“Rest Behind the Curtain” by Photographer Michal Solarski, Anna, BOOOOOOOM!

Some really nice photos in this set and a nice set overall…

Photograph by Michael Solarski

Photograph by Michael Solarski

20220212-03

Eikoh Hosoe

Photograph by Eikoh Hose

Guts and Ghosts: The Radical Legacy of Japanese Photographer Eikoh Hose

… there are so many Japanese photographers I love… Eikoh Hosoe is another one… this book from MACK is on my list if i get a windfall…

Exhibition: ‘Mario Giacomelli: Figure|Ground’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, review by Dr. Marcus Bunyan

Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000)
Figure (My Mother), No. 130
1956; printed 1981
Gelatin silver print
40.1 × 30.1cm (15 13/16 × 11 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000)

Figure (My Mother), No. 130

1956; printed 1981

Gelatin silver print

40.1 × 30.1cm (15 13/16 × 11 7/8 in.)

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

… another exhibit that has recently closed, but Dr. Bunyan’s reviews are so thorough with tons of images, that they are a bit like going to the exhibit…

… Dr. Bunyan’s reviews are from a love of photography and art perspective as well as an academic one… they are long, but worth a close look…

Photographer: Grade Solomon, BOOOOOOOM Mag

Grade Solomon

… the above photograph blew me away with it subtlety and clarity… it’s also a photo i could easily have taken…

… exceptionally well made photographs and an artist statement that is to the point and accurately reflects what i encounter in the work… no small feat…

Bruce Haley, Home Fires. Vol.I: The Past

reviewed by Jonathan Blaustein… based on the review, i would buy the book if i had much disposable cash… it’s about ecological disaster… maybe i need something more uplifting…

Erwin Olaf

“Palm Springs”, American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex I, 2018 © Erwin Olaf

another wonderful artist written up by Miss Rosen

_ “I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks._1

… Olaf works in a similar vein as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson

… in addition to the tableau photographs in this article, the full article on Blind Magazine includes some wonderful portrait tableaus…


  1. Erwin Olaf, Miss Rosen: http://www.missrosen.com/erwin-olaf-strange-beaurt/ ↩︎

05 I Like

this photography

Alvaro Deprit, from Rendezvous, Things that happen

Alvaro Deprit’s Website is worth a look…

04 If I Had $85

… i might get this book… it promises an interesting portrait of China… from the sales page of the book…

History of Life is a collection of 415 restored photographs chronicling the history of modern China, from 1910s to the late 1990s. Compiled from over 600,000 negatives, Cai Dongdong curated the book using salvaged negatives from ordinary Chinese citizens and public records which he developed, scanned and selected. Adding a few of his own pictures into the story, the artist crafted his interpretation of the birth and growth of modern China over 3 of the country’s most formative eras: the founding of the Republic, the cultural revolution, and the post-Mao era.1


  1. https://www.imageless.cn/products/history-of-life ↩︎

04 Creation Story by Aaron Canipe

an article in Booooooom

Aaron Canipe from Creation Story

… an all black and white project…

Seen through the lens of the South, this edit of work takes the viewer through a cosmological and primordial journey of a world created by a divinity disrupted…1

… it’s an interesting set of images with an interesting concept for their organization… the creator suggests that it is a selection from a broader body of work, pulled together to tell a story the photographer may not have specifically intended in the beginning, but there are themes and you pursue them…


  1. Aaron Canipe, via: https://www.booooooom.com/2021/07/08/creation-story-by-photographer-aaron-canipe/ ↩︎

03 On Photography, Max Sher:

Max Sher, from Palimpsests, published by Ad Marginem

… i love photography books… i have a small collection and love looking through them… i have long wanted to center my own photography practice around the making of books by hand, the artist object… this seems to make the most sense as a way to deal with the thousands of images i collect each year…

… because i love photography books there are a number of reviewers that i follow religiously… Brad Feuerhelm is one of them…

… this morning he reviews Palimpsests, a book by Max Sher, an emergent Russian photographic artist…

… the images are de-populated urban scapes in the tradition of Stephen Shore and New Topographics… they focus on places where the new is overlaying the old… it is highly recommended by BF… i wish i had an endless pot of money for photo book purchase and to build a library to house my thus ever growing collection…

03 Juergen Teller and Skateboard Fashion

An article on a new skateboard fashion line incorporating the images of Juergen Teller

… an interesting character, fashion and art photography that often (always?) pushes the boundaries of good taste (many would say steps well over it) in presenting male and female bodies…

… i have one of his photo books…

Cover of Unterwegs Mit Juergen Teller

Spread from Unterwegs Mit Juergen Teller

… it’s a collection of photographs taken during his career with brief stories accompanying each… it is frank and largely heterosexual, even if it incorporates gay and trans personalities… it, like the fashion industry, very sexually oriented… there is a picture of Nobuyoshi Araki with a beer bottle sprouting erect-penis-like from his crotch (a frat boy cliche if you ask me, but then, it’s Araki)…

… he seems to be an equal opportunity boundary pusher, young nude women, old nude women, nude men (mostly his middle aged self), men’s genitals, women’s genitals, men’s sphincters, women’s sphincters, trans women, black men, black women, most of them celebrities of one kind or another…

… from where i sit it seems a wild life… my libido is interested and perhaps a little envious, but the poetry of Basho is more my style…

04 Paul Phung, Sisterhood

… to encounter Paul Phung’s portfolio, Sisterhood, immediately after spending time with Jenna Westra’s Afternoons, is interesting to say the least… the parallels are significant… Phung’s project shoots women who are dancers… Westra’s project shoots women who are dancers… both make claims to displaying feminine intimacy, though Westra’s work is a deeper study of the feminine…

… costuming has removed the sexuality of female bodies as in issue in Phung’s work, the women dance in robes with copious amounts of fabric which hide features of the female body that could signify overt sexuality…

… largely, i react to Phung’s work as a study of dance and female dancers… the choreography is not that of the artist as it is in Westra’s work, and Phung remains removed from the work since he does not, could not, participate in it as subject, and he photographs from a distance, no close in crops…

… i enjoy Phung’s photographs, they are well done, but they actually lack the intimacy claimed, which is further made remote by dance representations of what intimacy amongst women is…

04 Jörg Colbert, Deutschland Deutschland

Every country’s past is contested to some extent. But there might be no country as extreme as Germany. To begin with, there is history that is largely uncontestable: World War 2 and especially the Holocaust. I added “largely” in that sentence because the contesting does happen, albeit at a different level (for example, members of the neo-fascist AfD party have been talking it down, claiming it doesn’t matter as much in the context of German history as a whole). But the basic facts stand, and denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offense.1

… as i read this, it is not possible to avoid thoughts of all the denial of January 06, 2021 that is going on by right wingers… the idea of such denial being illegal is appealing… perhaps there ought to be laws that make lying to further fraudulent or destructive aims in public forums of any kind illegal… i don’t think speech should be free if it’s demonstrably false and destructive…

… JC is reviewing Ruckshaufehler by Eiko Grimberg… the book is dedicated to the symbology of the German State… it sounds like an effective critique of where things stand… nationalist/fascist sentiments are on the rise… attempts are being made to minimize the Holocaust… if it weren’t illegal to do so, there would of course be denial that it happened…

… human beings are an ugly species… the so-called rational mind has given us the capacity for duplicity and, i might argue, little more…

… JC gives the book a highly recommended thumb up…

… I look for a place to possibly purchase, i find this article by Brad Feuerhelm, who gives it his highest recommendation…


  1. Colbert, Jörg: https://cphmag.com/deutschland-deutschland/ ↩︎

04 Herbert List

an article on the sensual photography of men and sculptures of men by Magnum photographer Herbert List… i am not into the depiction of the male body sexually, so i view the images with a certain detachment that i don’t have when viewing depictions of female bodies, where viewing is always sexually charged… List photographed during the Second World War… he had little opportunity to exhibit or publish during his lifetime… looking at the images, i imagines him traveling through the Greek Isles and surrounding himself with youthful, heavenly bodies wherever he went…

05 The Shabbiness of Beauty

…photographs by Peter Hujar and Moyra Davey… review by Jorg Colberg… i have seen a number of reviews of this book, all of them good…

06 Dan Wood, Black Was The River, You See

… very nicely composed photographs, about place, anchored by a river…

Dan Wood?

the article attributes the photographs to Mike Gaynor(?) in their captions, but the book, and one believes, photographs are decidedly by Dan Wood?… confusion… i don’t know that there is anything exceptional about the book other than very well made photographs… there are many books about place anchored by a flowing body of water, Sleeping By the Mississippi comes to mind…

02 Mike Brodie

a series of photographs on train hopping/homeless culture… it’s not pretty, each photograph assigned a number, no person is identified, almost all the photographs are people, the photographer travels with them, photographs them… hopping trains sounds romantic, looks anything but… a young woman, lying down, legs spread, menstrual blood showing on white panties, she has pulled a skirt up to give the photographer this view… she holds a paperback book, 3 By Flannery O’Connor, this suggests she is intelligent… the same young woman appears in several photographs… this is one of them…

1027, Photography by Mike Brodie, Taken from the series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

… the title, Mike Brodie’s Pictures of the Fascinating, Fleeting Train Rider Subculture, seems misleading… there is a lot of squaller, many people in the series we feel sorry for…

02 Peter Lindbergh

… this photograph of Tina turner and Azzedine Alaia in 1989…

Azzedine Alaïa & Tina Turner, Paris, 1989. © Peter Lindbergh (courtesy Peter Lindbergh Foundation, Paris)

… wow!…