Book Report #3

 

This is the third installment in a regular series on photobooks. Books discussed in this installment are 1864 by Matthew Brandt, Too Tired for Sunshine by Tara Wray (both by Yoffy Press, 2018), and A Habit of Self-Deceit by Lorena Turner (self-published, 2017).

1864

Matthew Brandt’s approach to photography is both process and conceptually driven, an approach shared with a diverse group of photo artists such as Marco Breuer, Alison Rossiter, John Chiara, and Chris McCaw, all of whom were included in the exhibition Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the Getty in 2015. Brandt’s book 1864, references the infamous Sherman’s March, a Civil War military campaign, in which the Union General, after capturing Atlanta, led his army across Georgia to Savannah, destroying homes, farms, and the Confederacy’s infrastructure along the way.

Brandt re-purposes Library of Congress photographs of post-Sherman Atlanta, to make new prints from a kind of home-brew albumen process, combining the conventional materials of egg whites and silver nitrate, with peaches, flour, salt, cinnamon, and butter—in other words, the ingredients for peach pie. Brandt revisits and re-imagines history by re-presenting archival images developed through an archaic photographic process that has been ‘sweetened’ with a conceptual twist.

 

The title is deeply embossed on the cover of this slim volume, which is covered in a light brown material the color of unrefined sugar. The first photograph to open the book is as self-referential as it is lovely and mysterious. In a barren landscape, we see a photographer under a dark cloth behind his tripod-mounted camera, a single dark figure stands still 10 feet away. It is a stark and lonely tableau that speaks to the most basic of photographic relationships. As a result of processing the unconventional emulsion, light and dark streaks hover in the space above the two figures, like an undeciphered text.

 

 

Mottled skies predominate the series, giving evidence to Brandt’s strange concoction and connoting the violence that has recently occurred on the earth below. The technical flaws are a crucial part of the images’ affect—wisps and spirits seem to rise from the ground or spread like spilled milk across the images of 19^th century Atlanta. Figures in the distance are caught in this web of enigmatic exhalations, making them appear to be inhabitants of the land of the undead. All of these deliberate yet unpredictable imperfections of the process make the viewing of the photographs visceral, complex, spooky, as if we are observing history with cataract-occluded eyes. Brandt’s overall project of revisiting older tools and processes is perfectly married to potent content in this elegant and evocative book.

 

Too Tired for Sunshine

 

Tara Wray is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker living in rural Vermont, and her book, Too Tired for Sunshine has already received wide-spread acclaim, and deservedly so. With a graphic simplicity recalling a children’s story book, Too Tired for Sunshine’s navy-blue cloth cover is printed with a pale yellow text and an image of a twisted and broken slide. Wray’s photographs are seemingly straight-forward photographs of everyday life. There are lots of dogs, backyards, chickens, and children—images that quietly suggest that what happens around us, in our quotidian existence, is both plain and mysterious.

Photography is a cumulative art; the photographer selects and collects moments and then strings them in a sequence that manifests the photographer’s intentions. Any single image might be appreciated on any number of levels, but taken together, photographs can reaffirm or contradict one another, they can lead us into territory we were not anticipating. This was my experience with Wray’s’ book. There are many whimsical images within, colorful balloons obscure faces, kids grimacing in mid-pillow fight, a rake caught in a branch floats over a kiddie pool, a perfect doughnut is crushed under the lip of a glass lid. Yet in between the whimsy lurks a creeping darkness—a toddler half-hidden under a bed, an empty table in a deli, a deer cut up and stacked in a garage, an elderly woman bends over a book in pale winter light. The pull of the lonelier moments begins to infect the lighter ones, threatening to swallow them.

 

 

Conversely, some of the bleaker images embody an ironic humor, such as the double-page spread showing a lonely evergreen in a wintry landscape, its branches akimbo as if were dancing for its life, and on the right, an image of pale and yellowing cardboard boxes imprinted with the word ‘Disappointment’ stacked up as if toward the infinite. Wray’s images miraculously combine the humble with the revelatory, the desperate with moments of serenity. The novelist Aimee Bender provides a sharply written introduction that summarizes Wray’s sensibility stating: “Tara’s eye holds it all, sitting with the in-between. Unafraid of—maybe even built of—the absurdity and the brutality and the practicality mixed together.”

 

 

A Habit of Self Deceit

 

Lorena Turner’s book A Habit of Self Deceit, published in late 2017 shares some emotional territory with Tara Wray’s images. Turner lives in Los Angeles where she teaches in the Communication Department at Cal Poly Pomona. Her previous book The Michael Jacksons is a fascinating collection of portraits of Michael Jackson impersonators. Turner has had a rich and varied career as a photographer; she has produced powerful documentary work in Africa, China, and Columbia, as well as conceptual portrait projects such as The Michael Jacksons and Convince me I’d rather be with you, for which she photographed people who placed personal ads on Craig’s List.

 

 

A Habit of Self-Deceit is a deeply personal project in which through her cool, distant photographs and spare, fragmentary texts, Turner examines her relationship to her parents, and their relationship to each other. The title is self-explanatory in terms of suggesting the lies we tell ourselves, but it’s also grounded in the broader, existentialist notion that people often dis-empower themselves by not believing they have choices. The book’s front cover features an old photograph of her mother, judging by the hair, taken in the 1960s. The back cover presents her father’s ID from the Department of Defense issued in 1959. All of the photographs within the book are contemporary—this simple strategy of enclosing a book of contemporary personal photographs within the cover of decades-old images of her parents quietly hints at the ways our own narratives can be enclosed, framed, or even shut off by our parent’s histories.

The first photograph in the book is a cluster of street signs pictured from behind. We literally cannot read the signs. Perhaps they are a warning, yet we will never know. The gray / green palette of the image is subdued, downplaying the dark humor of the image. For this project Turner is photographing like a modern flaneur, roaming the streets to find previously unnoticed or hidden meaning in everyday flotsam. A MacDonald’s coffee cup cover has been flattened on the pavement, its openings violently contorted into a happy face. A few pages later, in another photograph of mostly muted colors, a backyard Jesus statue is lit by a spotlight, the sky in the distance is clearing from a storm, and as if blushing from some infinite embarrassment such as sacrificing his life for thankless humanity, Jesus’ face is obliterated by a crimson intensity.

 

 

 

A majority of the page spreads feature a single photograph on the right and blank white page on the left. Many of the photographs are of individual objects, abject and tossed aside, like crushed birds, cupcake frosting smeared on the pavement, a forlorn section of a hair weave, or a white ribbon in the dirt inscribed like a command in all capital letters, ‘Forget You’. When Turner does use both pages, it is often to stunning effect, for example, a king-size bed, covered in blue, features three pillows, although only one third of the bed seems to have been occupied, in the left-hand image early morning light illuminates a gust of steam that rises from a kitchen sink like an errant spirit.

Turner’s world is inscribed with human gestures, traces, marks, clues, and ghosts—A Habit of Self-Deceit transforms the materiality of day-to-day life into an incisive meditation on loss, and longing for communication.