Category: Featured

A recent study suggests that “Facebook envy” affects one in three users of the site.  Family happiness was noted as a particular source of grief and vacation photos the greatest cause of resentment.

I confess I felt similar pangs of envy while reading Tamara Shopsin’s memoir, MUMBAI  NEW YORK  SCRANTON. The book starts with Shopsin and her husband vacationing in India. It didn’t help that I read about their travels while on my own family vacation to Wisconsin Dells. While Shopsin and her husband visit neglected museums and hunt for arcane mementos, I was staying at Kalahari – the 2^nd largest indoor waterpark resort in the country – with several thousand other miserable Midwestern families.

Nor did it help that Shopsin’s husband is Jason Fulford. Not only is Fulford one of my favorite photographers and publishers, he appears to be an unusually sweet husband. He calls Shopsin “beach ball,” sends her postcards while they are traveling together, and comforts her by resting his chin on her eye.

Like the most lyrical status updates you’ve ever seen, the couple’s photographs and illustrations sprinkled throughout the book are only more cause for envy. But even without the artwork, Shopsin and Fulford are able to make a trip to the grocery store charmingly romantic:

Jason pushes the cart. He calls it a “buggy.” This and calling any kind of soda “Coke” are all that’s left of his Southern accent

People study meditation for twenty years to clear their minds of worry and distraction. Jason and I go to Wegman’s.

The first stop is always produce. Jason gets the standards. Green beans, Fuji apples, baby carrots and so on. I find the curve-balls like fennel or beets. The fish department has misters in the cases. We hold hands and pick out a salmon fillet because it has omega-3. I remember we need peanut butter and am rewarded with a kiss. The ritual takes an hour, costs $125, and will feed us for a week.

Not only did reading this make me envious (why don’t I grocery shop with my wife, much less while holding her hand?), I felt guilty for feeling envious (why can’t I be more self-assured like Tamara and Jason?).

After drowning my self-pity in Amstel Light on the fake beach of Kalahari, I read on. It actually takes a long time for Shopsin to get to the “harrowing adventure” described on the book’s dust jacket. On his Facebook page, Shopsin’s friend John Hodgeman describes it this way:

There is a THING THAT HAPPENS in this book, and I knew what it was, and what a devastating surprise it was, and what happened after…

And when I finally did reach the moment where THE THING THAT HAPPENS started to happen, I audibly gasped in surprise, which I never usually do. I realized suddenly that every sentence led to this inevitable thing, and hinted at it, and I should have known all along.

I too was surprised by THE THING THAT HAPPENS. And it was fascinating to see the way it shaped my understanding of everything that preceded it. Suddenly, the stroll through the supermarket made sense. Shopsin was seeing the scene with the precision of an artist and the gratitude of a survivor. My envy vanished.

The morning after finishing MUMBAI  NEW YORK  SCRANTON, I discovered the omelet bar at the Kalahari’s breakfast buffet. I loaded up my bowl with onions, mushrooms and jalapeno peppers. When the omelet was done, I smothered it in Tabasco and Sriracha. I sat next to my wife and enjoyed every bite.  I even considered posting a picture on Facebook.

It is a humbling experience for a bookmaker to troll the endless aisles of the New York Art Book Fair. But it also provides an invaluable learning experience. After scanning hundreds of books, one invariably jumps off the table demanding attention (and acquisition).

One of the books that did this for me this year was Dalston Anatomy by Lorenzo Vitturi. The first thing to catch my eye was the book’s cover. Or covers. The 500 copies of Dalston Anatomy are bound in a variety of vibrantly patterned Vlisco fabrics. The books cry out to be touched. Fortunately this tactile quality isn’t lost when opening the book. If anything, Dalston Anatomy is an ode to the sensual pleasures of the bustling marketplace.

All of the images in Dalston Anatomy were all made at London’s Ridley Road Market. We see a cacophony of texture and color: Afro’s and braids, fruit and balloons, bright paint and windswept tarps. Intermixed within this sensual frenzy are Vitturi’s sculptures made on site at the market.

One of my favorite things about Dalston Anatomy is the way these sculptures are so seamlessly intermixed with Vitturi’s photographs. This book isn’t a boring treatise on the distinction between sculpture and photography. It is a fluid, almost musical incorporation of different mediums and cultural influences.

In last week’s Popsicle, I discussed Tim Davis’s essay on the fear of humor in photography. Davis claims that the artists most likely to feature humor in their work are neither self-proclaimed photographers nor A.W.U.P.s (Artists Who Use Photography). “The nakedest and least ashamed photographers,” he writes, “are usually sculptors.”

Vitturi’s unpretentious use of sculpture in Dalston Anatomy isn’t just humorous, it’s joyous. The fact that this joyousness makes the book sing should be a lesson for photographers and bookmakers. Whether it is in the crowded markets of Ridley Road or PS1, audiences will always be drawn to jubilant music.

The purpose of this weekly Popsicle assignment (I tell myself as I frantically write under a self-imposed deadline) is to remember to take pleasure in my cultural consumption. The truth is that there hasn’t been a lot of consumption these last couple of weeks. I’ve been too busy playing Ping Pong.

But I did manage a little bit of airplane magazine reading. It has been years since I’ve subscribed to a photo magazine, but the redesigned Aperture is a must read. Not only is it larger, thicker and more lushly printed than before, it is chock-full of text. After the endless waves of Insta-Tumblr, what a relief to be forced to shut my phone off on the plane and engage with thoughtful writing about photography.

The theme of the current issue is ‘Playtime’ and there are excellent pieces on Erwin Wurm, Christian Marclay, Jacques Tati, American conceptual humorists of the 60’s-70’s and contemporary Swiss photographers using comedy. But my favorite essay is ‘Photogeliophobia: Fear of Funny Photography’ by Tim Davis. “There are no published case studies of Geliophobia, the fear of laughter,” writes Davis, “but the History of Visual Art mostly is one. Despite how unbearable life would be without it, artists get anxious letting laughter leak into their work.”

Later in the essay Davis goes on to quote the patron saint of these Popsicle essays, George Saunders:

I just started writing these Dr. Seuss poems after seven or eight years of doing just Hemingway. And that night I just brought it home and threw it on the table…and after the kids were in bed I heard my wife laughing in the other room. Like Christmas morning I peeked around the corner and she’s laughing at my stuff, actually having pleasure in it…I had just written a 700 page novel…in a Joycean voice…so to see someone taking pleasure in it was just unreal…After that I said OK, so, you are heretofore permitted to be funny.
-George Saunders, The Sound of Young America Podcast

During the course of an interview with Araki last week in Tokyo, he looked at my book Sleeping by the Mississippi. “Why do you take pictures that are so sad,” he asked, “they all look like graves in a graveyard.” One of the answers, I suppose, is that I too have suffered from geliophobia. But in the years since working on Mississippi and Niagara, I’ve tried to loosen up and give myself permission to be lighthearted.

One result is LBM’s most recent book Ping Pong. This project came about after years of collecting vernacular pictures of my beloved semi-sport. The thing I cherish about these photos is their whimsy. Ping Pong isn’t boxing; it isn’t a brutal metaphor for our primitive aggressiveness. As Pico Iyer writes in the book, “Ping Pong is a lifestyle, a training in attention, a diversion, a mad passion and a way of not taking anything important too seriously and taking some tiny things much too seriously.”

Last Friday night LBM hosted a Ping Pong party in New York. In attendance I saw Paul Graham, Todd Hido, Susan Meiselas and many other acclaimed photographers. It was glorious to see all of these fantastic artists having fun and not taking themselves too seriously. I hope that now and again photographers allow themselves to convey this same spirit in their work.

In the next few days we’ll be announcing a new LBM book made in collaboration with the writer Pico Iyer. It has been such a delight to work with Pico. He’s brought generosity, humor and transparency to every one of our exchanges. So I was thrilled when I opened up the Sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago and saw he’d written a piece for Op-Ed section. I was also deeply moved. I read ‘The Value of Suffering’ while visiting a loved one in the hospital who’d been struggling with complications from cancer surgery. What makes the piece so great – and something I wanted to share with her – is that it isn’t the least bit preachy:

Philosophy cannot cure a toothache, and the person who starts going on about its long-term benefits may induce a headache, too. Anyone who’s been close to a loved one suffering from depression knows that the vicious cycle behind her condition means that, by definition, she can’t hear the logic or reassurances we extend to her; if she could, she wouldn’t be suffering from depression.

Occasionally, it’s true, I’ll meet someone — call him myself — who makes the same mistake again and again, heedless of what friends and sense tell him, unable even to listen to himself. Then he crashes his car, or suffers a heart attack, and suddenly calamity works on him like an alarm clock; by packing a punch that no gentler means can summon, suffering breaks him open and moves him to change his ways….

But does that change all the many times when suffering leaves us with no seeming benefit at all, and only a resentment of those who tell us to look on the bright side and count our blessings and recall that time heals all wounds (when we know it doesn’t)?

I’m writing this week’s Popsicle from my hotel room in Tokyo (where a typhoon appears to be brewing outside my window). This is my first visit to Japan and I’ve been flabbergasted by the depth of the cultural differences I’ve seen here.  The British-born Iyer lives in Japan and is able to speak to the way these differences play out in our response to suffering:

“I’ll do my best!” and “I’ll stick it out!” and “It can’t be helped” are the phrases you hear every hour in Japan; when a tsunami claimed thousands of lives north of Tokyo two years ago, I heard much more lamentation and panic in California than among the people I know around Kyoto.

My favorite part of Iyer’s essay is his discussion of Kobayashi Issa’s 18^th century haiku. Rather than restate Iyer’s point, I think I’ll just end with Issa’s poem. This is a perfect thing for me to read as I head out into a dark and rainy day:

This world of dew
is only a world of dew –
and yet