Book: Ron Jude, Other Nature

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by The Ice Plant (here). Hardcover, 80 pages, with 39 color images. Aside from a short Kafka quote, there are no essays or texts. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: There is something truly wondrous about picking up an unknown photobook and having it grab you. Unlike gallery and museum shows which relentlessly come and go with the changing seasons, a photobook is permanent, an artifact to be unearthed at any time in the future and enjoyed by its future discoverer. Some of you (especially the photobook crazed among you) will wonder why I would review Ron Jude's Other Nature some five years after its publication, but the truth of the matter is that I just found it. While I had tangentially heard about Jude's work, I hadn't ever seen any of his prints in person, nor had I taken the time to track down one of his books. So for me, seeing this book was entirely fresh and new, an introduction to a photographer I had meant to investigate.

A first flip through the pages comes off a bit dull and boring: medium range scraggly landscapes interspersed with nondescript hotel room details, all offered in deadpan color clarity. But with longer looking, both sets of pictures start to reveal themselves as quite a bit more thoughtful. Jude's landscapes have compositional echoes of early 1980s Lewis Baltz (San Quentin Point) and Robert Adams (Los Angeles basin), but without the same suburbanization/ecological point of view. In fact, they have no point of view at all; there is no obvious sense of location, no potential narrative, nothing but an interrupted, blocked view of the land, often decorated with the lazy detritus of human involvement. Overgrown greenery, thick evergreen hedges, dry scrubland decorated with rusty oil drums, sandy desolation with the twist of a garden hose, every image is a reductive smack in the face, the opposite of what we think a landscape should be.

Jude's interior still lifes are equally familiar yet unknowable. Doors and windows are closed, and artificial surfaces and textures stand in for reality. Fake wood paneling, vegetal vine patterns in drab carpeting, the synthetic stickiness of an extra blanket in the closet, the shiny plastic of an empty pastry rack, they all try to give us a clue to a larger story, but ultimately fail. When interleaved with the outdoor landscapes, a rhythm is created, moving back and forth between outside and inside with a frustration that borders on subtle tweaking comedy. There is no way into this body of work, and that, in a certain way, is the insightful point.

So what Jude has done is actually made a book of landscapes that aren't landscapes, in the sense that they don't function in the way that normal landscapes do. His project is more of a conceptual deconstruction of the genre, breaking each image down until it stands right on the knife edge of narrative plausibility, teasing us with our preconceptions but ultimately running off laughing. The hotel interiors provide the palate cleanser between courses of thwarted intention, where clean geometries balance the unruly wildness of the natural world. Seen together and in careful sequence, the images upend our sense of how a photograph is supposed to operate. That deliberate removal of narrative is a powerful concept, one that left me impressed with just how smart this book is.

Collector’s POV: Ron Jude is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, CA (here). Jude's work has little or no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: Fraction (here), 5B4 (here), The Photobook (here)
• Interviews: Ahorn (here)

Book: Steven B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by Duke University Press (here) in conjunction with the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography (here). 122 pages, with 80 black and white images. Includes an introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: One afternoon back in late December, I selected a handful of photo shows to see and headed off into the very brisk (some might say arctic) weather to gather some information for a group of reviews. One of the shows on my list that day was a selection of Steven Smith's photographs of the suburban West, which were on view at Sasha Wolf. After making my way down to TriBeCa, I came to the door of the gallery, only to find the lights out and a paper sign taped to the window: "Gallery Closed: No Heat!". While I was thwarted that day, and didn't get a chance to get back to the gallery before the show closed, I am happy to say that I prevailed in the end, by getting my hands on a copy of this excellent monograph.

Purely from the point of view of a collector, I think the cult of the New Topographics is a fascinating study in the slow but relentless growth of an artistic movement. While it is certainly getting harder and harder each year, it is still possible to gather a representative sample of images from this landmark phase of photography: a few images by Robert Adams from The New West or Denver, a selection of works by Lewis Baltz from NIP and Park City, plus grain elevators by Frank Gohlke, suburban backyards by Joe Deal, and maybe even some color work from Stephen Shore. What I find particularly interesting in all of this is that in a span of two decades (the 1970s and 1980s), these photographers (and a few others) actively grappled with the suburbanization in the western US, effectively wrestling many if not most of the thorny conceptual issues of the times to the ground, leaving the topic effectively "done" for the many artists that were to follow along later. While in recent years, we have seen Japanese, Chinese and European photographers take up some of these same issues and threads from their own national perspectives, the suburbanization (and commercialization) story is of course far from complete here in the United States (especially in a world of renewed interest in the environment and climate change), and yet, few American photographers have revisited and reconsidered these issues in an updated and contemporary way in the past decade or two, without seeming too derivative or stuck in the 1970s. Most of the original photographers moved on to other related or tangential subjects, and very few new artists have stepped into the void to successfully carry the flag onward.

It is the synthesis of the old and new, and most importantly, the bringing in of updated perspectives and vantage points from our current world that make Steven Smith's topographic works so compelling. While the setting of the subdivision, the prefabbed tract house, and the gated development community will certainly feel familiar, the underlying issues have clearly continued to evolve and change. With most of the prime real estate in the West long ago carpeted with houses, builders are now encroaching further onto marginal desert lands, especially those that need an abundance of alterations: bulldozing, flattening, grading, retaining, and terracing, with special attention being paid to the increasingly scarce resource of water, via elaborate culverts, spillways, runoffs, and drainage ditches. Smith's images of these wide open construction sites find eye catching patterns and geometries in the altered landscape, while also asking pointed questions about the real sustainability of such approaches and about the scale of the arrogance and hubris that makes us think we can so readily transform an indifferent land in our own image.

Smith then moves in for a closer look at the unfinished houses themselves, mostly captured in the midst of construction, with piles of raw boulders, plastic drainage tubing and sprinkler systems, driveway heating coils, and cement lawn edging still in the process of installation, with new sod freshly laid out in perfect rows near thick cinder block privacy walls. Plenty of new homes sit precariously under massive rock formations or at the bottom of obvious desert washes and hillsides, mudslide disasters waiting to happen. The scenes have a puzzling sense of absurdity and head scratching, laughable idiocy. The only trees that are found in the blinding sun of these developments are the spindly, newly planted kind (sure to die almost immediately without constant watering); otherwise, garden decoration is dominated by large desert rocks settled in curved beds of dusty gravel, oddly spotlit by nighttime lighting.

As I flipped through these images, I was astonished to find that we haven't gotten much smarter about how we build our suburban communities; in recent decades, the whole enterprise has apparently been super-sized and we've been extending into more and more challenging terrain to meet the ever increasing demands of a growing population. This body of work will I think be looked back on as an important bridge piece to recent projects that have chronicled the violent bursting of the American housing bubble; it effectively shows the mood of the run up and the boom times, before the bottom began to fall out. As such, Smith's images now have an unexpected sense of impending doom; since we already know the ending of the story, the pictures are surprisingly similar to the morbid fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion.

Collector’s POV: As I mentioned above, an exhibit of Smith's work was recently held at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York (here); Smith also has prints with Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica (here). All of the images in the book were shot on film and have been printed in digital inkjet on baryta based paper. Each image comes in three sizes (12x15, 20x24, and 30x40), with a total of 20 images in the entire edition, spread across the three sizes (9 small, 7 medium, and 4 large). Prices for the prints are $1200, $2000, and $4000 respectively.

For those collectors who have immersed themselves in the conceptual framework of the New Topographics or for those who simply have an affinity for the built structure as subject matter (like ourselves), Smith's work will be an excellent extension into the contemporary domain. The images are also a terrific example of how black and white can still be relevant, even in the color dominated digital age.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: Robert Pinsky at Slate (here, scroll down), Eyecurious (here)

Book: Landscape Shibata Toshio

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Ryoko Yomiuri Publications, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name. 84 pages, with 74 images. Includes essays by Iizawa Kotaro and Fujimura Satomi, selected exhibitions and bibliography, and a list of public collections. (Cover shot at right, via Japan Exposures.)

Comments/Context: Not to be confused with his two monographs with similar names published by Nazareli Press (linked below), this volume is an exhibition catalogue of Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata's 2008 show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, collecting together a sample of his recent color work, as well as selections from several earlier black and white projects going back to the early 1980s. So while not quite a retrospective, it certainly is an excellent overview book for those who want to get a broad understanding of his photography.

Unlike the many Japanese artists who have celebrated the natural world and its spiritual qualities, Shibata has focused his attention on the man made structures that have been introduced into the landscape: roadside retaining walls and concrete barriers, webbing to catch falling rock, terraced dams and reinforced reservoir spillways. In many ways, he has adapted the ideas of the New Topographics photographers of the 1970s (Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, et al) for his own environment, challenging the established notions of what a Japanese landscape should look like in the process.

His works in black and white are full of vaguely organic but unidentifiable geometric forms, stripes and checkerboards, zig-zags and chevrons, draped over the undulating land like chain mail, often with tufts of greenery growing from between the cracks. Water also plays a large role in these pictures, either tumbling down the face of a dam in frothy waterfalls, or pooled in reservoirs and man made lakes. And yet these images look nothing like anything you've seen anywhere else; they seem to be unique civil engineering solutions devised for the problems of Japanese construction, now suddenly more visible, as opposed to being consciously overlooked. Shibata has cropped out both the sky and horizon, drawing our attention to the details of the concrete, posing questions about man's interaction with nature and about the traditional definitions of landscape beauty.

The recent large scale color images tackle this exact same terrain, almost as a rephotography project. Many of the same structures that we first saw as stark black and white contrasts are now softer, more real, in their neutral earth tones of tan, green and brown. The same underlying issues are of course at work here, but the integration of nature and the man altered landscape is more subtle, and arcs of color add an additional element of form to the compositions.

A final group of early night pictures from the 1980s round out the book. These too seem indebted to the New Topographics photographers, as Shibata has singled out roadside hotels and restaurants, toll booths and gas stations, centering on the flat horizontals of the architecture and road, lit by pinpricks of light in the enveloping darkness.

Overall, this volume is a solid introduction to the work of an important contemporary Japanese photographer.

Collector’s POV: Toshio Shibata is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery in New York (here), Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, CA, (here, on artnet) and Tepper Takayama Fine Arts in Boston (here). Shibata's work has very little auction history, so gallery retail is likely the best bet for collectors who wish to follow up. There are quite a few of Shibata's black and white concrete patterns that would fit well into our city/industrial genre; we just need to spend some time looking at a number of prints to find the one that matches our collection best.

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here)
• Profile on Polaroid website (here)
• Reclamation, 2006 @Laurence Miller Gallery (here)
• Landscape and Landscape2 @Nazraeli Press website (here)

Book: Joachim Brohm, Areal

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2002 by Steidl (here). 265 pages, with 206 color images. Includes essays in English and German by Urs Stahel and Regina Bittner. The images in the book were taken between 1992 and 2002. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: In the past few decades, cities all over the world have worked to transform themselves, clearing away their old industrial infrastructure in favor of new business parks and planned communities designed for the knowledge economy. German photographer Joachim Brohm has been a careful witness to one of these slow moving redevelopment projects (on the periphery a German city), documenting the unspectacular evolution of the site across many years, through all its ugly intermediate stages.

While there are certainly plenty of stand out images in this volume, this body of work is better thought of as an extended essay, where the images work together to tell a multi-faceted layered narrative. The chronological sequencing of the pictures leads to a meditative flow of time, where the site is slowly redefined, from its original function, through demolition and clearing, to the first stages of its eventual reconstruction. Each image is a small piece of the larger puzzle, a captured fragment of what happened along the way. There is no obvious beginning or end to this project, no ground breaking or champagne ribbon cutting; instead, the process seems to drag on (the seasons pass again and again), with inertia as the driving force, and the completion of small tasks as the activity. Progress is slowly made, and at the end, the buildings look mostly completed, although most are still covered by plastic sheeting or scaffolding, the small details still unfinished.
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Brohm's images are a mixture of bird's eye views (presumably from nearby buildings) and deadpan frontal shots at ground level; his subjects are trucks and back lots, sheds and temporary structures, discarded items and construction rubble, an unspecific view of a generic process that could be happening almost anywhere (and is). He comes back to the same locations time and again, the same diamond shaped blue clock often hovering somewhere in the distance. His compositions are dense, often disorienting, with echoes of Lee Friedlander's all over chaos.

If you pick this book up and flip through it in a hurry, I think there is a good chance you'll miss the subtleties of Brohm's approach; it will look like a grab bag of snap shots from the faceless construction project just down the road from where you live. Given some time however, the complexities of the individual images will start to reveal themselves and the story he's telling will resonate much more profoundly. The more I look at this book, the more impressed I am with its contents.

Collector’s POV: Joachim Brohm is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, CA (here, on artnet) and Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer in Cologne (here). Brohm's work has recently become more available in the secondary markets, particularly at Van Ham. Images from Areal are Fuji Crystal archive prints made in 2002, in editions of 11; prices have generally been under $2500. It appears that prints from other projects were made in editions of 8 or 12; they too have sold in this affordable range.

Transit Hub:

• Artforum feature, 1993, via American Suburb X (here)
• Ruhr on We English (here)
• Ohio at Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig, 2008 (here)
• Fotomuseum Winterthur collection (here)