Category: Narrative Photography

A few weeks ago at the Fotobook Festival in Kassel, the folks at Schaden showed me their single copy of Story/No Story by Tobias Zielony. The book wasn’t for sale yet, but I knew I had to get my hands on it. Yesterday the book arrived and I was relieved to find it was as great as I’d remembered. The book is made up of thirteen chapters documenting young people in various locations around the globe. Usually photographed at night, the teens are invariably drawn to generic locales like car parks, gas stations and other public spaces. As the book’s title suggests, their is no story. But this, in fact, is the story of so many young people around the world. They gather at night and wait for something to happen. In an interview included in the book, Zielony quotes one girl he photographed who said, “We’re not bored. Boredom is just a word for what we do anyway.”

One might think that thirteen chapters of kids loitering might be, well, boring. But Zielony’s book is almost cinematic. Flipping through the pages, I feel like I’m floating around the world at night. “There’s a latent narrative,” Zielony says in the book’s interview, “It’s in the situations, in the youth’s imaginations. You can’t say that nothing is happening. My photo series disclose this potential narrative.

More info here and here

In a recent post on photo-novellas, Marc Feustel of eyecurious mentioned two children books by Eikoh Hosoe and Betty Lifton. I just received Taka-Chan and I, (1967). I love the book and so do the offspring.

The ‘about the photographer’ page pretty much explains the book and the spirit in which it was made:

“One day Eikoh Hosoe, the photographer of this book, was walking on a lonely beach in Japan, now and then taking pictures of the ocean, the beach, and of a small girl sitting on some rocks. He was startled by a Weimaraner dog which appeared unexpectedly from right out of the ground. Mr. Hosoe couldn’t believe what he saw, but before Runcible’s departure from Japan they had a long talk. Runcible told Mr. Hosoe about his adventure. Runcible was very proud to know an outstanding free-lance photographer who had received so many awards for his pictures. Mr. Hosoe gave Runcible copies of his three photo-essay books, Killed By Roses, Ondine and Why, Mother, Why! The two have been firm friends ever after.

See scans of the whole book here.

Since listing Allen Ruppersberg’s fantastic exhibition catalog in my list of Top 10 Photobooks of 2009, I’ve been doing more investigation on Ruppersberg. In the late 60’s and early 70’s he experimented with the way banal images, once combined, create narrative. Ruppersberg published three books juxtaposing pictures of motel rooms with other ordinary pictures sometimes containing narrative clues (ketchup drizzled on a table, a picture removed from a wall). These three books were called 23 Pieces (1968), 24 Pieces (1970) and 25 Pieces (1971).

I was able to track down a copy of 24 Pieces. See the whole thing here.

Note the colophon: “Design and Photography by Gary Krueger.”