and the boroughs, has more in common with the Bechers’ rigorous topologies. They’re almost too beautiful for the deadpan conceit to work, but that’s hardly a criticism.

Bing Wright’s Everyday Pictures (Paula Cooper), with its gatefolds and gorgeous reproduction, is on the high end of this particular spectrum, but it’s far from mainstream and scores points for quirkiness. A retrospective of photographs made between 1989 and 2006, the book includes pictures of dead flies, wet glass, overcast skies, falling bits of newsprint confetti, and roses in various states of disarray. Wright, who describes his work as “kind of blasé, kind of quotidian,” makes exquisitely refined images that flirt with minimalism, abstraction, and decoration but go their own perverse way. He’s an insider’s outsider, flying under the radar.