Berolzheimer, Ruth, and Edna L. Gaul. 500 Tasty Sandwiches: Fancy Breads, Fillings and Spreads, Party Sandwiches, Closed Sandwiches, Hot Sandwiches, Double-Deckers, Tripe-Deckers. Chicago: Pub. for Culinary arts Institute by Consolidated Book Publishers, 1949.

Notes: Offset. Paperback, staple bound. Edited by Ruth Berolzheimer; Associate editors, Edna L. Gaul, Ethel Marie McDonald, Helen Lucy Kinney … [et al.].

Locate a copy via OCLC WorldCat

Many thanks to Jon for taking the time to talk.

from the series Pure Aesthetics
© Jon Feinstein

Zach Nader: Before we dive into everything you’re doing now, where did all of this begin? What was your early, initial interest in all things photographic?

Jon Feinstein: When I was around nine, I went on vacation with my parents – I can’t remember exactly where, but it was somewhere foggy, and my dad took some pictures of trees in the fog and then printed them, framed them, and hung them in our apartment. For some reason that moment is pivotal for me thinking about photography as more than something you share with family members or have in albums. It was a way of elevating them to a level beyond snapshots.

ZN: Discuss the origins of Group Show, which would become Humble Arts Foundation. I am especially interested in the decision to move from purely digital showcasing of work to a mix between online and physical exhibitions.

JF: Amani Olu and I were both working together at Shutterstock (where I still work, managing marketing and partnership initiatives) in 2005 or 2006. I had been there for a few months and Amani had just moved from Philadelphia where he ran a magazine called B. Informed – a lifestyle, culture, and arts magazine. Our CEO, Jon Oringer introduced us because of our similar backgrounds in photography and magazine publishing (I was photo editing for HEEB magazine on the side). So, we sat down, bounced some ideas back and forth, and came up with a really simple idea: group-show.com. The idea was taking what we saw in standard gallery shows and putting it online. This hadn’t been done much at the time. Tiny Vices was a great online venue, and there were a number of really significant blogs—from Alec Soth’s to Jörg Colberg’s, but there wasn’t anything mirroring the way physical shows were done.

The first show was 24 Photographers, one photo per photographer. We contacted people we went to school with, photographers we were friends with that were making interesting work, and more household names, famous photographers. I wrote to Alec Soth and asked him if he would let us use one of his photos in the context of these emerging photographers. He wrote me a really wonderful e-mail back saying that he would help us in any way. This was great because it allowed many unknown photographers to have their work in the same context as someone becoming very widely known. At that time, he had already been in the Whitney Biennial, he had a number of solo shows, and Sleeping by the Mississippi had come out a couple of years before.

As far as the shift from purely digital shows to a mix – on the digital side, it creates a wider access to see and experience work. However, we felt that showing work in the flesh was still a necessary part of experiencing it, so after about four months of running group shows online, we did our first physical show at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn titled “group show: pinned up.”

Raphi and Danielle, 2002, from the series Portraits
© Jon Feinstein

ZN: You review submissions to Humble, have done portfolio reviews at FotoFest, and have been a juror for Flash Forward, Critical Mass and other events. What have you learned from seeing so many artists submit work?

JF: I’ve learned how impactful the online photo community is in influencing and accelerating trends in photography. When I was in school, I saw a lot of work influenced by more ‘canon’ figures like the New Topographics, Nan Goldin, Gregory Crewdson, 70’s color photography, etc. While that’s still a big influence to a lot of the work I see, I’m also seeing work that is peer-influenced, young/emerging photographers taking cues from their peers, from work they’ve seen online… it’s interesting to see how quickly this develops and spawns new ideas and trends. In some ways this is great and really helps to keep photographers thinking on their feet, but I also see a lot of young photographers rushing their ideas and getting their work out there too quickly, which results in a lot of projects that feel unresolved, and incomplete.

ZN: Photographic work is incredibly varied and pervasive. When you’re doing portfolio reviews, jurying a show, picking an artist to feature in your Whitewall Magazine column, or acting as a curator, what are your criteria? What especially interests you?

JF: At the forefront, it is sincerity in the work. I want to see that the photographer’s heart is behind it. I want to feel like the photographer is making it because they have to – that they could not live without making it.

Aside from that, it has to be a well-rounded mix of aesthetically moving and conceptually challenging work. So much conceptual work relies entirely on an idea alone, but it is important to have a mix of both.

In the same way, if it is entirely beautiful or technically perfect, without the conceptual level, it doesn’t work. To simplify it: smart and pretty. Maybe “pretty” is the wrong word.

from the series Small Signs
© Jon Feinstein

ZN: You have put together three 31 Women in Art Photography shows. Would you tell me about how that project came into being and why it is significant to you?

JF: Humble’s mission has always been to get exposure for photographers that weren’t connected, that struggled to get their work out there. We came up with the idea for the 31 Women in Art Photography show after seeing some research a group called The Brainstormers did, that showed that the percentage of female MFA graduates vs. the percentage of women that were being represented by major galleries and shown at major institutions was significantly off. We felt like it tied directly in to our mission to do a show that focused entirely on women that were making strong and challenging work.

As Curatorial Director of Humble, it was important for me to be one of the curators, but we also wanted to include a female powerhouse curator that we respected and had a vision aligned with what we were doing. For the first exhibition, which was at 3rd Ward, we asked Lumi Tan, who was gallery director at Zach Feuer Gallery, to participate and she was very enthusiastic about it. The idea was that we would work with a different curator every two years. So, the second time we approached Charlotte Cotton who we thought was doing amazing work as well. And the third time around, this past summer, we worked with Natalia Sacasa from Luhring Augustine Gallery. Those three curators had very different curatorial practices, but all somewhat in line with what we wanted to do with the exhibition and the organization.

from the series From Russia with Love
© Jon Feinstein

ZN: Tell me about your personal artistic practice. I’m especially interested in any link between From Russia With Love and your stock photo work.

JF: There is an ambiguity about the source of the From Russia With Love photos in that some could be stock images and probably are. This mystery was fascinating to me, but also quite terrifying – the question about what these images are used for – the potential reality of who these women might actually be and the horrible sex trafficking issue connected to this. I was interested in the ambiguity of the photographers and subjects in these photographs – who these women actually are, who is actually taking the photographs, and who is behind sending them out in spam e-mails.

As far as my artistic practice in general, it has fluctuated and gone in different directions. I studied photography at Bard, which influenced me in a very ‘straight’ way – large format, landscape, and portraiture. As I started looking at more work online and working at Shutterstock, I became interested in stock and appropriated images. You can see that in the From Russia series and another project called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which are stills from intro slides to 80’s horror and sci-fi movies. Those were taken from VHS tapes where there is a slide that flies into the corporate logo with terrifying music. What I was interested in was using image and sound to recreate the terror of the movie with these graphic design elements. With this project, and a lot of other work I’ve been making, I was most interested in how images, stock or otherwise, influence perception or buying behavior.

ZN: What’s next?

JF: I’ve been working on a few new projects over the past couple years that will be on my site when I relaunch it in a couple months. One of these is my first collaboration with a friend/colleague who is a wizard of a graphic designer at Shutterstock. Stay tuned.

installation view, Boys, 2013
© Aneta Bartos

ZN: One of your most recent projects is the Aneta Bartos show at the Carlton Arms Hotel. How did that come about?

JF: Aneta was in the most recent 31 Women in Art Photography show we did this past summer. I was taken with her work and found it very fresh and different from other work that I was seeing. In the early fall she approached me for a studio visit and showed me the Boys project. It’s a series of 12 images that were shot in the Carlton Arms hotel in low light conditions with expired Polaroid film of men masturbating while she photographed them. They are subtly composed, beautiful images that have a deep connection to early pictorial photographers.

The idea was to do the show in the hotel where the images were shot. It made the show into a full installation. Aneta painted the walls, we rearranged furniture – it was the most art directed exhibition I’ve ever had involvement in.

ZN: What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects you can talk about?

JF: I’m jurying the Flash Forward awards this year. I’m actually in the process of doing those right now, which is really exciting.

I’m also moving to Seattle in early March for at least a year. I’ll still be working for Shutterstock and doing Humble remotely. I’m actually excited to get out of New York, art world wise, and develop new relationships with photographers and curators. I’m excited to see how other communities work.

Humble will still continue doing grants twice a year, there is potential to do another Collector’s Guide, and we have a year off of the 31 Women in Art Photography show, but we likely will be continuing that in 2014. We have also had some early discussions about what is next for Humble. Those are too early to talk about, but we have some fascinating projects coming out.

My weekly column for Whitewall Magazine called New Art Photography focuses on a different photographer every week, and I am also writing a monthly column for GOOD magazine. I’m totally open to photographer solicitations, so any artists reading this should feel free to Google me for my email address and shoot me a note!

from the series The Serpent and the Rainbow
© Jon Feinstein

No. 1, 2012 from the series Film Electric
© Brea Souders

Arianne Di Nardo: What fascinates me most about your new series, Film Electric, is that the image-making process seems to enact the constructive nature of memory itself; more specifically the coding, storage and retrieval of information. Can you describe how you created these images?

Brea Souders: After shooting film for ten years, I’ve accumulated a lot unusable film – bracketed exposures, awkward compositions, experiments gone awry, victims of mechanical errors and light leaks. I began to clean up my archives, cutting up these cast-off pieces of film into a pile, intending to throw them away. I cut the pieces onto a plastic film sleeve and as I went to toss the first pile into the wastebasket, I noticed that several pieces of film still clung to the plastic.

I liked the way that this unknown variable (static electricity) held certain bits and pieces of my life together in an unpredictable way. I think memory often behaves this way – with fragments coming into focus and converging with others. This was how the project began. I scatter pieces of film that I’ve cut up over larger pieces of acetate that I cut into various shapes. The acetate is rubbed against a hard surface to create a static cling, and then I lift the sheets up to hang against a wall and photograph it. Pieces of film fall to the ground, and the remaining pieces will sometimes rearrange themselves – some pieces are attracted to one another while others are repelled.

No. 2, 2012 from the series Film Electric
© Brea Souders

AD: The idea of being repelled to a memory is interesting. Maybe because of their geometric nature, but the images seem to be structured considerably by what’s not there, physically and psychically. So the repelling kind of performs itself. Was absence a concept that you wanted to play with?

BS: I noticed that when you physically cut into pieces of film, only a small amount of each frame contains any recognizable imagery. Mostly, you get snippets of color, textures, a flash of light, or an isolated object. Impressions. I feel that memory works this way also, with the bulk of our complex experiences getting lost in a sea of much more basic sensory remembrances. Only certain slices come forward, and they intertwine with a lot of smaller sensory memories tied to color, light, or shape. An entire day can be remembered as the way that the light caught someone’s hair, the peculiar pattern on a guitar strap, the shape of the moon that night, and so on.

AD: Several of your earlier works project, in my opinion, a sort of active silence. What role does absence have in your practice, broadly speaking?

BS: I’d say that much of my work deals in some way with the idea that nothing is fully knowable. Another way of saying that is that in the context of my images, unknowability isn’t just a steering principle, it’s a physically manifest factor. There are things left out not because they don’t belong, but because the harmony of the piece calls for their absence. I find that honoring absence creates a dynamic that mirrors how I think things really are. Having control over an entire world, as I do with an image, the tendency might be to create the thing as I’d ideally like it to be. Complete. Or, “complete.” But my preference is to have it, even when surreal in appearance, mirror the rules of the real world. Even if it means I’m left grasping in darkness in a metaphorical room of my own construction. Where there isn’t a light switch. Or there is, but it doesn’t work. Or it only works intermittently. Or it used to work but we don’t know if it will again. Illumination isn’t guaranteed.

Dark or light, we do of course try to understand everything. To make it all add up. But it never will, and that’s what’s reflected by such absences.

No. 4, 2012 from the series Film Electric
© Brea Souders

No. 5, 2012 from the series Film Electric
© Brea Souders

AD: What are your thoughts on the relationship between memory and photography?

BS: Though I tend not to use the camera as a purely documentary tool, the more loss that I’ve experienced in life the greater importance I put on photography’s ability to record a moment in time. For me, a photograph captures an impression, which can create a circuit into the memory bank in your brain, and then who knows what will emerge from that connection. It rarely makes a single precise link, but I find a photograph can act as a kind of springboard into a larger pool of interconnected memories.

AD: I admire your inquiry on the relationship between chance and (dis)harmony, the intuitive relinquishing to unknowability. I think Film Electric can be framed within a larger trajectory, inspired by the early 20th century avant-garde. Photography has always had a tumultuous marriage with Truth, and beyond that, with Control. How does your practice relate to these themes? Is it something that you consciously explore, or an element that tends to reveal itself by default?

BS: For me, intuition and control are highly related non-opposites. When I use intuition purely, I see it as a weak control. Then there’s deliberate and mentally active control, which is a strong control, where I am actively making decisions and involving myself in the minutiae of the fate of an image. So they are both measures of direction. But the difference is the intuitive, like you said, can relinquish more easily to unknowability.

So while some people might start with intuition and then exercise control, I’m more likely to exercise strong control at the start, then allow my intuitions to take over. From there, I allow myself to relinquish the weak control of that intuition and see where an image will progress. It’s a way of allowing the work to exist in the intellectually demilitarized zone between making things and helping things make themselves. And much like the strong control, the weak control, and no control, the acceptance of which is a kind of submission to unknowability, my exploration of these themes are at times deliberate and blindsiding.

No. 6, 2012 from the series Film Electric
© Brea Souders

AD: From your description of the creative process, I imagine there was much movement involved; it sounds almost like a charged dance. Do you consider this work performative?

BS: Definitely. Though there is movement on my end as well, I feel like a spectator in the process – watching some pieces of film float to the ground, and the others dance together in a some times
frenetic way, other times quietly. It’s fascinating thing to witness. I think I put the performance in motion by getting all the elements together. And then time and chance and energy take over.

No. 13, 2012 from the series Film Electric
© Brea Souders

Barret, Richard C. Identification of American Art Glass. Manchester, Vt: Forward’s Color Productions, 1964.

Notes: 30 pages, 14 color plates, offset, comb binding. All items illustrated are from the famous collection of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Limric on display at the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont. Photography by Frank L. Forward.

Locate a copy via OCLC WorldCat

In the 20th century, the production of books required an entire team of skilled laborers. These laborers learned their trade through long apprenticeships and hands-on application. Photographers who specialized in illustration and reproduction existed as a larger production team of typesetters, platemakers, and pressmen. This golden era of applied photography (a professional trade whose craft existed before the advent of photographic academization) was an genre of images crafted for a specific end use.

Before the widespread use of acid-free paper, many of these books have become brittle with age, exhibiting varying shades of yellow.

To paraphrase Walker Evans’ comments on how the vernacular image is read, as artless as these photographs appear, they become a kind of art due to their lack of pretense. However, to refer to these books as vernacular would diminish the contribution of the skilled artisans who created such publications. Many of these mid-century books are high quality, and often feature unique design characteristics whose layouts are striking on reexamination. In fact, they are quite sophisticated, and their design are as relevant today as the day they were published. Even though these books are created with a specific audience in mind, if these books are available in a used store I believe it is evidence of their lasting value in a wider audience.

Untitled, from the series Off
© Johan Rosenmunthe

Greg Jones: First off, tell us a little about your background in photography, and what drives you to make pictures?

Johan Rosenmunthe: My interest follows the boundaries of the photographic medium, and that is what I have been investigating in my past work. When is an image also a photograph, how can we talk about reality in a collage picture, who’s memories are images a representation of? The link between an image as a flat surface and the representation of an actual scene that appeared in front of the camera. And the medium as a tool and goal of investigating a subject matter. These are some of the themes I have been obsessed with so far. But this always changes, and I don’t know how it will evolve in the future.

Untitled, from the series Off
© Johan Rosenmunthe

GJ: Many of your projects are based around elements specific to the digital medium, and more often than not you seem to be making comments on the nature of seeing within a type of digital realm. What is it that interests you about digital processes, and what do they offer in terms of our understanding of the world around us?

JR: With the digital workflow, a visual artist can try so many different things in such a short time and at so little cost — the span of possibilities has been vastly expanded over the last decade. It is both easier and harder so make interesting work now, because as the viewer you demand either a new idea or a really time-consuming effort to judge something a success. Vernacular photography has shifted from the analog world, and though analog photography is the source of everything, it is not necessarily the most interesting medium. It just adds nostalgia. Anyway, I have no specific interest in the digital medium as such – my interest lies in the references the digital medium has to our analog life. At the same time I love being nerdy with technical aspects of photography, but that is an analog thing as much as a digital one.

Untitled, from the series Off
© Johan Rosenmunthe

GJ: Your most recent project, Enlargements, is derived from a single photograph of a cityscape. The photographs within this series are a sequence of crops, within which you composite in various human activates, such as a woman crouched on one rooftop, and a nun standing on a ledge of another building.
Tell us a bit about your thoughts going into this project.

JR: I thought the concept of finding something in your travel pictures that you didn’t see at when you took them – being an unconscious witness to something emotional – is really interesting. And I’m not the first one to think that. Michelangelo Antonioni made Blow Up a long time ago, but I think the present issues of surveillance and image quality are important for this project too. I really like to break down the conventions of image quality – all of a sudden these images can be printed in whatever size because it is not about looking realistic, it’s about an investigation of what you have: a few pixels of light and shadow.

Untitled, from the series Enlargements
© Johan Rosenmunthe

GJ: Your series Off looks directly at the dichotomy of digital and analog processes, juxtaposing one against the other, and challenges viewers to make sense of what seems like a fractured image. The images themselves provide scenes of isolation and loneliness, as the characters within are so seemingly detached from their environment. Were you aiming to set this type of emotional tone in these images, or is there another statement here you were looking to make?

JR: That is definitely also my feeling when I look at the images. The characters are distant and anonymous, which apparently is something we interpret as sad and lonely. Another main point for me, and the beginning point of this project, is the format of modern communication like Facebook, Twitter, online dating, and personal websites. As I state in the accompanying text: “Never have we had access to so much information about each other, and never has the information been so unreliable.”

Untitled, from the series Enlargements
© Johan Rosenmunthe

GJ: What’s the photography scene like in Denmark? Who are some of your favorite Danish photographers?

JR: Unfortunately we have a lot of focus on documentary photography in Denmark – photography as visual art is not very big here. Danish artists working with lens-based art are more looking out to the rest of the world and especially down to other European countries for an interesting milieu, I think. There are many interesting Danish artists, but I just recently re-discovered Marianne Vierø‘s work, which is super nice.

Untitled, from the series Enlargements
© Johan Rosenmunthe

GJ: What’s coming up for you over the next year, photographically or otherwise?

JR: I am working hard with a new project that will be a new book investigating a subject matter, a project that I have been working on for some time now. And then there is my publishing house and exhibition platform Lodret / Vandret that I share with Flemming Ove Bech. That takes up a lot of time too, but it is so much fun and I love it…

Untitled, from the series Off
© Johan Rosenmunthe

—

An earlier version of this interview, co-written by Meghan Maloney, was published on In the In-Between. To see more work from Johan, visit his website.

Ward Long: Tell me a little bit about your library. Where do you keep your books?

Jeffrey Ladd: They are all here in Köln, Germany with me. On one side of our living room are my shelves, the other side my wife’s. I think because of my blog people have the impression that I own thousands of books, but I really have a modest library that holds currently at about 900. As much as possible I claim to be a minimalist, relatively speaking. My obsession is not to own but to know a little about and to learn from. So my library has varied over the past 25 years from its most burdensome (2000+ titles) to the state of my shelves today, which I consider an essential reference and working library.

WL: When did you start collecting books?

JL: I discovered photobooks my first year in art school in 1987. I had a work/study requirement for one of my student loans working in an “art supply shop” run by The School of Visual Arts. It was actually less a shop and more a tiny janitor’s closet they stocked with a few cases of rubber cement and sheets of colored paper which graphic design students needed for class. It was mind-numbingly boring because only about 3 students an hour would stop to buy something. So I wouldn’t be tempted to start huffing rubber cement, I checked out half a dozen photobooks from the school library before each shift. I gravitated towards books which were mostly catalogs that featured dozens of photographer’s work — eg: American Images edited by Peter Turner, The Photographer’s Eye and Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski, etc. — so I had neatly organized overviews of photography and could discover photographers I liked. Then I got more into books of individual photographers, but I was still looking at them for the separate pictures and not for collected statements that transcend the individual photos.

My first two years in art school I lived very hand-to-mouth but I did manage to buy my first photobook at The Strand bookstore for $3.50 — a paperback copy of the catalog Towards a Social Landscape, the Eastman House exhibition with Bruce Davidson, Duane Michals, Danny Lyon, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, curated by Nathan Lyons. I liked the Danny Lyon photos, so I spent my Christmas money that year on his book Pictures from the New World. The Strand had a stock of the signed and numbered slipcase edition (but lacking the print of course!) for $29.95. That was 1987 and was the most money I had ever spent on a book. When I showed it to my mom, by pure chance, she flipped it open to the page that has a self-portrait of Danny Lyon fucking his girlfriend. That was an awkward introduction into photobooks for the rest of my family.

WL: Do you remember the time you saw a book and decided to search high and low for your own copy?

Yes, Sophie Ristelhueber’s book Fait. In 1996 she was one of the artists showing in the New Photography series at MoMA where I first saw the work. A year or two later I saw the book at Gilles Peress’s studio when I became his printer. Gilles also had her book Beyruth Photographies which I also thought I needed. It took three years of searching but I finally found a copy of Fait through a London bookseller for about 80 dollars. Around the same time I found her book Beyruth Photographies at The Strand for about 6 dollars, and they remain to be two of my favorites. The Beirut book unfortunately got damaged while I lived in a loft on 14th street where some phony assholes would gather once a month to talk about Buddhism. One of them, apparently unconcerned with my worldly possessions, had sat their teacup on top of it because I found it later with the whole bottom right corner wet with tea. To this day there is a “Buddhist” out there that owes me an undamaged copy of that book.

WL: In an interview with Blake Andrews, you described your own photography as “just putting myself in the way of life.” That’s an incredible description, and a poetic way to think about the right place and the right time. In some moments, shapes, people, buildings, shadows and places seem to coalesce into something larger and more mysterious right in front of your camera. I’m wondering whether you’ve had the same experience with a book or another piece of art, when you delve into it at precisely the right time in your life for maximum impact.

JL: I think that has happened many times but an example of just the opposite comes immediately to mind. It haunts me a bit that there have been many books I passed up (or exhibitions I didn’t respond to) that are very important to me now that I am older. It wasn’t the right moment when it first crossed my path, I passed on it and now it is way out of my price range. Once when I was still naïve towards everything let alone photobooks, I saw a box full of Ed Ruscha’s artist books in the Strand Rare Book department. While I leafed through a few of them I remember distinctly being confused as to what they were trying to be. To see a book called Thirty-Four Parking Lots or Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations and the content was exactly that, I thought Ruscha was somehow making fun of the reader. They didn’t have that familiar ring of “Art” to them. Also why the number 34? Why 26? They seemed like a joke but they were also serious — it was a printed book after all. Plus The Strand had them priced around 50-60 dollars each, which seemed totally insane for what they appeared to be. Days later I was still thinking of them and getting more annoyed because they seemed so pretentious. I took it personally. Ok, I was young but there is something to be said about getting pissed at little art books even if I wasn’t ready for them. I hadn’t had any book evoke a reaction like that before.

Right now, I often look at Robert Adams (From the Missouri West, The New West, Denver, Los Angeles Spring and especially What We Bought) and I genuinely feel giddy with excitement towards the pictures which, in my youth, I thought were dry and boring. Now is the time for that work and me to be in the same room.

WL: You went to school at SVA, and you lived in New York for a long time. Do you think there’s a unique photobook culture here?

JL: I lived in NYC for most of my life, I moved there a couple months before my 18th birthday and left 5 days before my 43rd. I’d say it just has a great book culture, period! There are still so many bookstores among the many other outlets for books; library sales, thrift shops, street sellers. A copy of William Eggleston’s Guide came to me in 1989 from a street seller off St. Marks Place for $3. It was laid out on a dirty cardboard next to a heap of clothing and a knot of extension cords. Before the internet made it harder to find rare and out of print stuff priced reasonably, The Strand bookstore was a gold mine for finding great stuff. I worked three days a week as a printer in the late 80s at a custom b+w lab called Arista near Union Square so I would check the photobook section and “art paper bins” at The Strand during every lunch hour. I’d estimate about 40% of my important books came from there.

Looking for books just became part of my routine while photographing. I spent so much of my life photographing in the streets I would organize my wandering to intentionally cross paths with different bookstores every couple hours when I needed a break or to escape the weather. If I was in midtown photographing I would slowly work my way towards Gotham Books (they almost never had anything), then wander up to the MoMA Bookshop (full retail price but I could see a good selection of new titles), go across the street to the Donnell Library and look at the library sale carts (library discard stamps but a few gems were occasionally there – plus they had a public bathroom), then photograph up and across to Argosy Books near Bloomingdales (priced a bit higher for the uptown clientele but worth browsing), then maybe shoot my way back down to Hacker Art Books on 57th (a small version of The Strand), then usually photograph all the way down to The Strand at 12th and Broadway, check Mercer Street Books (messiest stacks but great prices) and further down on Mercer to A Photographer’s Place (buy a book and still have Harvey the owner shoot you an angry look). Maybe finish up at the Strand Annex which was way down on Fulton street. Several hours later I might have 8-9 rolls of film shot and one or two books in my backpack. Do that 4-5 days a week and you tend to find things. It is like photographing, you have to be continuously engaged with the actual physical world to be surprised by it.

WL:Each book in the Books on Books series has to meet some pretty strict criteria, but every batch of four books has some very distinct themes; cities, experimentation, the stasis of political events. Were you interested in these topics before Errata, or did they emerge from the group of books eligible for the project?

JL: Curating the series is fairly difficult as it depends on what books we can get permissions to do and when. I have been lucky to be able to make connections between the books in the series but that is how my own collection grew as well — I have a lot of interests. One books leads to another — sometimes it is a direct link, other times it is a purely random discovery. My books sit on my shelves in alphabetical order and not by subject or groupings, so if you look at the variety of styles connected just by name it becomes very interesting. Just glancing left I have this order; A pamphlet on Parachuting, Astrid Proll, issue one of Provoke, Gregoire Pujade-Lauraine (maybe that should be shelved under ‘L’), Walid Raad, Man Ray, Josep Renau, Tony Ray-Jones, Marc Riboud, Revistas Y Guerra (a book about periodicals from the Spanish Civil War), Eugene Richards, Clare Richardson, Gerhard Richter, Miguel Rio-Branco, Sophie Ristelhueber, Alexander Rodchenko, Thomas Roma, Dieter Roth, and so on.

WL: More broadly, how do you see the relationship between your own library and Books on Books? Were you searching for some of these titles before Errata?

JL: The series partly grew out of my own frustration in not being able to see many important books. My library up until the early 2000s was very American-centric. When the Parr/Badger The Photobook: A History Volume I and Volume II came out I was amazed at how many books there were I hadn’t even known existed. After more than a decade of being immersed in books I thought I knew something about photobooks but I saw I knew only a fraction of what the history held. Most important European or Asian books, unless by big name artists and translated into English, didn’t regularly get distributed in the US. Of course by the time I found out about the larger scope I could only access some of them at auction previews, research libraries or in specialty rare bookshops. Doing the Errata series has enabled me to spend a year at a time with four books that I mostly didn’t know. I don’t have a lot of money to spend on one book so I don’t worry about owning anymore.

WL: Errata Editions focuses on out-of-print titles and the classics of photobook history, but are there any new favorites that you’d like to recommend?

JL: It is becoming much harder for me to get my fix. A lot of books are published each year, more than ever, and although I am excited by the popularity and interest with artists exploring the possibilities in bookmaking, there are fewer and fewer books that I feel I need to have at arms length. Some recent discoveries from the past half year are; Wilhelm Schurmann’s books Fotografien and Pagel Koeln; A Document by Paul Thek and Edwin Klein; Elisabeth Tonnard’s We Are Small; Gerhard Richter’s Eis; Gerry Johansson’s Deutschland; Christian Lange’s Lange Liste 79-97; and the William Eggleston Los Alamos Revisited box set. Many of those are not “photobooks” though.

The last mention of the Eggleston box set is fascinating for me. The books are f-ugly but that archive is so deep. Just when you think you’ve seen everything from Eggleston that could possibly be scraped from his proverbial mayonaise jar, they publish another 300-400 images, and although there is certainly a lot of crap mixed in, the majority is pretty amazing. It reminds me of when my friends and I would get together and look at stacks of each other’s prints for feedback. Its a raw experience and you see variants of the same photo, the interesting pictures sit in line with the embarrassing but you see someone investigating and curious, taking risks and testing their vocabulary.

That is what I often miss when I look at a lot of contemporary work. Much of what gets immediate attention in the book world I perceive as almost too well thought out or just extremely clever. It looks complete and well designed yet it leaves me wondering why I should ever pick it up twice. I sense almost a distrust of photography on the part of many bookmakers now. But I am also a self-described dinosaur. I want the pictures to make me fall under their spell when they are irreducible in form, not by the ideas laid upon them. The pictures I have known for decades and they still somehow excite me after hundreds of viewings, those win out. There are books like that, you know them so well and yet they somehow still surprise you even as you change. Those are the books I keep that don’t get neglected and dusty. Lots of dust is the sign of a poor choice.

Pat Padua: Who are your influences as a photographer? As a book maker?

Cristina De Middel: When I am asked this question, I always wonder if the influence meant is in my work or in my life. If it is in my work, I have no clue. I used to love Diana Arbus and Duane Michals when I was studying but I do not think I am technically or aesthetically influenced by them. I find many photographers work inspiring but my influences come from what I read, what I watch in the cinema or what I listen in the radio. The information I get everyday is what really conditions my work both conceptually and aesthetically.

As a book maker there is definitely one person that influenced me because he is my friend and he gave me very good advice: Ricardo Cases, author of Paloma al Aire.

PP: I loved Paloma al Aire. What kind of advice did Ricardo give you?

CM: Ricardo gave me very good advice on the importance of design and print control. Once the book was done he shared with me his address list with the people that should absolutely see the book, like bloggers, curators and other photographers.

PP: You’ve said that you learned more working as a photojournalist than from formal academic training. Is your personal work different because of your work as a photojournalist?

CM: Yes, definitely. I think all I have to say in photography is just a reaction to my days as a photojournalist and in some ways, revenge. I was very disappointed with certain parts of this job and I have always been very idealistic, so I started to give my own version of reality and of the business (because it is mainly that, let’s not forget that detail) on personal blogs at the beginning, and on more elaborate projects later.

One of the aspects of the Afronauts story that excited me the most was that I was going to create new images of Africa to tell a positive story coming from that continent. It is very simple… just Google “Africa news” and look at the images. I react against that, and it’s been always my starting point.

from the series The Afronauts
© Cristina De Middel

from the series The Afronauts
© Cristina De Middel

PP: How did you first learn of the Zambian space program?

CM: I was researching strange psychological experiments in the US in the ’50s. I was, and still am, very interested in the first studies of human behavior adapted to war strategy. Surfing the web looking for these weird experiments I found a page with the “10 Strangest Experiments in History.” The first one on the list was the Zambian space program.

PP: I love the crossroads of technology that your book proposes – a space age ambition with folk art sensibilities. Do you think there’s a danger that the Zambians’ project will be considered a joke?

CM: Well, the images are not offensive by themselves in any way. I am not making fun of the project or the idea, and I was very aware of the risk I was taking and how careful I had to be. Yet, it is true that people tend to laugh by only reading the headline “African Space Program,” which is actually revealing prejudices that we might not even be aware of. I say the same every time that I am asked about this… if it was a German space program, you wouldn’t be laughing, right?

One of my intentions with The Afronauts was to raise awareness of how we consume the image of Africa that is given in the media, and how a whole continent has been stigmatized. This uncomfortable reaction and prejudice belongs to the viewer as it is not literally included in the images.

from the series The Afronauts
© Cristina De Middel

PP: If viewers bring their own prejudices to The Afronauts, do you feel this is a problem with how viewers react to photojournalism as well?

CM: I think the audience now is just assimilating and metabolizing photojournalistic language in a different way. We all seem to decipher photographic images just as we decipher letters to understand words and sentences. Photography is much more a code than a proper message.

In that sense, we might be limiting ourselves to assuming only the simple and straightforward ideas or concepts that are behind each image. That is sadly evident with photojournalism and advertising. Images in newspapers seem to work as headlines, simple and direct, and they lose a lot of potential by contributing to a simplistic version of reality.

Documentary photography should enrich our visual culture and stimulate or assumption of reality and never reduce or castrate it. I am far more interested in images that open at least an internal debate about veracity, than in images that state a certain reality and turn into a product we consume.

The Afronauts (Self-published, 2012)
© Cristina De Middel

PP: The presentation of this work goes far beyond the typical photo book. Did you have the book in mind when you shot the work, or did the format come to you later?

CM: When I started shooting I didn’t know what this story would become. I needed to propose a new exhibition for my gallery in Spain and found the Afronauts story, so at the beginning my intention was just to take pictures and hang them on a wall. Yet after a few months of research I realized that the story had to include many peripheral documents and elements to be told properly and to enable the fact and fiction game that I wanted to play. So at some point it was clear that I needed a book, but I didn’t how to make it happen.

I think every story has its ideal platform to be told. For this particular one, the book is by far the best way of understanding all the layers of it, but that doesn’t mean that I am going to stick to the book forever… I might come up with another project that needs fortune cookies to be understood. ;-)

PP: The photo book market has gone nuts, and prices for The Afronauts are outrageous. How do you feel about the collector madness?

CM: I wish I could answer your question firmly, but the truth is that I still do not know how I feel about all this. On one hand I would never spend that money on a book, not even on the last copy available in the world of The Afronauts. I just cannot understand that collectors’ mentality because I don’t belong to that world. On the other hand I can’t help feeling flattered by the whole idea. It is weird, crazy, uncomfortable, scary. At this moment I cannot afford my own book, which is kind of freaky.

The Afronauts (Self-published, 2012)
© Cristina De Middel

The Afronauts (Self-published, 2012)
© Cristina De Middel

PP: Are there any plans for a second edition of The Afronauts? If not, do you think the video is the next best way for reader to experience the material?

CM: No, there will be no second edition of The Afronauts in the near future. I really need to move on to something else as I had to stop other ongoing projects to attend to this “phenomenon” and I just can’t wait anymore to start working again on my stuff.

But I am preparing an Afronauts app to make it more accessible. It will be a version of the book adapted to this new platform, but it doesn’t pretend to be a literal translation, just an adaptation that takes advantage of all the multimedia possibilities.

I think after the book, the best way to show this story and to experience it is the exhibition as all the documents and the images are included and you have no time imposition. You can enjoy it and consume it at your own rhythm, just like the book.

PP: The Afronauts video works differently from either the individual images or the book. Do you plan to make more films?

CM: Yes, of course. I am really happy with the video and find a lot of possibilities with storytelling but there are limits. I am not interested in making movies, I just want to use moving image to support a story that is mainly told with photographs for the moment. Actually, I am really intrigued and excited by all the different ways and object that can be used to organize images to tell a story…. even View Masters.

from the series PolySpam
© Cristina De Middel

from the series PolySpam
© Cristina De Middel

PP: The images in your project PolySpam began with spam texts which you then bring to life in photography. Do you find as much inspiration in the written world as in the visual world?

CM: I find inspiration in the real world. ;-) But it is true that I read a lot and try to go to the movies at least twice a week. I do not consume a lot of photography; I have to say and I love photography books, but more as objects. Literature, movies, drawing… that’s where I get my ideas from, never (not consciously at least) from other photo books or photo-stories because these are for me “problems” already solved by others.

I find it very interesting to translate what you read into something you see because that is how memory actually works… with images and this idea is for me fascinating.

PP: What are you reading right now?

CM: I am reading and old astronomy book from XIX Century and a book called The Magus by John Fowles for the second time because I remember I really enjoyed reading it a few years ago but can’t remember why. I am also reading the little red book by Mao… kind of.

PP: Are you feeling a lot of pressure for your next book?

CM: Well, more than pressure. What I am is impatient to publish it. I had to stop a few ongoing projects to dedicate some time to The Afronauts after all this success, so it has just been a question of going back to work right where I left it.

It is true that I will definitely be comparing the reaction to these new books to what happened with The Afronauts but this is not affecting the content or the subject at all… it is just that I am now curious of what is going to happen next.

I have to say that I am terribly excited with finishing these two other projects and to move on to something else. It’s been two years now since I started and I am used to a more dynamic production rhythm (a side-effect of my photojournalism years).

The following conversation is broken into two parts: a series of questions for Rozovsky from Cromwell, followed by a series of questions for Cromwell from Rozovsky.

Lay Flat would like to thank both artists for taking the time for this conversation.

© Irina Rozovsky

PART I

Rose Marie Cromwell: In your beautiful book One to Nothing (Kehrer Verlag, 2011), it seems to me that you are working in a documentary tradition by photographing in a specific geographic location. At the same time, I believe you are subverting this tradition by not identifying the location explicitly. What purpose does this approach serve, and how did you anticipate it would impact the work?

Irina Rozovsky: Garry Winogrand said something like, “If I know what a picture will look like before I take it, what’s the point of taking it?” I knew what he meant when I came to Israel — we’ve seen the media imagery of this place, the photo essays and news reports that try to identify the culprit and illustrate a one-sided storyline. But upon arriving, I realized that the story that appears linear from a safe distance is more complex than we can fathom. We think we “know” a place before we even arrive, but this kind of removed knowledge is simplified and uninvolved.

In regards to documentary, there are no obvious facts in this work. I am aiming to convey a sense of this place as it struck me — the aged, eruptive, powerful land, the clumsy layering of history, the occasional absurdity of human efforts, and the heartfulness behind it all. It is important that it is Israel, but somehow secondary, as the elements I stumbled on are not particular to this country or this geography, rather they are quite universal. It’s equally as much about the futile gestures of people in a riddled landscape that unveils a deeper conflict, one that’s not limited to geography, but that’s more a metaphysical conflict, a mythic struggle.

© Irina Rozovsky

RMC: Your image of the man with the jar of screws is an example of how you have managed to position yourself in an intimate way in a “foreign” place. We all have a similar jar and can relate to the act of looking for the right screw. Your intimate position is demonstrated by the fact you could relate to this subtle gesture. Was the act of photographing instrumental in creating an intimate experience as a short-term visitor?

IR: Absolutely. I was really seeing the place through the camera, especially on my first visit — it was an intuitive response to being there, a way to try to understand and get oriented. I learn more from what I see and hear than from what I read, so this was a way for me to feel out the place. And while I hadn’t come to make a project, I felt that making photographs was the only way for me to be there, as my doorway in. That doesn’t happen very often when I’m home, where pictures are afterthoughts, or pauses from life. The photos in Israel felt like explosions. During my first trip, I was traveling with other people and we were never in one place, so I followed just a few steps behind, running with the camera in front of me. Wherever we were felt like it warranted an image. There is a chaotic sense to these pictures, as I’m trying to keep up. When I returned a second time, I came specifically to photograph. I traveled alone, and with a more concrete vision. This time I got a deeper sense — a slower, older, almost metaphysical relation to the place.

© Irina Rozovsky

RMC: Some images function more as loose metaphors, while some seem less subtle, and I interpret you to be mining the natural, social landscape for found performances that allude to allegories and historical myths. Were you alluding to larger myths when you made these photographs and if so what were they, from where did you draw them, and why are they important to include?

IR: I’m drawn to looking at what’s new and fresh, yet reminiscent of something old, learned, forgotten. I like the idea of banal daily moments inadvertently taking on the forms and shapes of an ancestral code. Seeing this way helps me believe in a continuity between the past and the present. But my understanding of history is very blurred and imprecise, so the visions I harken to are not tied to one particular root, they are associating rather loosely, which hopefully allows the photographs to be open and more like allegories rather than illustrations. In Israel, it was natural to think about the Bible, Genesis, iconic Christian representations, creation, life rising up out of the ground, erupting. I was thinking about antiquity in general, warriors on the face of Grecian urns, archeology, cave drawings. I am happy when people perceive mythical allusions here because this way it seems possible to transcend the current moment and make an image that has a greater time line.

© Irina Rozovsky

RMC: I believe that the important thematic structure in One to Nothing, modernity and antiquity, day and night, is in a large part created by your careful and decisive editing. The relationships between the images become just as important as the images themselves. What guided you through the process of editing such a large body of work?

IR: It’s true, an image transforms when juxtaposed with another image — which is the fun and fury of sequencing a book. On their own, the photographs in One to Nothing are fragments that skirt around full-fledged narrative. It was my aim in editing the book to draw these fragments into a constellation. Certain images immediately gravitated towards each other, like the beginning and end of a sentence. I hope that certain pictures vibrate together and allow the viewer to transcend their initial associations. We are pretty lazy and rash when looking at pictures, maybe because there are so many or perhaps because the media feeds us easy imagery. You see a photo of a woman in a burka and you immediately commit to what the picture could be saying, depending on your political, cultural beliefs and experiences. I wanted to try to turn these associations upside down — to recognize them and to gently subvert them. On one page is a woman in a burka, in proximity to an image depicting a slit opening in a black cave, which gives me hope that it’s possible to shift perspective. Instead of looking at someone, you are for an instant looking through their eyes. It was also important to allow the photos to be flexible, many times linked through a visual, inexplicable feeling.

© Irina Rozovsky

© Irina Rozovsky

PART II

Irina Rozovsky: You have been returning to Cuba to make photographs for years and the work recently culminated as the project Everything Arrives in your MFA thesis exhibition at Syracuse University. What drew you to begin working in Cuba and what brings you back? Does your view and process change with each trip? And what is it like to take photographs there, but present them here — a place whose reality is quite different from where the images originate?

Rose Marie Cromwell: I have been visiting and photographing in Cuba for the past eight years. I kept going back to Cuba because I began to feel part of a close community there. Despite this feeling, I am ultimately always going to be an outsider, and someone who comes and goes. This push and pull of intimacy is something I attempt to convey through images in Everything Arrives.

Many people in the United States only experience Cuba through photographs. When we are bombarded with visual representations of a foreign place, we begin to create imagined geographies. I began an attempt to convey my own personal experience of place by photographing my everyday rituals and mundane still life compositions.

The work does not aim to illustrate Cuban culture, but some images cannot help but to contain it. While making images in Cuba and presenting them to my MFA colleagues at Syracuse University, I learned how objects or gestures can lose or gain meaning in powerful and surprising ways depending on the cultural context in which they are being read. The work is not made for a specific viewer in mind, and I have learned to embrace that the images will be interpreted differently depending on the audience.

Installation view, MFA Thesis Exhibition, Syracuse University, 2012
© Rose Marie Cromwell

IR: Although you have gone to Cuba on many occasions and your photographs span eight years, they all seem to occupy the visual space of one endless, hot afternoon. It’s often said that Cuba is a time warp, a passage to the past. What role does time and history (political, personal, big and small) play in your images?

RMC: My images do lack a sense of contiguous time, inspired by an early love for existential literature. In Kobo Abe’s novel, The Woman in the Dunes, an entomologist, against his will, is put in a sand dune. He only has a shovel and an unknown woman to keep him company. Time is absent and the reader only learns that he has been in the dunes for seven years at the end of the novel, after the protagonist decides he doesn’t want to leave anyhow. He has found an intimacy unlike any other he experienced outside the dune. The dune is a stage in which Abe alludes to larger questions of human predicament. My stage is a long, hot afternoon.

© Rose Marie Cromwell

© Rose Marie Cromwell

IR: Your images seem to intertwine choreography with chance. How are these photographs seen and made? Is the way in which you make the photographs, by any means, a reflection of how you consider the place itself?

RMC: I consider all of the images to be performances, including the images absent of human gesture. I am inspired by this quote from Collier Schorr: “Still lifes are simply endnotes, pointing towards something too theatrical to be directed with human flesh.”

The process within which the images are made, however, is quite varied. Some are reenactments of personal experiences or imagined scenarios and some are observed- compositions or gestures that I happened upon. How do you choreograph authenticity? How do you locate telling performance in the everyday? These are questions driving my current working process.

© Rose Marie Cromwell

© Rose Marie Cromwell

IR: You capture a number of human, physical gestures in a way that suggests to me the fine line between pain and pleasure, helping and harming. What are the people in your photographs running to or from, metaphorically speaking?

RMC: My images contain those moments of intimacy and expression when I attempt to escape political, cultural, and gendered constraints. Everything Arrives is a negotiation between the perpetuated myths and the moments when I am able create my own meaning free from conventional representations. The models in my images are representing a perhaps futile drive to exceed politics, to exceed gender, to exceed race — and to be the real owners of our actions and relationships.

© Rose Marie Cromwell

—

Irina Rozovsky has been published and exhibited in the US and abroad. Her monograph One to Nothing (Kehrer Verlag, 2011) was a ‘Selected Title’ of the German Photo Book Award and featured on photo-eye Magazine’s and Alec Soth’s “Top 20 Photo Books of 2011″ lists. Rozovsky’s first solo museum exhibition, A Perpetual Hold, will be on display at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona in February 2013. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the International Center of Photography.

Rose Marie Cromwell is a photography based artist currently living and working between New York and Panama. Using photography she documents performances and still lifes that explore themes such as intimacy, communication, and alternative notions of family and home. She hold an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University and is a co-founder and co-director of Cambio Creativo, the alternative arts education initiative based in Panama.

Asger Carlsen

Greg Jones: First off, Asger, tell us about how you became interested in photography, and where does the inspiration to create such haunting work come from?

Asger Carsen: I got into photography when I was a young boy. I felt drawn to the openness. I discovered that the images I made could be associated with who I was as a person. Like a silent way of saying things, or expressing a mood.

GJ: The title of your work, Hester, calls to mind the famous protagonist Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hester is shunned by her community and forcibly visibly marked for a grave sin that she has committed in their eyes. The figures in your work are obviously human, but appear to have been irreversibly altered as well. Was this reference intentional, or is there another reason for the name?

AC: Hester is really the street I live on in New York and that is where I made the first images. For me, the name is just something I couldn’t place, in terms of culture and reference. I guess it left me somewhere bizarre.

from the series Hester
© Asger Carlsen

from the series Hester
© Asger Carlsen

from the series Hester
© Asger Carlsen

GJ: There’s a strong element of horror in these pictures, punctuated by the informal documentary style you used to make them, which creates a suggestion of believability. The idea of the “Grotesque” stands out to me, and it recalls the work of Joel Peter Witkin. Would you call him one of your influences? Who are some others?

AC: I know Joel’s work and it’s good, but I studied everything I could possibly find, from medical books to known artists. All this work I’m doing comes from a desire to become a studio based artist more than just a photographer (which I don’t really consider myself as anymore) that travels for subjects. I want my works to look like sculptures, or photographs of such. My work comes from photo sessions done in my studio and I see this process more as collecting material for my process – like buying oil paint to put on a canvas. I was influenced by the work of Francis Bacon and Hans Bellmer and by the surrealistic movement.

GJ: It is clear that the subjects of these photographs are assembled from human parts, but are quite inhuman in their construction and positioning. In many of your photos, the subject is in a bizarre posture or environment, such as laying on a dining table or perched on a shelf. What did you hope to convey with this conflict between humanity and inhumanity in your work?

AC: I like the work to float somewhere between a reference and non-reference, having small pieces of recognizable details. For example, in the work I could have an electric plug but I don’t like any hair details on my subjects. I want the work to have a feeling of timelessness and a classic approach, and for the prints to be perceived as objects, more than just photographic prints.

from the series Wrong
© Asger Carlsen

from the series Wrong
© Asger Carlsen

from the series Wrong
© Asger Carlsen

GJ: Your photographs have the interesting quality of seeming unplanned and candid. Some have a skewed viewing angle – in one you are able to see a person’s shoe seemingly left in the frame. Many of the figures also convey, through their posture, a sense of being caught off-guard. However, it is obvious that you spend a great deal of time carefully crafting these images – there is a strong conflict between the altered reality shown in your work and what we, as viewers, know must be true. What is it about this contrast that interests you as an artist?

AC: I guess it’s that balance of familiarity, without spilling out the intentions too much. It’s about a sense of craftsmanship of something that could be a lot of different mediums. Or perhaps it’s a random picture of a sculpture.

GJ: Lastly, what’s coming up for you over the next year, photographically or otherwise?

AC: I’m releasing my long awaited book, Hester, with Mörel Books in London. There will be a few book signings. I also have a few group shows in Europe, and finally a solo show in Berlin, Germany in January 2013.

from the series Wrong
© Asger Carlsen

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An earlier version of this interview, The Surrealic World of Asger Carlsen, co-written by Meghan Maloney, was published on In the In-Between. To see more work from Asger, visit his website.