Papercut
Well-known
- Local time
- 10:29 AM
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2008
- Messages
- 1,064
"Santa" (in various guises) brought me several more treasures this year:
- Nakki Goranin, American Photobooth : part history of the "photomaton" and successors (i.e., automatic photo booths), part selection of vintage images made in photobooths, and part the artist's own photos. An interesting, intriguing book that looks at, and takes seriously, a type of photography usually relegated to the basement in terms of "artistry" (and often literally as well: Goranin has been collecting photobooth images on ebay, fleamarkets, etc. for years ... buying our forgotten and forlorn photographic ephemera).
- Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer : a standard collection of HCB's images.
- Berenice Abbott : a gorgeous two-volume retrospective. The printing is quite lovely in this; one image to a page, with generous white borders. Delicious book of portraits and urban landscape images, all with a richness of tone and studied presence that comes only from large negatives. 🙂
Pieter Hugo, Nollywood : few people know that the third largest film industry in the world is in Nigeria. (Hollywood is #1, India's Bollywood is, of course, #2.) Hugo went and made images of Nigerian actors in costume. They are mostly set in their filming locations. Many of the images are disturbing: with a good number of the actors made up as zombies, corpses, soldiers, witch-doctors -- bloody, impaled, rotting away, with false eye contacts -- for scenes that deal with horror stories, both supernatural or the ethnic/religious violence of Nigeria's civil war(s). Hard to say how representative the images are of the type of movies that are popular in Nigeria, but the photographs are thought-provoking about the traumas of (and psychological responses to) recent colonial and post-colonial Africa.
- Nakki Goranin, American Photobooth : part history of the "photomaton" and successors (i.e., automatic photo booths), part selection of vintage images made in photobooths, and part the artist's own photos. An interesting, intriguing book that looks at, and takes seriously, a type of photography usually relegated to the basement in terms of "artistry" (and often literally as well: Goranin has been collecting photobooth images on ebay, fleamarkets, etc. for years ... buying our forgotten and forlorn photographic ephemera).
- Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer : a standard collection of HCB's images.
- Berenice Abbott : a gorgeous two-volume retrospective. The printing is quite lovely in this; one image to a page, with generous white borders. Delicious book of portraits and urban landscape images, all with a richness of tone and studied presence that comes only from large negatives. 🙂
Pieter Hugo, Nollywood : few people know that the third largest film industry in the world is in Nigeria. (Hollywood is #1, India's Bollywood is, of course, #2.) Hugo went and made images of Nigerian actors in costume. They are mostly set in their filming locations. Many of the images are disturbing: with a good number of the actors made up as zombies, corpses, soldiers, witch-doctors -- bloody, impaled, rotting away, with false eye contacts -- for scenes that deal with horror stories, both supernatural or the ethnic/religious violence of Nigeria's civil war(s). Hard to say how representative the images are of the type of movies that are popular in Nigeria, but the photographs are thought-provoking about the traumas of (and psychological responses to) recent colonial and post-colonial Africa.
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