All Hail C4

Among my daily computer-centric routines is clicking various bookmarks linked to online art and photography mags to see what’s new. Perhaps my greatest delight is when I find a fresh article on C4 Journal, aka Copy Copy Copy Copy. Today was one of those happy days.

C4 is the creation of Callum Beaney and Eugénie Shinkle, who have recruited various writers to review photobooks (mostly) and photographic exhibitions (less frequently). The writing is always extremely good, and I just don’t know where else to hope for such attention to things photographic. N’existe pas.

Eugénie Shinkle.

The source of my delight is a new article by Benjamin Jones reviewing a recent but past exhibition of the work of photographer Jeff Cowan. Reading Jones puts me in my place. It reminds me that I’m just a photographer writing about photography whereas Jones, and the other contributors to C4, are actually art writers, with a much-deeper understanding of what that calls for and a greater dedication to those skills than I have.

Instillation shot from Jeff Cowen, Asemia, at Cassius & Co.

Eugénie herself is a very interesting photographer, and I have one of her books. (Or is it a zine? I get so confused by the distinction, if any). She lives in London, but the writers she publishes come from all over, near as I can tell. And despite the bigger-ness of the Aperture website, for example, C4 frequently covers the less-obvious photographers and strikes me as much more weighty and consequential.

Eugénie Shinkle. Rockfall.

I’m not going to say any more than this. I just want to make sure you know about C4 and have it bookmarked, as I do. And to encourage C4 to keep doing what they’re doing. For me, it’s like coming up for air after swimming under water. What would I do if it wasn’t there?

The Crucial Nature of Influences

Do you ever stop to think about who your influences are as an artist? I wonder if I do this more than most photographers I know personally, since the question of one’s lineage has been rejected by some as not how they operate. As for me, I’ve never set the topic aside.

I think all photographers have a lineage and are influenced not only by other photographers, but by (I hope) literature, philosophy, science, movies, anthropology, history, economics, family, personal experiences, and, of course, arts different from photography.

R.B. Kitaj. Western Bathers.

Painters are famous for talking about their influences. R. B. Kitaj has spoken and written frequently about the Venetian colorists of the Renaissance, about poets and writers, the larger Jewish experience, and about his main master, Cézanne. Anselm Kiefer has likewise been effusive in discussing the Kabbalah and Merkabah of Jewish mysticism, alchemy, World War II, the holocaust, and the poet Paul Celan, along with the formative influence of artists like Joseph Beuys.

Anselm Kiefer. Für Paul Celan.

I’m a bit curious why I don’t read more photographers talking about their influences. Maybe, first off, that’s because far fewer photographers write than the painters of the same era—whichever era you choose. I wonder if photographers see their work as a conversation with art the way many painters and sculptors do. Meanwhile, most artist’s statements by photographers don’t refer to art history or the continuum of artistic concerns so much as to their personal lives and issues of politics, identity, and their self. (Ah, the all-important self.) As well as the story their work is telling and exactly how we should see it.

Charlie Simokaitis. from The Crisis Tapes.

At the artist’s talk given by Charlie Simokaitis during Filter Photo Festival last week, I found myself confessing an influence. I was asking Charlie questions during the Q&A and next thing I know I’m telling him how much his work has affected my own over the years—something I’ve only recognized in the last few months.

The poet Robert Duncan, one of the most distinct and inventive poets of the 20th century, used to call himself a derivative poet. He published a collection of poems that is actually titled Derivations. He freely called out his lineage and the influences that had informed his poetry over his lifetime.

Coral polyps.

This reminds me of a concept in Zen Buddhism of “dependent co-arising.” It pre-supposes that, even though we experience ourselves as individuals, none of us are actually independent individual entities, but that this belief is actually a cause of much suffering. When we see ourselves as a separate, isolated individual positioned against the world. we are deluded, the theory goes. And, of course, terribly anxious and protective. What the alternative concept proposes is that we are all arising together, dependent on one another utterly for our existence. My mind conjures an image of a colony of coral or recalls Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.

Tod Papageorge.

I don’t presently see a purpose in listing my own personal influences at the moment, since that seems rather self-centered. (Although I’m thinking about them.) But you get the idea. Maybe it’s useful to look at your own influences. And maybe, if you don’t find that many, it might steer you towards locating more artists and thinkers and writers in whom you find delight. As Tod Papageorge said, rephrasing Robert Capa’s famous dictum, “If your pictures aren’t good enough you’re not reading enough.” Or looking, perhaps, at enough art.

Thoughts on Filter Photo Festival 2025

My hope, in writing this blog, is to be useful. I think perhaps I gained some new insights during Filter Photo Festival 2025 in Chicago this past week which might be just that.

When I learned that my recent photobook, Mysterious Bundle of String on Mars, was included in Tim Carpenter’s book exhibition, On The Shelf, part of Filter Photo Festival, I decided to go out to Chicago for the event. First, I wanted to meet more photographers and see their books. Second, I was excited to reunite with four of my Hartford first cohort brothers, who would all be there. It was the first time some of us had seen each other in 13 years.

Charlie Simokaitis. from The Crisis Tapes

I also wanted to see Charlie Simokaitis (one of those brothers) talk about his marvelous book, The Crisis Tapes, which had comprised a solo exhibition at Filter Space in the last year. I fear I may have alienated some of the reviewers by my lengthy and rather conversational questions for Charlie during the Q&A. Some even accused me of being an audience plant. But I’ve never been good at guarding my enthusiams.

Photos from last year’s Filter Photo Festival

First: The festival itself. Having participated in the Photolucida portfolio reviews twice, and being familiar with other reviews, I am deeply impressed by the speakers and reviewers at the Filter event. While not huge (an advantage, I think), the group you would meet at Filter is superlative. It has a high concentration of the most important museum photography curators in the US, as well as accomplished book publishers like Clint and Alex Woodside (Deadbeat Club) and Nelson Chan of TIS books, plus a few excellent gallerists and some really great photographers. Also included was Jessie Wender, a photo editor at the New York Times. The line-up is stellar.

I heard nothing but positive comments from photographers who participated in the reviews and workshops. Everyone, including reviewers, said the event itself is smoothly managed and quite rewarding. Not a single complaint. That’s pretty amazing.

Workshop with Clint and Alex Woodside of Deadbeat Club

Second: Why sign up as a participant? Here’s where I gained some new insights. If you are a photographer who wants to deepen the chances of getting a book published or being tapped for a group show at a museum, these are the people you want to meet. It’s not just a chance to get comments on your work, it’s also the best way to start a relationship with the people who are the gatekeepers to your future. Besides, they’re really great people.

If you’re very lucky, after doing a few such review events, you might build a friendship with someone who will invite you to join their group for dinner after the day is done. This is when you will really start to work your way into what I might call the inner sanctum of photography. And this is how you eventually get published or in group shows or into (maybe) a gallery. (Although the gallery game is something else entirely.)

After all, we are humans. And, as the late great ad agency owner Dan Wieden once told me, “People want to work with people they like.” So your eventual goal is a handful of human-to-human relationships with people you like, and who like you.

Book from TIS: Mike, by Elijah Howe

As I told three recent Hartford grads over dinner, the path, as I see it now, into that sanctum really starts when you get a recognized publisher to put out your book. A publisher who will take your book to Paris Photo or Polycopies, and the New York Art Book Fair and the ICP Photobook Fest, etc., and get the book reviewed in multiple places.

Of course, you will have to help pay for the book’s printing. And you will also pay your way to the photo events and put yourself up in a hotel. But you’ll be introduced by your publisher to more people who you will want to know. Soon, as I’ve witnessed with friends, you attend enough such events that you get on a first-name basis or even build a friendship with the curators, gallerists, and others who will help you achieve your goals.

Third: Why didn’t I sign up for the portfolio review myself? That’s a really good question. Having graduated with my MFA 13 years ago, frankly the thought never occurred to me. I imagined having my photobook in the On The Shelf exhibition might qualify me to meet some of the amazing people I discovered would be reviewers at the event.

The good news is, it did. The bad news is, it didn’t. At the first evening reception of the event, I introduced myself to one of the stellar curators. This person asked me if I was participating in the reviews. I said no, I was there because my book was in the exhibition and to meet up with my old cohort friends. That ended that conversation. Permanently.

But think about it—as I did that next day. The review participants are the ones who pay the airfare and hotel costs for the reviewers. They, plus the chance to see friends (and everyone does know each other), are the reasons the reviewers are there. For some reviewers, anyone else is beside the point.

This is not surprising because, as humans, the reviewers only have so much time and energy to give. They’re doing nearly eight hours of reviews a day, a new one every 20 minutes. Of course they’re exhausted. And we photographers are constantly hounding these people for help in reaching our own goals. I was a bit disappointed that at the photobook exhibition I didn’t see many reviewers looking at the books. But what would you want to do at the end of a long day of looking at other peoples’ work? You’d want to have a drink and catch up with your friends and take a break. Still, it was disappointing.

Book by Susan White featured in On The Shelf exhibition

That said, the crowd at the photobook reception was huge, with tons of people carefully paging through the books and paying real attention. I was quite pleased and I also met some wonderful people.

All of this was a big aha for me. Had I wanted to really connect with the reviewers, I should have signed up for the review. It’s a not that expensive considering how much you’re paying for the flight and a hotel for four nights. Now I know. Although I still think reviewers would look askance at someone 13 years out of an MFA program signing up for a portfolio review.

I’m writing about this because I think you might want to know all this. I’ve published four of my own books, which has given me complete control over everything, which I love. But distribution is reserved for the real publishers or the big award winners, and my work is decidedly not mainstream. It’s hard to build an audience that way, and maybe it’s time for me to re-evaluate my approach. I don’t know.

If you want to grow your audience and your exposure, the truth is, you’re going to have to pay. So you might think about doing the portfolio reviews. And Filter, in my opinion, should be near the top of your list. But make sure you’re bringing a really strong series of photographs ready for a serious audience.

Photographers I'm Watching

Yes, Instagram is a bowl full of barbed wire and turned milk for breakfast. I can’t believe the utter crap in my feed. On the other hand, living in Portland, Oregon, where the last real photography gallery closed several years ago, and the only thing left is a non-profit which chooses its exhibitions by committee—hence, of course, any vision is impossible—I am dependent on IG to find new photographers to watch.

And you know what? Wading through the fecal water of the algorithmic flood does turn up some really marvelous photographers. Here are a few I’m watching, in no particular order.

Máté Bartha. Spread from Anima Mundi.

1 Máté Bartha. @mate.bartha. OK, I did find Máté through an article in the wonderful online photo mag, C4, but I connected with him via IG. He lives and works in Budapest. When I received his book, Anima Mundi, I kept saying aloud to myself, as I paged through it, “This is the most fucked-up photobook I own!” That, by the way, is perhaps my highest praise. Máté is swimming in the ocean of his own world, his own way of seeing the world, and that ocean is bobbing with references like Giordano Bruno, Mallarmé, William Blake. Plato, Mondrian…the list of kindred spirits continues. He is working with imposed grids over city scapes and the semiotics of images and his human encounters in the city. It’s about the city, it’s about the spirit. It’s going to take me some time to really digest it. And that is such a worthwhile endeavor. Máté is starting to attract much-deserved attention and recognition out there.

Uta Genilke. Spread from Sacre.

2. Uta Genilke. @pik.dame. Now Uta is someone I did discover on Instagram, and I’ve since acquired one of her several slim books. Uta has fearlessly followed her inclinations in composing—as a poet would compose—these books, and is not afraid of puzzling mixes of images or to sometimes paint over or collage her photographs. Like Máté, it’s her mind at work in the making and choosing and sequencing of her images that enlivens photography with something new. Uta lives in Hamberg, and is known to frequent Berlin. Her books are starting to win more awards and get into exhibitions, but I know I would never have found her work if it wasn’t for Instagram. What a sadness if I hadn’t.

Pavel Mikailovskii. Image from White Like Heaven series.

3. Pavel Mikhailovskii. @pavel.mikhailovskii. When I find myself stopping my scrolling, over and over again, at the images from the same photographer, I know something’s up. And Pavel’s photographs always stop me. He’s working very much in a similar way to how I’ve found myself working lately, making decontextualized tight shots that are confusing and mysterious. Of course, different things in the world are catching Pavel’s eye, and I find what he’s posting always worth looking at closely. These are discoveries in the corners and above eye-view, in places where people either don’t look or don’t see if they do look. Pavel sees. He lives in Amsterdam. I’m so interested to watch where the work goes, and to receive news of Pavel’s first book.

Marco Messa. A pair of photographs from his web site.

4. Marco Messa. @nn_ho_un_nick_name. Color. Color! Marco is clearly in love with color. Not so much color photography—which is indeed what he shoots—but with color itself as principal content. His are tight shots with unworldly color, exaggerated but taken from the real world. He favors a very narrow, tall aspect ratio, which gives his images the slight element of a scroll painting, but not really. And again, my personal tastes are showing, in that he tends to extract (not abstract) things from that real world. I always know its a Marco photo as soon as I see it, although he rarely shoots similar subject matter. I just find his images a source of constant delight.

Gui Marcondes. A spread from I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me.

5. Gui Marcondes. @gui.m.photo. Gui is a Brazilian who divides his time between New York and São Paulo. Gui has published books and jurored shows and has been interviewed on Nearest Truth and Nowhere Diary. So it’s not like Gui isn’t getting attention. I find his work always surprising and provocative. He’s also comfortable painting over images, creating abrupt juxtapositions, abstracting patterns from images and other processes I don’t fully understand. He published a book in 2023, I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me, with Nearest Truth Editions. Rich, challenging work.

Anastasia Davis. Spread from Self-Portrait By The House Wall.

6. Anastatia Davis. @anastatiadavis_. In keeping with the general direction of the other photographers I’m watching, Anasttatia is pulling images out of the world, both black and white and color, and creating non-narrative sequences of images for books and zines. Her images are often tight extractions from reality which become her own mysterious vocabulary for making meaning. She graduated from the Hartford MFA in 2024 and has definitely attracted my continued attention.

So that’s six of the photographers I’m following right now on Instagram. Photographers whose work is expanding my sense of what photography and the photobook can be. If I’ve introduced a new photographer for you to follow then I’ve done what I hoped to do.

So, Why Do We Do This?

I’m learning to accept the nights in which I’m trying to go to sleep and find myself involuntarily writing a blog post in my head. Like tonight. It’s 11:30 pm in a hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. Sleeping is hopeless, so I might as well get up and write.

The topic haunting me? Why we make art.

My big fat presumption here is that you, the reader, do in fact have art in mind. I must say that, given the number of photobooks produced each year with obvious artistic intentions, this presumption is true for an awful lot of photographers.

As far as the question goes—why we make art—I should tell you I don’t so much have answers as I have questions, and I’ve found some answers from other people that might help to figure this out a bit.

On the other hand, I am confident about one thing: that making art is a compulsion. We are compelled to make it. The great poet William Carlos Williams reportedly met someone at a party who said, “Oh, I would really like to write poetry, but I don’t have the time.” And he is said to have responded, “Well, you have time to shit, don’t you?”

William Carlos Williams.

A compulsion and a necessity.

When I was a book dealer in San Francisco, I worked with a book collector who had, in his youth, busked his way around Europe for a few years playing classical guitar in cafes. He told me of a woman who approached him and said, “I’ve always wanted to play the guitar,” and he replied to her, “No you haven’t. Otherwise you’d have been practicing six hours a day like me.”

A compulsion and a discipline.

Picasso. Guitar.

I was fortunate to attend the final graduation ceremony of the Hartford Art School Photography MFA under the directorship of Robert Lyons this week. After inventing and launching the program and directing it since 2010, Robert has handed the reins to the extremely capable Michael Vahrenwald and is retiring as director. One of the things Robert said to the class of 2025 in his commencement address was: don’t worry about exhibitions, don’t worry about galleries, don’t worry about publishers, just make the work.

He’s right. It’s got to be hard for these students to hear, or even harder to follow, because it bucks all self-advancement instincts. But the wise insight underlying Robert’s admonition is that once you start worrying about these indicators of “success” it can adversely affect your work. It’s so easy to gradually start to make the work you think the galleries and collectors and publishers want.

Robert Lyons.

The other wisdom is that, to achieve any of the above successes, you need a strong body of work. (And I use this term in its original sense of referring to one’s entire opus or oeuvre, not just a recent series of photographs.) Work that has an unusual vision and is bringing something different to photography. And that takes time to build, for most of us.

From all reports I’m getting, on both sides of the Atlantic, from established on up to art-star photographers, the photography market has taken a nose dive. Book sales are low. Print sales are dead. Teaching is honging in there. Galleries, if they do take on photographers, are not nurturing careers but cashing in on the self-nurtured artists with massive social followings. And while lower-paying editorial work is still available, lucrative advertising commissions have nearly vanished. Photographers everywhere are scrambling.

In a way, I wonder if we’ve slid back to the time Stephen Shore discussed recently, the very early 60s, about which he said: “My point is that photography, then, offered the enticements of neither fame nor fortune. For those of us who pursued it as an art, it was simply a ‘calling.’ I mean this literally. I felt called to it.“ (See the full quote in my blog post from July 17, 2025.) Yet we don’t even have the magazines they had back then, which gave so many art photographers a livelihood.

Stephen Shore. Photo by Sprüth Magers.

Here, copied into my notebook, is an excerpt from an article by Charlotte Cotton from 2013, celebrating the persistence of photographers who were already then finding themselves left to their own devices. She describes them as “the groundswell of pro/am photographic artists who self-publish, collectivize, and find their audiences themselves, knowing full well that the professional infrastructure for art photography is never going to accommodate them during their productive lifetimes.” Will there be exceptions to this? Yes. How many? Who knows.

Charlotte Cotton. Photo by Show Studio.

Is this a grim assessment? Or is it a liberating encouragement? Is it a resignation? Or is it the acceptance of a new reality? In Zen Buddhism, the first Noble Truth is that life is suffering. The second, that there is a way out of suffering. The third, that the way out is letting go of attachment. Atttachment was once explained by Richard Baker Roshi, in a talk I saw him give, as “wishing things weren’t the way they are.”

Richard Baker Roshi.

If this is, in fact, the new reality, it’s difficult to imagine how many photographers, who have worked really hard at growing their vision, knowledge, and skills, and who maybe even have just graduated from a grueling MFA program—how many of these people are now grieving the lost chance at what they’ve seen others achieve and what they’ve always thought was possible. And then there are the ones who’ve had it, and have felt it slip away.

During the graduating class exhibition at Hartford this week, I was talking with one of the students and his parents about career prospects going forward. We all agreed that, with an MFA, one could teach. The question the father asked was, should photography be depended on for a livelihood? I suggested that one approach was to figure out how to make a living to support the photography, and the father nodded his head emphatically in agreement. I said, support and protect the art at all costs, but don’t necessarily force the art to provide a living. The father agreed and seemed happy to find someone who felt the same way. I didn’t believe he was saying photography is secondary to career, but more that it shouldn’t be burdened with earning a living. The student was carefully digesting all of this.

So what happens when art is just art, unsupported and barely appreciated by the larger world? Is this a chance to take photography back from the marketplace? And what is art, anyway?

I’ve been reading the writings of the late painter Jack Whitten, whose massive retrospective just closed at MoMA this month, and whose journal was published as Notes from the Woodshed. He wrote in 1978 (his emphasis):

Painting is a gift. Please don’t ask who does the giving or what does the giving I simply do not know. From now on I will cease calling what I do experiments. The word no longer applies to what I am doing. I am the recipient of visual messages. Where these message come from, I do not know. I don’t even know what to call them. I am even confused as to their use.

Two photos of Jack Whitten.

Yes, Mr. Whitten struggled to make a living, and would have loved to sell a bunch of paintings and have galleries, which actually did happen before he died. But while he does talk about being broke in his journal, he talks so much more about his higher purpose in making art. He talks frequently about the sacred nature of this gift.

Here is a quote from the journal about the presence of spirit in art from 1976 (original punctuation retained):

One senses that he is in the presence of something. I got that from African sculpture. I have the feeling that I’m in the presence of someting and I understand that they even put certain substances into a work of art. They say that the spirit is embodied in the work. Now if it doesn’t have a spirit it doesn’t work for me….Does it have the spirit in it or does it not. If it does it works for me and it’s time to stop working on it. That’s when I send it out into the world to do its job.

So is art spiritual? Is it a calling, as Stephen Shore says?

According to the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, in his book Sculpting In Time, the goal of art “is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question.”

Andrei Tarkovsky.

It’s hard, watching Tarkovsky’s great movie Stalker, not to believe Tarkovsky saw art as a sacred calling, a great and selfless gift to others. (Filming the movie in the middle of a toxic waste site ended up killing him.) The main character, the Stalker, suffers deeply when his clients have no faith in what he has shown them in The Zone, an act which utterly exhausts him to the marrow of his soul. The Stalker stands for all artists.

The character referred to only as The Stalker.

Tarkovsky also writes, “Such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherant logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life.”

In a similar vein, the French film director Robert Bresson said in a 1966 interview, “I firmly believe in cinema as art. Not as entertainment, but on the contrary, as a way of taking a deeper look at things, a kind of aid to man in looking deeper and discovering ourselves.”

Robert Bresson.

Are we now seeing the larger contribution of art to the world beyond the commodity it delivers? Does this role justify the artist expending more time, energy, and resources than they can ever hope to be compensated for? Has this been the role of artists since the first songs and the first marks on cave walls? And are you, as an artist, willing to continue to make art no matter the presence or absence of reward?

Like I said, I can’t answer the question of why we make art. But I’m thinking some of these comments and questions can help each one of us figure out our own answers.

Michael Schmidt's Ein-Heit

“Unity, justice, and freedom for the German fatherland. Let us all strive for this, brotherly, with heart and soul. Unity, justice, and freedom are the pillars of this bliss. Flourish in the splendor of this bliss, flourish, German fatherland.”

-Google translation of a plaque depticted in the book Ein-Heit

Please excuse the weird moire pattern in this photo. Pretty, but not real.

I feel compelled to talk about reading the photobook Ein-Heit (Scalo, 1996) in this blog post. I will surely fail. Except I won’t. Because despite the fact that I don’t recognize many people and things in this book, despite the fact that I’m not German, or perhaps even more importantly not a Berliner, and I don’t know the references, and I don’t know the language, I still don’t believe Mr. Schmidt created this book with the idea that any serious attempt at reading it would lead to failure, whatever the outcome.

And yet, Ein-Heit is so weighty in subject matter, so large, so obviously complex, and so laden with meanings that failure always feels like a distinct possibility when I pick up this book. However, my experience with it has always been exceedingly gratifying, no matter how impenetrable the mystery of it sometimes feels.

But it’s not impenetrable. All you have to do is turn the pages.

A photo of Michael Schmidt included in Ein-Heit.

The German word einheit means unity. But with the added hyphen, it reads to me more like one-ness. This is one of the richest book titles I know of, which is why I can’t abide the English version of the book, which has been retitled Un-i-ty. The whole point of the title in German is the subject matter of the book, which is the reunification of the two Germanys in 1990: the DDR (or East Germany, as we used to say), and the BDG (or West Germany). There were two Germanys—hence the two word parts joined by a hyphen—not three, as implied by Un-i-ty. (I hope Herr Schmidt didn’t pick the English title.)

Ein-Heit the book feels epic. Not in the literal sense of the traditional epic form of poetry, which is a long narrative. There is no narrative here (thank God). But the book feels epic in scope, and in length, and in importance.

First photograph in Ein-Heit.

It starts off with three photos pretty clearly taken by Mr. Schmidt—many of the subsequent photos were not originally taken by him, but were photographs he photographed from what appears to be newspapers, magazines, and books, as indicated by the Ben Day dots. The first is a winter scene outside what appears to be an apartment complex. The second photo is of patterned window curtains. The third features patterned wallpaper and part of a table. So far, we’re not being “told” what we’ll find in the rest of the book.

The fourth photograph in Ein-Heit.

The fourth picture is an extremely tight enlargement of a photo of what looks to me like the schematic of a concentration camp. I may have read somewhere that it is. Or perhaps the curator Thomas Weski told us that in a talk in the Hartford program. I don’t believe Mr. Schmidt talked about this photo when my cohort met with him. The fifth photo is an enlargement from a printed document of a man in a suit and hat, looking vaguely official and sinister. Now the reader is being somewhat alerted to what’s coming. The sixth photo is a detail from an embroidery depicting a lute player and another man doffing his hat, both in “period” clothing—the period being vaguely 17th to 19th century to my untutored eyes. It is clearly an image of nostalgia related to a happier, carefree time. (Always dangerous.)

The fifth photograph in Ein-Heit.

The seventh image is an appropriated photo of capped and uniformed soldiers standing at review, possibly Soviet-era DDR military, maybe BDG, but not overtly Nazis. That will come later. The book will continue to rhythmically show us historical images from different eras and Mr. Schmidt’s own photographs of buildings and portraits of more contemporary people, some looking official, some looking like civilians, including punkish youth. We are left to decide in each case which side of the German divide they represent, who or what they might be, and from what time period.

The seventh photograph in Ein-Heit.

Do you see what a failure it is to try to describe this book to you? But that’s OK, it’s all in the hope that you’ve either seen the book and will remember it, or you will soon see it. The book runs 314 pages, with most photographs on the right-hand page. Every time I pick up Ein-Heit, I watch myself turn from the first page to the last without stopping. It is, for me, that compelling.

Why? Why is this such a great book, in my estimation? First, because I’ve never experienced anything like it. Burning curiosity and uncertainty seem to merge with emotional responses to nearly every photograph. It’s as if Mr. Schmidt is plunging us into a mystery that is our mystery, whether we’re German or not. After all, the division and then the reuniting of Germany has had a deep impact on all our lives. Secondly, and I think this is crucial, I never feel the book is propagandistic or polemical. He’s not judging, he’s presenting. I cannot tell you from looking at the book how Mr. Schmidt feels about reunification, except that it’s big and important and historical.

I happen to be re-reading, for one of my own works, the slim little book War and the Iliad, which contains two main essays: one by Simone Weil, called “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1939) and the other by Rachel Bespaloff, called “On the Iliad” (between 1939 and 1942). Both women were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and Ms. Bespaloff’s essay is a response to Ms Weil’s essay. Ms. Bespaloff is comparing Homer and Tolstoy in her essay when she comments on the nature of the epic:

The style of the epic, when it attains the grandeur it has in Homer and Tolstoy, demands an accurate perception of true facts as well as the inclusiveness of an all-embracing view; it has no place for the arbitrary. It must give the sense of slowness and at the same time have the gift of brevity; it must have insights into collective states of mind and also into individual souls; it must capture the cosmic vision and be captivated by the anthropomorphic imagination; any partiality of judgment or sensibility is therefore impossible to it.

I had been wanting to write about the range of Mr. Schmidt’s photobooks, but reading this passage made me decide I had to write about just Ein-Heit alone, immediately. This passage describes part of why I’ve been so compelled by Ein-Heit for the 13 years I’ve owned a copy. It has grandeur. It has an all-embracing view of the breaking and rejoining of Germany and its shared history. It certainly has slowness, and yet enough brevity that, even at 314 pages, I always turn my way completely through it. And as I said, it’s not judging, it’s giving us an experience that is dark and sinister at times, but it’s an equal-opportunity darkness.

Meanwhile the portraits by Mr. Schmidt are profoundly compassionate and matter of fact and inclusive, although his sympathies clearly lie with the young Germans.

Most of all, I feel from this book a depiction of humanity, much as I do from Homer’s Iliad, with all the tragedy and some of the light which humanity entails. Images of power, force, youth, violence, love, betrayal, horror, and the drudgery of life are amassed and presented as a shared heritage of the German people who, at that time, were coming together again like a long-divorced couple hesitantly trying to give it one more go. People with no real idea what they were getting themselves into, and perhaps no clear memory of what had happened before. It seems that Mr. Schmidt was trying to remind them and keep them honest.

It’s possible to say that this is a depiction of the German soul, but somehow that doesn’t feel sufficient. It’s too easy a summation. It’s reductive, and this book is anything but reductive. The book is more like a step-by-step reconstitution of a memory, one that impresses, as happens in the Iliad, the actual feelings, the experiences, which constitute this memory. Each image closes a circuit in the brain and restores the force of each memory as an actual neural event, which is something words have a hard time doing. Because we can chose to hear or process words—or not. But an image cannot be evaded the same way. The retina sends the message immediately and directly to the brain.

The photographs don’t just reactivate memories, they also create images in the present moment, especially with the faces of people who are living this reunification at the time the images were made. Even though the Iliad was presenting events that happened in 1200 BC and was recorded in the poem around 800 BC, when Homer describes a lance penetrating near a soldier’s belly button and coming out the other side with bits of soldier attached, we viscerally experience that image in the immediate now. So, too, with the images in Ein-Heit. We experience them in the present, whether it’s a schematic of a gas chamber or the portrait of a young Berliner, even if we weren’t alive when the images were made.

Perhaps this is a large part of the power of Ein-Heit—that it is always the present. Distance of time, and even of place, have been erased. Even reading it again and again, I can’t remember what comes next when I turn the page. The force of its non-narrative structure helps assure, for me, its inexhaustible nature. So, too, the uncomfortable beauty of Mr. Schmidt’s photographs. Who can say if, fifty years from now, when everything in it will have been from so long ago, that this will still hold true for new viewers of the book. It’s impossible to know. I won’t be alive to see so you’ll have to tell me.

For insights into the artist, I highly recommend you read Jörg Colberg’s excellent blog post about Mr. Schmidt: https://cphmag.com/michael-schmidt

What Photobooks Can Be: Ron Jude

No blog post about what photobooks can be is possible. So I’ve decided to break up this topic by individual photographers and see what happens. The subject interests me personally, since I conceive of my work first for the book. But over the last 15 years, with the oceanic surge in photobooks, I cannot think about the whole thing. But I can think about bits and pieces.

Miwa at Dashwood Books, a great place to make sense of the torrent of photobooks.

Perhaps you feel as overwhelmed as I do with the uncountable number of new photobooks each year. Perhaps you’ve made a photobook or want to. Or maybe you’re building a library of such books to learn how to photograph. Perhaps, in these cases, this one-sided discussion will be useful to you.

Another one of the best places to find recent photobooks is Bildband Berlin. Ask Joe for help.

Out of compassion for my children I am slowly reducing my library. But one of the things I will leave for them to deal with are the books of Ron Jude. [A note about names in this blog: if I know someone, I’ll use their first name. If not, I’ll use their last name with a prefix like Mr., Ms, or Mx.]

Ron Jude teaches in the University of Oregon undergrad and MFA photography programs.

As the first cohort of the Hartford photo MFA, we defended our theses—our photobook dummies—before Mark Steinmetz and Ron Jude. This is the year I first discovered Ron’s work. Since then I’ve acquired nearly every one of his books, and what has always fascinated and inspired me is just how different each book is.

These range from a small collection of essays and interviews to a slightly larger box with a pamphlet in it to full-on hardcover books published by Mack. Out of almost a dozen or so books he’s created, there is a core of three that are referred to as an autobiographical trilogy. These are: Alpine Star (A-Jump, 2006), Emmett (The Ice Plant, 2010) and Lick Creek Line (Mack, 2012). This is as good a place to start as any.

Alpine Star. Photo by Motto Distribution.

Alpine Star is autobiographical but in a most un-egotistical way. It’s a collection of photographs, I think re-photographed but I’m not sure, taken from the small home-town newspaper his mother kept him subscribed to after he’d left Idaho for graduate school and a teaching career. The images are all strangely extraordinary, black and white, and extracted directly from the newspaper, complete with Ben-Day dots. They feature everything from a bridge being washed out by a river to strange and unsettling pictures of people we don’t know.

From Alpine Star. Photo by Saint Lucy.

What’s most extraordinary to me is the way the book reads, thanks to Ron’s selection and sequencing, and the rich experience the book delivers. It’s both surreal and all too real. That a photographer would make an autobiographical book using the images of other photographers strikes me as a profound commitment to art over self-interest. After all, they’re not even his photographs. Except, now maybe they are.

Even the book’s format is non-self-aggrandizing. It’s a paperback measuring 8 1/2 x 6 1/4 inches, and published in an edition of 500 copies which, for 2010, was a small print run.

Emmett. Photo by Ron Jude.

The follow-up book in the trilogy is another slim and just slightly larger volume called Emmett. This time the book features Ron’s photos, but they are pictures he made in the 1980s when he was in high school in rural central Idaho. Thirty years later, Ron found the photos he’d taken in his youth in a shoe box at his parents’ house. The stars of the photographs are nature, Ron’s friend Kenny, and Pontiac GTOs, his friend’s favorite car. We see drag races, trees, teens kissing, images from television screens and, of course, Ron’s shaggy-haired blond best friend.

Spread from Emmett. Photo by Dashwood Books.

Nowhere do we see a photo of this autobiography’s author, Ron Jude. Instead, we see inside his teen-age life courtesy of his eyes. Who is Emmett? I believe it’s the small town north of Boise where the drag races occurred, if I remember correctly from a talk Ron gave. An epilogue of two photos closes the book. The first appears to be an alleyway in a Mexican village, or something like that. The second is of the almost-identical view but with a torrent of water rushing toward the alley.

From Lick Creek Line.

As Ron has described it, these two photos are a prelude to the third book in the trilogy, Lick Creek Line, which opens (after two preliminary images) with five photographs in a row of a violent cascade of water. Now we’re looking at a more substantial paper-bound, 11 1/2 x 10 inch, 112 page book published by Mack. And the photos are all Ron’s, made much closer to the year of publication.

Lick Creek Line. Photo by Jorg Colberg.

The title is enigmatic. The photographs are enigmatic. The subject matter is enigmatic. But I found that after five “readings” of the book I started to piece together a sense of what might be going on. And I always found the experience deeply rewarding. I don’t really want to give you my take on that, however, because, like David Lynch, I don’t believe a work of art should be explained. Too much of the actual experience of the book gets taken away from you if I were to do so.

I will say that I discovered themes, such as the new and the old built environments within the place near where Ron grew up. There’s a theme of paths, and of a person—a person who appears to be a trapper, hence the title Lick Creek Line, which is the line of traps the fur trapper runs along that creek. There is a flitting sense of seeing this man’s life and existence, but it’s fleeting. Much the way his livelihood is fleeting. There’s a sense throughout of Ron as witness to change. But perhaps I’ve said too much already.

Joachim Brohm. Photo by Inn Situ.

The German photographer Joachim Brohm said, during a talk given at the Hartford MFA session in Berlin—a session I was fortunate to visit this past May—that “A book is an object that gives you an experience.” So much in life is too easily consumed and forgotten, and a book like Ron’s is a great gift of puzzlement, searching, and uncertainty. I’m just pointing you in the direction of Ron’s work. Much of the joy it gives comes from each one of us coming to find its meanings in our own way.

Needless to say, Lick Creek Line is very different stylistically from the other two books in the trilogy. And yet they all offer a similar experience of discovering and uncovering meaning. And this is something that deeply inspires me in Ron’s work. Were I to write about some of his other books, you would find each one is an exploration of what a photobook can be, and of what photography can look like. There is no one Ron Jude style, counter to the advice so many receive in portfolio reviews that you should develop a signature, recognizable, and therefore brandable and sellable style.

From Lick Creek Line.

Check out Lick Creek Line to see what you think. And I encourage you, if you find that interesting, to look at Ron’s other books and consider adding them to your library of possibilities. Some of these include:

Executive Model. (Libraryman, 2024 second edition.) A Ron’s-eye view of businessmen in the street.

12 Hz. (Mack, 2020). A brilliant visual engagement with the cthonic forces of the earth.

Nausea. (Mack, 2017). Photographs made in an abandoned school that make ghosts real.

Vitreous China. (Libraryman, 2016.) A midwest site of light industry becomes a mix of writing by Mike Slack and photos by Ron Jude.

Lago. (Mack, 2015.) Ron returns to the childhood site of the California desert and the Salton Sea.

Fires. (RAM Publications, 2013). A collection of photographs from previous works for a show at Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Other Nature. (The Ice Plant, 2008.) Visual questions about what is nature, what isn’t.

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Adequate Images

I have never forgotten renting the short film called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe back in the 80s. It was directed by Les Blank, who asked if he could film while Herzog fulfilled a promise he’d made to Errol Morris. Morris was a grad student and was complaining to the director about the difficulties of making his documentary Gates of Heaven. To push him along, Herzog vowed that if Morris completed the film Herzog would eat his shoe. Eventually the film was finished, Morris’s career as a director was born, and Herzog found himself one evening at the famous restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

Werner Herzog. Photo by Robin Holland.

Chef Alice Waters had cooked the Clark Desert Boots—the shoes Herzog was wearing when he made the vow—in a garlic and herb-infused duck broth for five hours, While Blank rolled camera, Herzog sat in front of an audience with a tin snips and a Heineken and talked about art as he slowly consumed his shoe.

Alice Waters. Photo by Platon.

Watching the film way back then was like drilling holes in my skull and standing in a torrential downpour. My head was filled with Herzog’s words. I will quote one of the most important statements I’ve ever heard about visual arts:

Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images, our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images.

This is one of the two ever-persistent koans that I’ve meditated on throughout my photographic practice. The other was a directive from Robert Lyons, the head of the Hartford Art School MFA I attended, who said to me, in the face of my intellectualizing: “There are different kinds of intelligence. There’s a retinal intelligence.”

Robert Lyons.

Back to Herzog. Over and over I pondered the question, What is an adequate image? I accepted Herzog’s assertion whole-heartedly. I just didn’t really know what it meant. Years later I found out that Garry Winnogrand was also deeply impacted by Herzog’s statement. Yet clearly Winnogrand and everyone else who has struggled with this conundrum has come up with different answers. And that’s probably exactly the point.

It strikes me that the definition of an “adequate image” quite likely changes by the decade, year, day, and hour. What was once adequate might not be adequate any longer. Conversely, there are many of what seem to me to be inadequate images made today while the photographs of Harry Callahan or Alexey Brodovitch feel entirely adequate sixty years later.

Photo by Harry Callahan.

So how do we know what’s adequate and what isn’t? I think, more than anything, there’s a feeling that is often nearly instantaneous that signals the answer. Perhaps this goes back to Robert Lyon’s term “retinal intelligence.” A study by MIT neuroscientists determined that the brain can process entire images in as little as 13 milliseconds. It turns out the retina is actually made of brain matter, and transmits visual information straight to our brain without any mediation.

I also suspect that each individual photographer exists to expand the number of eyes looking for adequate images on humankind’s behalf. Therefore, the number of photographers out there matters. Because some of us are going to get it right. And the definition of getting it right will constantly change over time.

From Ballet. Photo by Alexey Brodovitch.

I think that, subconsciously at least, we all know what an inadequate image feels like. To me it can feel any of the following ways: familiar, clichéd, safe, manipulative, simplistic, nostalgic, etc. Mark Steinmetz told our cohort at Hartford that “something needs to be at risk” in our photography.

Mark Steinmetz. Photo by Andre Wagner.

Perhaps this is all part of what makes art hard for artists. Its never a question that gets answered, there’s never a sense of landing on the proper way of making an adequate image. Instead, it keeps us off-balance, anxious, uncertain, questioning, and rather desperately hunting. We never get to coast. But I do personally feel, like Herzog, that much is at stake.

Photography and Career

I just read an article in ArtNews titled “What Is Art Good For?” In it, they talk with Stephen Shore. Speaking about his “own journey” in art, Mr. Shore says:

When I first knew I was a photographer, when I was still a child, the world of photography was radically different from what we experience today. There were no galleries in New York that showed and sold photographs. Very few photography monographs were published. The first photography gallery I ever visited, the Heliographers Gallery, opened in 1963, when I was already in my mid-teens. And that gallery sold prints for perhaps $15 or $25. I remember buying a print from W. Eugene Smith, at that time one of America’s best-known photographers, for $25. My point is that photography, then, offered the enticements of neither fame nor fortune. For those of us who pursued it as an art, it was simply a ‘calling.’ I mean this literally. I felt called to it.

Stephen Shore. Photo by Sprüth Magers.

This reminded me of Robert Lyons talking about how he and Stephen Shore were the two youngest photographers in a Minor White workshop. Robert was 15 and a half years old, and went on to have a long mentorship and friendship with Mr. White.

Robert Lyons

It’s pretty hard to imagine thinking about career when you’re 15 and a half years old. Clearly for Robert it was a calling.

I really appreciate Stephen Shore reminding me that it used to be virtually impossible to have an art career as a photographer. It makes my own anxieties about whether or not I have an audience, an exhibition, a gallery begin to recede. It’s like standing at the edge of the ocean looking out..

During my time in the Hartford MFA program I had the privilege of watching Bryan Schutmaat open into full bloom. It was incredible how quickly he mastered the 4x5 camera, which he had never used before. And to witness his deep, obsessive attention to detail as he was sequencing what would become Grays the Mountain Sends, his first photobook, which went on to win all the awards and position him for a Guggenheim.

Photo by Kominek Books.

Then, and since, I never heard Bryan talk about career in any way. He talked to me instead about the emotions he wanted the viewer to have looking at his photographs. He talked about movies and literature and all kinds of other things. (He was the first person I ever had a conversation with about Tarkovsky.) I felt he was called to photography, in the way that Mr. Shore talks about, albeit in a different time with different possibilities.

A year or two after we graduated, Bryan was at our house for one of the dinners I host for visiting photographers, and he was speaking with another somewhat more experienced photographer sitting next to him. The other photographer quickly began talking about Bryan’s career strategy. Bryan looked both uncomfortable and embarrassed. It struck me Bryan was mostly listening and being polite.

Now obviously a photographer does not build the career Bryan has without working at it hard. What I’m saying is, I never felt that it was his primary motivation, as it might be for other photographers, whose decisions about their next work are driven by positioning themselves in the market. Yet clearly he has made smart choices regarding the art market.

Susan Howe. Photo by Nina Subin.

I remember reading an interview with the poet Susan Howe where she talked about being OK if she only has a tiny handful of readers for her work. This is the world I come from—poetry, and those who are working, as the poet Michael Palmer puts it, “at the margins.” These poets accept that they may not have a large audience. The poet Robert Duncan used to tell us that every poet is guaranteed two ideal readers—the readers who totally get everything you’re doing. You just hope, he said, that both of them aren’t in the past.

Robert Duncan

Stephen Shore is reminding me of that commitment, that willful engagement of the art of photography with no apparent “upside.” Like the painters Jack Whitten and Stanley Whitney, who toiled for years without real recognition, we have to keep going, even when it would be easy to feel defeated.

Stanley Whitney and a detail of one of his paintings. Photos by Lisson Gallery.

As Stanley Whitney tells it, one day he came back to his studio after one of his regular visits to the galleries in Chelsea, and said to himself, “Well, Stanley, you’ve seen what the galleries want. Do you want to keep doing what you’re doing?” And he replied to himself, “Yes, I want to keep doing what I’m doing.”

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis

This is not a review. I’m not a critic. I’m a photographer who is writing about a photobook by Charlie Simokaitis called The Crisis Tapes (TIS, 2024). The poet Robert Duncan used to say that responsibility is the ability to respond, and that’s what I’m hoping to do here.

The first photograph in the book is of Charlie’s daughter Faye. I know this because Charlie was my friend in the first cohort of the Hartford MFA program, and I watched this work grow from it’s infancy. Charlie’s daughter Faye was gradually losing her eyesight while Charlie was making these photographs, and this situation was the genesis of the book. Her presence for us the viewers fades almost immediately as the book progresses, but not, I imagine, for Charlie.

The second photograph is of sand, in which we see a triangulation of the footprints of a multi-toed small creature and the slithering tracks of a Sidewinder, a desert rattlesnake I know about from old western movies. The uncertainty of what happened in this sand is unnerving, which is true of many of the photos in the book. What are we seeing? Exactly.

We are seeing the things which Charlie looks for, sometimes scenes of nature, sometimes dark corners of possibly a basement ceiling, sometimes a building, sometimes an incomprehensible detail of a wall with two holes, one of which is crossed by a saw blade, sometimes a blind dog. Many of the photos are quite dark, and almost all of them are mysterious.

As mysterious, perhaps, as losing one’s sight. Or as having sight and finding oneself seeing these dislocated fragments of a real world that is no longer real because now it’s a photograph. A Charlie Simokaitis photograph, which I think of as being just as distinctive as a paragraph from a novel by Samuel Beckett (who I happen to know Charlie has read). And I think this is where I take my delights from this book—in seeing so many Charlie images. They are sometimes nearly abstract. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, extract—detailed extractions from the context of the world.

The Crisis Tapes feels very much like a celebration of seeing something that doesn’t really exist until it’s photographed. The shattered moon, which might be a way-too symmetrical galaxy, or possibly the broken ice from a bird bath lying on the night grass. Flash is an important part of this seeing at times, as is night, and shadow. I use the word celebration because this is not a gloomy book, despite it’s impetus. I don’t know if he’s seeing on behalf of Faye, who soon won’t be able to, or if he’s seeing sympathetically with her, as the darkening occurs. Perhaps it’s both.

Page after page delivers another extracted image, sometimes clumped thematically, and sometimes a complete surprise, with no comforting narrative structure or set subject matter to ease the uncertainty, the strangeness, the unpredictability. Almost all of these are photographs I’d want on my wall so I could study them over time and live with their presences.

The final image, bookending the first image, is Faye again, this time diving down into the water of a swimming pool with her legs kicking back and up toward the camera. It’s a photograph filled with the bright light of summer sun on water and an exuberance that signals for me, personally, just how joyous it can be to be alive, even though.

I think looking at The Crisis Tapes as being a book about something is a mistake. It’s not an “account” of anything, no matter what the publisher’s blurb says. It is about a lot of things that do not need one thematic thread unifying them. My sense is, it’s more dedicated to Faye than it is about her. It also feels like a long engagement with vision and uncertainty by a father who is coming to terms with his daughter’s approaching loss. Meanwhile, he’s doing what he does in his own particular way, which is to see.

Let Us Now Praise Slim Photobooks

I listened yesterday to a Nearest Truth podcast in which Brad Feurhelm interviewed my friend from the Hartford MFA program Felipe Russo. Among other things, they discussed the beauty of the shorter photobook. They were talking about Felipe’s book Garagem Automática, which consists of 22 photographs.

I commented to Felipe on Instagram that this book felt to me infinite, but that I realized it’s because the images resonated infinitely for me, despite there being such a surprisingly small number of them. It’s a book that took four years to come about, I think he said, and I bet it could have included so many more images. But Felipe realized that 22 were enough.

Spread from Felipe Russo, Garagem Automática.

I have witnessed the development of multiple photobooks from their naissance to their eventual publication, and I’ve seen a few cases involving a shift from what were tight, powerful edits to something larger. It struck me that the expansion of the work did not necessarily make it stronger. Rather, I wondered if the photobook publishers, and maybe the artists, grew the number of images to fill out an idea of what a serious photobook should be, which is: a large hardcover with between 60 and 80 photographs and well over 100 pages.

My sense is that the initial thread of an idea, or concept, can get lost as the number of images grow, and even the relations between the images can become more tenuous. This might have to do with memory’s capacity to hold onto images and relate them to each other. Or it might be that only so many images can be combined around one concept before either repetition or straying sets in.

Don’t get me wrong. I love images that don’t belong, or that surprise the reader––the hard left turn. But I have a suspicion that photographs sometimes end up included in a book both because of the general feeling that bigger is better, and because they’re really good photographs which the publishers and artists don’t want to leave out. The net result might be a collection of really good photographs that don’t necessarily deliver a unified experience. I think this connects to a revelation I had writing poetry in undergraduate school that once I started taking out words and lines the poems often got stronger.

My favorite Robert Frank book—OK, yes, after The Americans—is Pangnirtung, which only has 27 photographs. I think I read once that he shot the images in a single week while visiting an Arctic village. It has a wholeness and a completeness that inspire me to try to make the same. And while it is a hardcover and is bigger in format, it’s a terribly slim book in the hand. The length allows for multiple “readings” in one sitting, which, for me, leads to a deeper contemplation of the book and its images.

The photographer Uta Genilke in Hamburg has been issuing a series of short, slim books, each serving a different theme or idea, and each of which feels like a full and complete piece. She prints these in small editions and they’re quite affordable. They also allow me to really feel the artist’s thinking through images and sequencing. Doing several shorter books I think also gives her a chance to address more ideas than trying to fit more photos under one title.

Uta Genilke. Sacre.

My personal favorite book by Bryan Schutmaat is Good Goddamn, which has 27 photographs made during a going-away celebration between two friends, one of whom was about to head to prison. (It wasn’t Bryan.) The work feels terribly personal and the emotions lift off the pages like mist. I believe Bryan said somewhere that it’s more of a zine, which I disagree with. It’s a book. It’s just a slim book. But to me it’s equally as important as his other longer books. (Brad Feurhelm and Felipe Russo mention that they believe a slim book is not automatically a zine.)

Bryan Schutmaat. Good Goddamn.

And while I love Michael Schmidt’s epic cloth-bound tome Lebensmittel, which clocks in at 264 pages, I find myself more frequently looking at Waffenruhe, a paperback which has 38 photos. I can’t imagine anything is missing at that length, and not a single image in the book feels superfluous.

I might also contrast Waffenruhe with John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall, a monumental 464 page book, which I looked at very carefully and completely. Once. I haven’t taken it down from the shelf since. There are many extraordinary photographs in that book, but it’s an ordeal just to turn through the pages

Michael Schmidt. Waffenruhe.

Not that longer photobooks necessarily have superfluous images, but I suppose I’m saying that for me slim books often have more impact and hold me in the images, the idea, and the mind of the photographer longer. Yet I think many in the photobook world still see the big important hardcover as the highest accomplishment. I applaud the photographers who are gravitating toward shorter books that don’t make a grand statement but often speak more forcefully and more compellingly than their lengthier brethren.

When Did We Lose Our Desire to Understand?

The massive and labyrinthine show of Diane Arbus photographs currently at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory was recently reviewed on the Hyperallergic website by Hakim Bishara. “The era of Diane Arbus’s cold, classist gaze is dead, “ he pronounces in the lede sentence. “Her “freak” photographs,” he continues, “of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people she ambushed with a camera in asylums and hospitals were morally challenged when she made them between the late 1950s and early ’70s, and have only soured over the decades.”

Diane Arbus

He goes on to critique the fact that she came from a privileged family that owned a department store, as if that somehow disqualifies her as an artist and the work she produced. “Arbus was in her natural element in New York’s high society,” he asserts.

Interesting. Had he read her biography and dug into her life he might have come to understand just how much she felt like a freak herself, and how she more likely identified with the marginalized people she photographed than the social milieu in which she was raised. But the pulse of curiosity seems to be absent from his entire review. This complicated, suffering, and imperfect artist is instead basically cancelled, together with her work.

John Ashbery

One of my favorite art critics to read is John Ashbery, though he is fairly dead. His reviews focus on trying to understand what’s going on in the art. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he was an accomplished poet who had created many significant works in his life and maybe had some measure of compassion for the artists who were trying to do the same. I can’t say.

John Yau

I also depend deeply upon the reviews in Hyperallergic by John Yau, a former student of Ashbery’s and a poet, to guide me towards artists I’ve never heard of, and who often end up being very important to me.

Robert Creeley

In 1974 I took a reading class at the University of New Mexico from Robert Creeley on contemporary poetry. Creeley was a writer who was credited by many as one of the most important lyric poets of his generation, and who was associated with the Black Mountain school of poetry, which is where he both taught and studied after dropping out his senior year from Harvard. In our class with Creeley, we read many poets who I’m sure he did not see eye to eye with, nor feel much affinity for, but he led us through their work with the sincere intent to understand what they were doing without dismissing any of them.

Robert Duncan

The poet Robert Duncan used to say that poetry needs all poets. He basically refused to rank in a hierarchy the importance of different poets. And yet he was a poet of great convictions and opinions.

It strikes me that it’s much more challenging to seek to understand an artist than it is to measure them, sometimes 50 or 75 years later, against the moral standards of 2025 and find them to be wanting. I’m actually curious which artists can withstand such scrutiny today. Like, sincerely curious. I wouldn’t know how to make such a list.

I was taken, in reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, just how often the “father of psychiatry” admitted he didn’t know something, that he couldn’t have an opinion on it because he didn’t have enough information or it was beyond his expertise. He did this frequently.

Uncertainty. In my personal opinion, this is the heart of art. As artists, perhaps we eventually discover that it’s more useful to seek to understand than it is to know. As for cancelling, I’m not sure what it gives us that’s actually useful.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 6: Tender Buttons

As I mentioned in my post about Emily Dickinson, the second-place prize for most well-known poet who no one reads goes to Gertrude Stein. I’m going to focus on just one work of hers: Tender Buttons. It’s a book of prose poems, written intentionally as a book of poems, not just poems collected into a book. Therefore I believe it has much to say to the photobook makers of today. It’s also so much easier to pick one work, rather than try to talk about her entire ouvre.

First edition of Tender Buttons.

I also chose Tender Buttons because of how “visual” it is. The book is divided into three sections: Objects, Food, and Rooms. (Wouldn’t this make an interesting photobook already?) But let’s start imagining how Stein’s book could be useful to photographers by talking first about the title.

Have you noticed a pattern in the naming of photobooks? There seems to be a set number of formats, including, as the most common, the one-word title. Here are just a few examples: Exposures. Epitome. Cargo. Needle. Noticings. (You get the idea.) It functions, but it doesn’t usually create curiosity.

And the titles with more than one word are rarely ones that I find surprising or intriguing. Not too many photobooks have a title that generates curiosity like the name Tender Buttons. Happily, there are many exceptions, including Jason Fulford’s Raising Frogs for $$$. Surreally (and delightfully) random, right?. Bryan Schutmaat’s Good Goddamn is another. A brilliant title is Michael Ast’s The Windows Are Tinted To Help You Sleep. I bought this slim book just because the title made me laugh with joy.

Another would be Ron Jude’s Lick Creek Line. Talk about a charged and estranged line-up of three words. Coming upon it for the first time, there’s basically no way to even guess what the title might mean, or what the photographs might be inside the book, but the words compel curiosity. If there’s one thing that I think is frequently missing from photobooks and photography today, it would be mystery.

Stein’s book plunges us into an utter mystery of words. Oh, we might feel comforted by the simple title of the first section—Objects—but then we turn the page and find the following, the first poem of the book:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS

A kind of glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

Not ordinary indeed. We are clearly in a realm beyond the simple and clear. In the book, Stein has not given us an “artist’s statement,” as most photography today does, which might explain away the mystery and make it perfectly clear what the artist is doing so that we might rest assured we will not be puzzled, perplexed, stuck, frustrated, or otherwise in a state of unknowing and curiosity. Yet, at the same time, do we need, as readers, a doorway into what is a truly challenging work?

Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein.

Perhaps usefully, Tender Buttons does come with enough of an introduction, written by the author Sherwood Anderson, a contemporary of Stein’s, to help us find some sort of footing without the mystery being destroyed. He suggests that these are portraits in words, portraits influenced by her cubist friends Picasso and Braque. He continues:

“…they revealed Stein to be attacking the denotations of words: while the individual elements of her sentences were familiar, their significance as a whole seems to be stripped away.” He continues, “She emphasized their musical qualities, favoring sound over sense. Confronted with such unexpected associations and willful incoherence, the reader is left to question the meaning of words, to become reacquainted with a language that Stein thought had been dulled by long use.”

The reason this introduction is different, in my opinion, from the artist’s statements of today is 1) it’s not the artist telling us what they’re going to tell us in the work. 2) It does not use artspeak to appeal to an academic audience, but uses everyday language. 3) It does not over-explain everything, but rather helps us into the work and allows us to keep walking along a dark cavern of uncertainty and unfamiliarity that might otherwise seem unapproachable.

The danger, of course, is that we might say, “Oh, I get it. Now I know what’s going on.” Mystery dissolved. Not that the work should remain unknowable, but the reader could then be deprived of the experience of the work because they’re not motivated to wrestle their own understanding out of it.

Stein with Alice B. Toklas and their poodle, Basket.

Reading Tender Buttons is a great way to shake loose new ideas about how a sequence of photographs (or any other medium) could generate meaning, and how a book of images might be structured. Photography in particular has a rather linear heritage, and Stein’s extremely non-linear, non-traditional use of language could inspire all kinds of new approaches to shaping photographic experiences.

I’ll close with one more short poem from the book:

NOTHING ELEGANT

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.

There is an utterly affordable edition of Tender Buttons published by Dover Books. For more about Gertrude Stein you might go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gertrude-stein.

Why Poetry?

When I was an anthropology minor in undergrad, one of my anthro professors was Alfonso Ortiz, who also happened to be a member of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (formerly San Juan Pueblo) in New Mexico. Ortiz told us that one of the world’s problems was that western civilization had been stuck in a closed conversation with western civilization, and that this had been disastrous. He encouraged us to overcome our white awkwardness and attend the multiple Pueblo dances open to the public. He assured us that this was not an intrusion, but an important engagement with another culture and worldview.

Alfonso Ortiz.

I believe the same is true for photography as an art form. When photography only looks at photography, the possibilities within the field become quite limited. After all, photography is barely two hundred years old. The question often becomes, for the photographer, which established form do I pluck from the shelf and fill out? Typology? Documentary? Identity statement? Portraiture? Landscape? Or, even worse, which photographer’s work do I emulate?

Picasso’s painting “Family of Saltimbanques” (1905) inspired one of the Duino Elegies, a series of poems written by Rainer Maria Rilke, who lived with the painting briefly while visiting Duino Castle in 1912.

The same is true for literature, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, dance, music, and filmmaking—they all need each other to keep the river flowing, to keep from trapping the water in a back eddy. To keep invention, and each particular art, alive and healthy. For that matter, our arts should infect themselves with all kinds of different influences, such as philosophy, astrophysics, history, anthropology, linguistics—you name it.

One of my favorite sayings related to photography is Tod Papageorge’s restatement of Robert Capa’s famous statement, “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Papageorge turned it into “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not reading enough.”

Anselm Kiefer, “Margarethe,” (1981). Like many other paintings by Kiefer, this one refers to the poetry of Paul Celan, specifically to a figure in Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (1948).

Reading poetry that strives to push into the unknown, rather than stand comfortably in the known and familiar, can give photographers all kinds of ideas about possible structues, subject matters, lack of subject matters, non-linear meaning-making, fragmentation, defamiliarization, recontextualization, and other ways photography might operate. Poetry is the most radical form of language. As such, it hints at what might be possible in our own art involving images.

Given my experience with other photographers and their interest in poetry, but the rather short list of poets I hear referred to, I thought that maybe I could open a few gates and broaden the grazing range (to introduce yet another metaphor—sheesh!). We know, based on the history of other arts, that over time photography will morph and expand photographic experiences and the ways it can create meaning. My thinking is that showcasing some of the less mainstream poets might help to grow the practices at the margins of photography. Because that’s where the innovation happens. That’s where the boundaries of our art are quietly, yet constantly, pushing outward.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 5: John Ashbery

If you listen to Bebop jazz today, it’s sometimes hard to hear how radical it was when it first came out in the 1940s. This is absolutely not the case when reading the early poetry of John Ashbery. His first book, Some Trees, was awarded the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize from W.H. Auden in 1956. Delightful poems. But after his second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1963) was issued, which stepped into much less familiar territory, Ashbery was sure his career was over and he’d never have another book published in his lifetime.

The poetry in that book was, and still is, as innovative and unfamiliar as any in the English language. Ashbery accepted the fact that, from then on, he would only write poetry for himself, convinced he would never have an audience. This commitment on his part—to continue no matter what—is almost as important to me as his poetry. Suffice to say, he had a long “career” and published many more books, winning the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and being one of the very few truly innovative poets to be published regularly in the pages of the New Yorker.

A couple of years ago, a young poet and friend of mine who was then working on his MFA in creative writing at Vanderbilt, after handing in a paper on John Ashbery, was told by the head of the program that only a few years ago a paper on John Ashbery would not have been acceptable. That’s how controversial his work still is among more conservative academic poetry circles.

I’m telling you all this to help you understand how vibrant and alive and, at some times, even threateningly so, this poetry is, and point towards how impactful it has been over the last last almost-sixty years. Here’s a relatively short (for Ashbery) poem to give you a small taste of some of his work. It’s from his Selected Poems (1986):

Instead of Leaving

Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn't used yet

would've done the same: bother the family's bickering

to head straight into the channel. My, those times

crackled near about us, from sickly melodrama

instead of losing, and the odd confusion...confusion.

I thought of it then, and in the mountains.

During the day we perforated the eponymous city limits

and then some. No one knew all about us

but some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town

for an empty drawer

into which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand

virgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!

No can do. Here come the bald arbiters

with their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.

Heck, it's only a muskrat

that's seen better years, when things were medieval

and gold...

So you people in the front,

leave. You see them. And you understand it all.

It doesn't end, night's sorcery notwithstanding.

Would you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times

than the child can contain or imagine?

Or is right now the answer—you know, the radio

we heard news on late at night,

our checkered fortunes so pretty.

Here's your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Records.

The whole embrace.

I’m not going to try to explain this poem—or any poem, for that matter. As Ashbery himself wrote: "I’m not very good at explaining my work... I'm unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled." (From John Ashbery, published by the Library of America.)

I see Ashbery as a vital bridge between the poetry that had been happening in Europe—especially France—in the first half of the twentieth century and that which had happened in Great Britain and the US. Ashbery, in my opinion, influenced every important American poet over the second half of the twentieth century, and well into the twenty-first.

A young John Ashbery

Also, as Baudelaire did a hundred years earlier, Ashbery has written some of the most useful art criticism of his era, which is collected in the book Reported Sightings, a book I continue to re-read. His former student, the poet John Yau, now carries on this tradition in writings for Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail web sites.

It is fortunate for all of us, no matter how much I prefer to have single copies of his every book, that the Library of America has issued his collected poems from 1956 to 1987 in one volume, which covers much of his output. This book allows you to sample his first poems, jump into the unsettling delights of The Tennis Court Oath, then skip over to his later, some might say more accessible, work, for a taste of his depth and range.

Again, the purpose of these blog posts is not to fully explore the poets I recommend, but to only point in their direction. Please consider this as emphatic a pointing as I can muster.

For more info about his life, and to read some of his poems, check out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-ashbery.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 4: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is surely the most familiar poet no one has read. (Followed by Gertrude Stein.) Or at least read in any depth. Everyone seems to have ideas about her, propagated by distorted plays and romantic pop culture misconceptions. She was not a recluse except perhaps at the end of her life. She corresponded frequently with several important literary figures of her time. She interacted with friends and family. She fell in love, with both men and women. But much of the world believed what her father believed, which is that a woman should not be a writer but should serve the household. She stubbornly resisted that in an astonishing way, even though she made her family home her primary world—especially her garden

Over her lifetime she wrote almost 1800 poems, which she neatly bundled together and tied up with string. She published only ten poems while alive.

Despite the sentimentality attached to her image, what she wrote was easily as innovative and challenging as the work of Gertrude Stein or any other modernist. This is particularly clear when you read a collection of her poems that preserves her original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, with its varying sizes of dashes, such as the R.W. Franklin edition of1998.

Her poems are like three-dimensional bees made out of tightly-bound tapestry thread. The only poetry that is as compact as hers would be the work of Paul Celan. Her meaning is so condensed that a reader has to periodically stick their head out of a window and take deep breaths of fresh air. She is as radical today as when she died in 1886.

Here’s a great example of the way she builds meaning in tight, halting steps. It’s poem number 372 (she did not title her poems):

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Because of the power compressed into each poem, her collected works feels nearly endless. It is an inland sea that cannot be exhausted. And a great example of how an artist can give over to their own idiosyncratic meaning-making if they resist trying to “fit in” to the photography heralded as “successful” and instead follow the small voice that leads them into a strange and unfamiliar garden.

Find out more about Dickinson and read some of her poems at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson#tab-poems. And consider buying The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin.

Another rare treat are the lectures by the poet Robert Duncan on Dickinson at New College of California, recorded in 1981 by my friend David Levi Strauss. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php

Also, the poet Susan Howe (blog post 3) wrote a marvelous book, My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 3: Susan Howe

In my previous post about Wallace Stevens I mentioned that one great admirer of Steven’s richly complex later poems is the (experimental? avant-garde? interesting?) poet Susan Howe.

And like Stevens, she has some of the most delightful titles for her poems and books of poems. One of my favorites is her relatively early book, Defenestration of Prague, which was published by The Kulchur Foundation in 1983. I wish I still had that small-run first edition, with it’s lovely cover.

Susan Howe owns her deep Yankee roots and has focused on such topics in her writing as Emily Dickinson, the Indian Wars in New England, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity tale, the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Pierce, and the attempts at utopia by the Labadists. It’s a wide-ranging and interlaced map of references, and Howe’s poetry, on top of that, is a sometimes elated play with pure language.

In fact, she’s usually associated with the LANGUAGE poets, the loose group of post-structuralist writers who rose to prominence in the late-70s and 80s, who broke many literary conventions and rebelled against the ego-centered emotive lyrical poetry embodied by the Beats and the Confessional poets.

I think Steven Paul Martin gives an insightful description of Howe’s poetic practice:

“by asking us to focus on the tangible presence of language itself—on the morphemes, phonemes and graphemes that words are made of—Howe moves us away from our tendency to think in abstractions, easing us into the motion and fabric of a verbal space that has not been reduced to a mere zone of representation. We are asked to see and hear the shapes and sounds of the words instead of reading through them to what they supposedly refer to. Our sense of discursive or narrative continuity shatters, replaced with the endless Protean linkages that give language its living power.”

The implications, to my mind, for photography are deep and broad. Reading Susan Howe is like completely refreshing one’s understanding of how meaning is made. She is sincerely inventive, in that she’s not just trying to be novel or obscure or difficult. She’s trying to return to a place where language most fundamentally starts to mean something. And that might not be a bad practice for a photographer to engage the image.

As with any “challenging” poet, the trick is to not try to rationally understand everything you’re reading, but to move through it, getting what you can from each pass you take at her work. It’s just like reading Shakespeare. If you stop and turn to a dictionary every time you hit something you don’t know, you lose the flow and the potential experience bound into the language. You can always go back later and Google a reference or a word, and then maybe read it again.

You can find out more about Howe, and read some of her poems, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/susan-howe.

As for a first book, I’d recommend The Europe of Trusts, a collection of three of her earlier books: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague. Published by New Directions, 2002.

Poetry for Photographers & Other Artists 2: Wallace Stevens

Two of the 20th century’s greatest poets had very traditional careers and wrote in their spare time. One was William Carlos Williams, who delivered over 3,000 babies in the Rutherford, New Jersey area as a doctor. The other was an attorney who rose through the ranks to become a vice-president at the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company: Wallace Stevens.

Despite his conservative lifestyle in Hartford, he created in the mid-20th century some of the most innovative poetry ever written, even by today’s standards. I’m thinking in particular of his later poems, from 1950 onwards, which are deeply admired by the “experimental” poet Susan Howe. And appropriately so. They bear reading and rereading for their rich language, intellectual delicacy, and compelling ambiguities. Here’s the opening stanza from “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.”

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street

Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement

Of men growing small in the distance of space,

Singing, with smaller and smaller sound,

Unintelligible absolution, and an end–

In contrast, Steven’s earlier poetry, particularly his famous book Harmonium (1923), is a lush, overgrown jungle of language at times, with great musicality and striking imagery. For instance, these opening lines from the poem “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws:”

Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life among a mort of tails.

You will also notice, as you read him, that Stevens has the best poem titles of any poet you’ll find. In fact, he often began his poems by coming up with a title first, and then finding where it took him. (I have been doing the same with my photographic works, without knowing this was Steven’s approach.)

The most quoted poem of Stevens’ has to be “The Snow Man,” of which the final stanza reads:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

There is one photographer, at least, who has paid great attention to Wallace Stevens, and that is Tim Carpenter in his book-length essay, To Photograph is to Learn How to Die. Carpenter sees Stevens as a materialist, but I see him in a slightly different light. I think it’s interesting to note that he converted to Catholicism on his death bed.

However his spirituality might be measured, Stevens could inspire a great amount of photographic work if he lands on your bookshelf. Fortunately for all of us, all his poetry and prose is to be found in one convenient book: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, published by The Library of America (1997).

You can learn more about Stevens, and read several of his poems, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 1: Intro

I’m fascinated by the rather small group of poets that seem to influence many photographers. In essence, it comes down to four names: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, and Richard Hugo. I can understand why the first three names come up so often, given how famous they are. But I’m a bit puzzled by Richard Hugo. And overall, I’m concerned enough at the puddle-size of this poetic pool to launch a series of suggestions of poets which photographers and other artists might want to add to their shelves.

My background is poetry. I was a creative writing major as an undergrad and attended the New College of California Graduate Program in Poetics in San Francisco in the early 80s. For around 15 years I was seriously writing poetry and publishing in various literary journals, before abandoning art for career in order to support my family. Later, aghast at having ignored my muse, I committed to photography as my art form, which has been deeply informed by my engagement with poetry.

I’lll try to focus each post on one poet, and keep it short and concise—just enough to point you in a poet’s direction and give you some links to their poetry. The great thing is, should you decide to buy one of these poet’s books, such books are positively cheap compared to photobooks and art books. So your investment, even in a decent-sized library of poetry, will be relatively small.

For those of you who will be shopping for these books online and who might be looking for used copies or alternatives to Amazon, you should know about AddAll.com, a great collection of offerings by a multitude of book dealers. https://www.addall.com/used is the url. For rarer out-of-proint poetry you might want to check out my friend David Abel’s lovely offerings at Passages Bookshop: https://www.passagesbookshop.com.

I think I’ll launch this series, which will occur in no particular order, with the next post focusing on Wallace Stevens.