This book is an antidote to the other stuff I have currently lumbered myself with � an uninspiring novel (so far) which I had been looking forward to This book is an antidote to the other stuff I have currently lumbered myself with � an uninspiring novel (so far) which I had been looking forward to and now don’t understand why; a turgid study of English folk music (I’m on a mission to reread all the essential books on that so it’s a must); and a horribly written academic book about the horrible subject of torture porn movies (it’s the only book on the subject).
Yes, the title of this book is rather pass the sick bag please. It was actually a present to Georgia who was 18 recently (imagine that!).
But now, a warning. Innocent leafers-through in bookshops should be aware that at many points during this book their eyes may spontaneously gush forth with founts of unaccustomed boohooing, so have a hankie or three at the ready. It is because we are not ready to be ambushed by joy in public places.
My own favourites were the three utterly scruffy goofy insanely-grinning Irish kids from Leinster, a dog which can’t work out what to do with a very unexpected frog in a pool in Yarmouth, Maine, a young couple on a street in Buenos Aires (it says they’re dancing, but I don’t know about that), a girl wrapped up warm in the autumn chill with a great wicker basket, she’s passing a castle and down a lane of trees in Ile-de France, a woman in Bihar carrying some huge bowl on her head in a red and orange sari (how many women through the world carry stuff on their heads, millions it seems), three nuns playing volleyball in Arequipa Peru, they got their full nun costumes on but they’re having such a great time, they don’t care, volleyball is now part of their religion, an old woman in a field wearing an enormous industrial-sized protective apron laughing her head off (it says “while harvesting sugar beets�) (I don’t know why old women smiling and laughing should always make such great photos), a woman resting her head on her horse’s neck with her eyes closed, you can tell she really loves that horse ...
Well, I could go on. You get the picture. All these photos and more can summon forth strange emotion.
I found the old woman. Here she is, a little diminished but still wonderful.
It's hard to made a bad photo book when your subject is Africa, but Olivier Follmi has created not just a not-bad book but a gorgeous brilliant one.
NIt's hard to made a bad photo book when your subject is Africa, but Olivier Follmi has created not just a not-bad book but a gorgeous brilliant one.
Now, the irony of giant luxury photo books whose subject is the poorest countries on earth will not be lost on any of us readers. This book features Namibia, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Ethiopia. This book like the other big ones I have by Steve Bloom and Stefan Schutz is all about rural Africa. The images are so beautiful and arresting that I can see why it might be next to impossible to wrench one's gaze from there to the cities and the shanty towns, but it does seem that there is a whole area remaining to be explored here � the littoral where the country (of traditional ways of life, traditional beliefs) meets the city (that signpost to the unknown future, that destroyer of what was once certain), where the country mouse meets the town mouse, where African Oliver meets the African Artful Dodger and takes on a whole new way of thinking.
GREAT PICTURES, BAD WRITING
I've noticed in big photo books like this that the loveliness of the images is offset by the wretchedness of the prose which is added in the form of introductions and essays tacked on at the end. These are written either by the photographer or more often by some mates, who are universally sycophantic about the photographer and write about him like he was the second coming of Picasso. And at the drop of a zebra they start up with the New Age vapourising, like this :
Talent intuits that one can absorb the "other" without losing a sense of oneself; to dedicate oneself to work with constant care in order to better understand assures us of salvation.
Or
The word is a force. But if it is, it is because it created a bond between coming and going, a generator of life and action; however, so that the word can produce its full effect , it must be rhythmically scanned because movement has need of rhythm which, itself, is based on the secret of numbers.
That's from this book, but it could be from any of the others too.
In medieval times illuminated manuscripts did not include any information about authorship or artistship and this rather gorgeous New York photo book In medieval times illuminated manuscripts did not include any information about authorship or artistship and this rather gorgeous New York photo book is reviving that tradition - there is no author or photographer named on the spine, there is no title page at all, and the preface is unsigned. Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ lists it as being by "Monaco Books", the publishers. On the very back page, in small print, I found
Text : Robert Fischer and Tom Jeier Editor: Kevin Wise
And I see it was printed in Slovakia - hey, Slovak printer-people, you did a great job!
So, it's a coffee table book full of fairly hyper-real photos of NYC, you know, the ones that look cleaner brighter hotter cooler urbaner grungier madder lonelier bustlier fantasticer amazinger and buildingier than even the real thing does, i.e. New York City itself. But hell, I'm not complaining. Anyway, if you do go to this very remarkable city, the de facto capital of The World, as we did for our hols this year (did I not tell you? oh well, it was grand!) you see a whole dimension which no photos can really get across - the third dimension. NYC is an immersive experience, it's in 3 D ! It's wraparound. The avenues & streets go roaring on all around you, it's a nonstop thing. Also, maybe this might be true in other places, I don't know, but it seemed to me that looking at the people on the street this is the most mingled together jumbled up place on earth - there was no single type of person in anything like a majority here, all the colours of the rainbow were milling about. Also, when we went to the Metropolitan, there was an a capella group of four guys singing "Money (That's What I Want)" outside, and a little way from them, a saxophonist doing his own thing with "Hit the Road Jack", which impressed Georgia as she knew both songs....more
Comparing this handsome photo book of Dublin with a similar one by Edward Quinn published in 1973 I was struck by the apparent tragedy laid out beforeComparing this handsome photo book of Dublin with a similar one by Edward Quinn published in 1973 I was struck by the apparent tragedy laid out before us - clearly, between 1973 and now, someone had dropped a neutron bomb on Dublin. This is the type of bomb which vaporises all the human beings and leaves all the buildings intact. So here is the visual proof of the undying beauty that is Dublin. How sad that there does not appear to be one single Dubliner left, if these photos are to be believed. Not in the pubs, not in the libraries, certainly not in the streets or on the bridges. Probably Paul Barker must have got special permission to visit the place and worn a special radiation suit.
Funny that I never read anything about this in the news. It just goes to show.
Levity aside, this is a lovely photo book of Dublin, of course, and if you're a Joyce fan you can add it to the growing pile of Dublin/Joyce photo-celebrations - so far I have
James Joyce's Odyssey by Frank Delaney The Joyce Country by William York Tindall James Joyce's Dublin by Patricia Hutchins James Joyce's Dublin by Edward Quinn Dublin by Paul Barker
So all are crammed with pix of the various locations in and around dear dirty Dublin and all are taken at various times between the late 40s and 2007 so you can compare and contrast and go into a kind of Joycetrance. ...more
Here is a thing of beauty, it's a collection of old American music on 2 cds contained in a book of old photographs of Americans doing things with musiHere is a thing of beauty, it's a collection of old American music on 2 cds contained in a book of old photographs of Americans doing things with musical instruments into which our editor has sprinkled mysterious quotes from such writers as Nabokov, Hamsen, Wordsworth and Hauptmann, along with Par Lagerkvist who gave him the title :
I listen to the wind that obliterates my traces the wind that resembles nothing understands nothing nor cares what it does but is so lovely to listen to. The soft wind soft like oblivion
This entire book is a collage, the cds are soundscapes, the theme is : who will still be listening to us when we are dead? who will still be reading the contours of our faces? The answer will be : not anyone you might have been expecting.
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I say soundscapes because the cds are a mystic, joyful panoply of jocund poor white and poor black folk and blues from the Golden Decade (1925 to 35) plus home recordings of similar sounds from anonymous sources, plus sound effects issued on 78s at this time - wind, walking on ice (was it thin?), a mocking bird, walking in thin underbrush, rainfall and thunder, Canadian geese (what a racket!), canary birds : several hundred; all these are interweaved with the songs, which include, for instance, the reverend Edward Clayborn, the Guitar Evangelist (there were a lot of those) - his song "Then We'll Need that True Religion" is as primitive as you get, as primitive as the wind or the canaries, for no Lonnie Johnson is he, a two-note one chord pulse with single string slide decorating the breaks between the verses ("Doctor's face looks sad, worst case I ever had") but played so delicately, with such precision; also we have the hermaphrodite voice of John Jacob Niles, Eva Parker singing "I seen my pretty papa standing on a hill and he looked like a ten thousand dollar bill", Bertha Idaho moaning about suicide by iodine, Chubby Parker cheering us back up with a song called “Bib-a Lollie-Boo�...
The photos can be imagined � a lot of serious guys with guitars and fiddles; a lot of serious women with haircuts no longer seen in Nottingham with guitars and fiddles; then a parade of absolute lunatics with bizarre home-made items which I assume emitted some noie or another; and a lot of folks posing with their new engorged phonographs.
People should do more soundscapes � you could, for instance, do a whole lot with a movie soundtrack album but � very surprisingly � no one bothers, except Trent Reznor’s brilliant production of the soundtrack to (of all things) “Natural Born Killers�. It may have been a terrible film, but this soundtrack is a thing of wonder, crushing fragments of dialogue, Islamic Sufi wailing, Patti Smith, Patsy Cline, Leonard Cohen, Duane Eddy and a whole lot more impossible bedfellows together under one weird blanket. Then some years before that David Toop produced a great cd called Ocean of Sound which had another crowd of unusual suspects blending and merging bearded seals into Holgar Czukay into the Beach Boys into Eric Satie into Sun Ra. That record was all about meditation and trance.
But this book/cd/art assemblage is all about those people, so long ago now, 80, 90 years, all dead now, all ghosts, and how they glint and sparkle.
I have a bookshelf called "This World Is Beautiful Too" - I need it, because it's so easy to forget when the news never has anything good to say aboutI have a bookshelf called "This World Is Beautiful Too" - I need it, because it's so easy to forget when the news never has anything good to say about anyone, or anywhere, and when the best authors, of the novels I read and the films I see, are filled with dismal revelation, and the better they are, the more perfectly do they express the bedrock tragedy of being a human being, triangulated as we all are between the possibility of love, the certainty of death and our own dangerous minds. So I need my big photography books, and it’s a lot cheaper than going there, too, and you won’t catch anything either. This one is a beauty (but really, it’s not hard when your subject is Africa). After a while you notice that Stefan Schutz’s Africa has no war, pestilence or famine. The four horsemen of the apocalypse had maybe cantered off somewhere else while he was there, off on their holidays in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they left Africa alone while Stefan Schutz was rattling around the continent, from Morocco all the way down to South Africa. More likely it’s because he avoided the middle bit, known as The Congo, where, I understand, the apocalypse is still cooking away, on a low light. There’s not much African photo-lovers won’t have seen before, you get the dunes, the old weathered doors in old weathered walls, the old weathered faces too, and the beautiful young ones full of hope and fun, there’s souks, sheep and dromedaries, footballers, matriarchs, patriarchs, monks, juju men, skyscrapers, pyramids, rivers dried up and in full flow, wedding parties, phlegmatic market-women, wide plains of grass with no one there, cramped interiors with too many people, women doing impossible things with their hair and other women balancing entire shopping trips on their heads, and then walking twenty miles, bicycles, boats, tears, resting, painting, fishing, dancing, bashing things to make a wall, bashing things to make dinner, crazy-ass trees, balancing and endurance, shamans, beggars and drummers, neat and eager schoolchildren in the blazing heat, scarification, guns, goats, grimaces, lobelias, longhorns and all the endless dust of Africa from which we came a few hundred thousand years ago. This world is beautiful too.
**
This has been a scheduled break for maintenance purposes. We apologise for the interruption. And now back to our normal programming....more
1) Everywhere should be like the places in here. Look at these brilliant creations, these towering dancing spires and naves, tThis book makes me sad.
1) Everywhere should be like the places in here. Look at these brilliant creations, these towering dancing spires and naves, the ribbed domes and the fantastic tracery, the meringues of stone and the souffles of marble, the pools, the shaded courtyards, the inlays of amethyst, the buildings you just want to eat. I want to live in all of these places, all the time. I want all my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends to be there too. (And my real life friends too. Not to say that you all aren't real. But - oh - you know what I mean.)
2) Only three kinds of people got to live in these places - a) ** rich gits, b) god botherers, c) the servants of the first two.
3) If I got in my time machine (it's in the shed, and it still worked the last time I tried it) and I explained to everybody in The Past that religion is oppression and the rich are the true vampires and that they should throw off these grisly yokes and declare themselved FREE, what then? It grieves me to say so but I think we'd be living in a world with no basilicas, no Ely cathedral, no Agra Fort, no Chatsworth, no Santa Maria della Salute... you get the picture.
4) Architecture is the fusion of arrogance and beauty.
I remember looking through it several times when Georgia my daughter was five or six and I just had to stop and walk away. All these beautiful childreI remember looking through it several times when Georgia my daughter was five or six and I just had to stop and walk away. All these beautiful children, and all their little hopes and fragile families. Each child describes themselves like this -
"Hello. My name is Joseph Mbangwe and I live in a village in Eastern Congo and I am eight years old. I have two little brothers and a baby little sister. I do not go to school yet, but wish to do so soon, when it is possible. I love football!"
And you the adult reading this book several years after it was published are silently adding some other comments :
"I do not wish to be kidnapped and made to fight by some other boys. I do not wish a lot of soldiers shooting people in my village. I do not hope to have killed ten other boys by the time I am fourteen. I wish to go to school."
Or then there was a lovely Eastern European girl. "Hello everyone. My name is Nadia and I live in a small town in the middle of Romania. My dream is to be a dancer and maybe to go to America. I practise every day. I am ten years old" to which can be added "..... and I do not wish when I am eighteen to be told that there is a great job waiting for me in London and to give some guy 20,000 lei to get me there and to wake up and find the job isn't like he said it was at all..."
Anyway, you get the drift. The effect of all those little faces, the earnest ones, the crazy smiling ones, the wistful ones, the fiery ones - and sitting next to me my own little earnest daughter asking - "do you thing she will grow up to be a dancer?" - it was way too much for me.
There were pages and pages of these kids, and I knew that some of them would be all right, and some of them wouldn't.
There should be a sticker on the front : "Warning! Not for Grownups! Pages of happy hopeful smiling children inside!"...more
I shall curse my addiction to giant photo books if I ever have to move but what the hell, some things are just too pretty, too terrifying, or too eyegI shall curse my addiction to giant photo books if I ever have to move but what the hell, some things are just too pretty, too terrifying, or too eyegogglingly weird to resist.
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Possibly you may say that super hi-def photos of very poor people living in very poor places packaged up as a huge coffee table book not that many Western people will bother to buy and no one who is actually in the book will ever see is in very questionable taste.
It's an argument.
But for Western people, Africa is mostly all about genocide, endless complicated war, famine and its attendent handwringing rock stars, and wildlife documentaries, with a side order of poachers.
This book and those like it are another Africa. It's a big place, as far as I can make out.
A book like this just shows how limited the aesthetics of modern interior designers, film-makers and body piercers are. Oh, and also how profoundly mismanaged our planet is, but that goes without saying. Steve Bloom rattles my formerly firm belief that photography is the perfectly democratic art. Even I think that if I was in that place at that time with Steve's very own camera I couldn't have got these pictures. When you're next in Barnes and Noble or Borders take a look through the display copy. Beautiful stuff.
Looking through this big beauty again this morning I was struck once again that I have never seen anyone comment on the convention in photography publLooking through this big beauty again this morning I was struck once again that I have never seen anyone comment on the convention in photography publishing that it's okay to print a photo across two pages, so it's got a big division right down the middle. If the photo is in the middle of the book, no problem, but if it's towards either end it's all wrong, the unity of the photo is wrecked, your eyes have to do a lot of forgiving. These publishers love their photos, so I wonder why they do this. It may be that they would say it's analogous to listening to some gorgeous acoustic guitar music and having to ignore the sudden screech as the player makes a difficult chord change. This happens all the time and it doesn't bother me, so maybe these centre-of-the-page photographic funhouse-mirror distortions are supposed to be glossed over like that. It a world full of anomalies, that's another one.
This is a five star book with the usual one star deducted for the pompous leaden text it comes packaged with. This is another thing that always happens in big photo books....more
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