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Italian treasure
I’m back from the Italian leg of the Little Brown Mushroom World Tour (next stop: Lincoln, Nebraska). I was hoping to track down some vintage fotoromanzi, but didn’t have enough time. Nonetheless, I still picked up a couple of treasures. I spent most of my time in Milan with the curator Francesco Zanot. Francesco is a raving book nut and, at only thirty years of age, one of the most knowledgeable and exciting photo curators I’ve met. Francesco gave me a copy of Vedove/Widows, a book he recently produced with Takashi Homma (more info here).
At a signing at the excellent Mi Camera Bookstore, I’m embarrassed to report that I bought more books than I signed. After some frantic browsing of the shelves, I discovered the flat files behind the front counter where they keep the little vintage books and ephemera. Treasure trove!
Followers of this blog know that I have a keen interest in narrative photo books. In the flat files I found a truly stellar example by Franco Vaccari. I’ve been curious about Vaccari since picking up a survey of his work, Exhibitions in Real Time, last year. Vaccari is a conceptual photographer that Francesco Zanot accurately described as ‘the Italian Baldessari.’ But what I love about the book I found in the flat file is that it isn’t a conceptual or performance exercise. This sweet, staple-bound booklet, Viaggio sul Reno, Settembre 1974, is nothing more than a travelog. But the text is funny, lyrical and works with the images extraordinarily well:
See the whole book here.
BOOK
With much reaction to the iPad this week here is an interesting BOOK to add to your collection.
“Introducing a new case based on an old idea. BOOK is a hand made hard cover book jacket on the outside, with a sleeve tailored to the iPad on the inside. Protect your digital device safely and then shelve it, carry it, put it in a book-bag, or leave it on the coffee table. BOOK is made with the highest grade of sustainable, durable, and natural materials to insulate your iPad in an enduring style”
Check out the BOOK here
Instax Review
How To Avoid Corner Corner Love
I’m currently in Ann Arbor, Michigan as part of the Little Brown Mushroom World Tour. Tonight my host dropped me off at Dawn Treader Book Shop. The treasure for the day was ‘How to Avoid Corner Corner Love and Win Good Love From Girls.’ It isn’t a photobook, but it has an excellent photographic cover and only cost me $6.50.
The book comes from Onitsha, Nigeria. It isn’t dated, but probably comes from the mid-1960’s. It exemplifies the genre called African Market Literature. It represents Africa’s first popular literature and is closely tied to their oral storytelling tradition. Part of the pleasure of this genre is what the African Market authority Kurt Thometz calls ‘Mad English.’ Note some of the other fantastic titles in the series (click to enlarge):
Savior.
Hey, Les.
Do you know about Scott Roeder? Kind of a distant cousin of ours whose will got absorbed into the campaign against abortion. His trial is going on now. I heard that he was a “little bit more” on the fringe than most of the Bible-thumping right-to-lifers, and when I heard that LBM clue I had to look into his qualifications a little bit more. Did you know that he made his own license plates, because he considered himself a sovereign state unto himself? And when he got pulled over because of them, police found materials for a bomb in his car.
This was a decade before he assassinated Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, May 31, 2009. Point blank execution, in the back of his head. In the lobby of Tiller’s church.
Which one was the savior? (Devin Friedman attempts an answer in the new GQ, of all places.)
As Alan “Silky Slim” Reed says, people respect violence.
Yrs,
p.s. The jury didn’t have much trouble separating act from implication. It only took them 37 minutes to arrive at the guilty verdict. Now, I’m just a bit worried about the notion that his defense was crafted to set a precedent for judging other comparable acts of violence. Read this excerpt from the Iowa Independent:
The ruling does not come as a surprise, since Roeder openly admitted he shot and killed Tiller in the hopes of arguing the necessity defense, which would claim that he did so to prevent the doctor from performing abortions. Roeder’s defense was crafted for him by Des Moines anti-abortion activist Dave Leach.
Leach’s hope was that the Roeder trial could set a precedent, whether victorious or not, that could then be applied to other acts of civil disobedience against abortion.
“The very existence of legal abortion, and even the existence of this discussion [of the necessity defense], as well as any hope the prosecutor has of convicting Scott, relies upon their success in keeping the slaughter of millions of human beings ‘irrelevant,’” Leach said before the trial’s conclusion. “Political correctness requires that we not care about their shed blood.”
Scary.
Full story by Jason Hancock, 1/29/10.
First Book: Eric William Carroll
I have been going around to photographers asking them one question:
What was the first photo book that you can remember buying or seeing that really had a strong affect on you?
Here is Eric William Carroll’s answer:
“The first photo book I can remember having a lasting impact on me would have to be my family’s photo album. I imagine my thrill upon its initial discovery was largely narcissistic, but the album played a major role in how I came to understand my identity, my past, and the formation of my earliest memories. The album itself is as thick as a phone book. The front cover is baby-duck yellow and says ‘Family Album’ in an embellished font, complete with photographs of some generic family enjoying an autumn picnic. Its thick adhesive pages were once a creamy white but have since gone yellowish-brown, a prime example of non-archival storage. The album starts right off with my birth and goes until I am about four or five years old. I think I noticed the album when I was around six, and revisited its contents once a week, experiencing what I can only imagine was a twisted sense of false nostalgia. Yes, I was six, reminiscing about the ‘good ‘ol days’. I kept looking through the album until it was memorized and I still don’t understand why I was so obsessed with it. Any way, no book of photography has affected or moved me in a similar way since. If I was to pick a commercially available photo book: Chronologies by Richard Misrach.”
Photo Novellas
I’d like to compile a list of quality photo novellas and photo comic books. Can you help?
Carl Johan De Geer
At a recent visit to Dashwood Books I picked up their lovely self-published book, Carl Johan De Geer’s Long Live the Large Family. I was excited to feature this excellent book here, but 5b4 beat me to the punch.
So instead I’ll show another book by De Geer: Pengar Eller Livet (Money or Life). I purchased the book because of my interest in photo novellas, but unfortunately can’t read Swedish. Nonetheless, I’m a sucker for this kind of loosey-goosey comic book design.
More images here.
