Thanks to all who have contributed to the discussion on Anders Petersen’s ‘Cafe Lehmitz’. It has been a really busy month! We have compiled an archive of the posts below for future reference and will also be listed under the reading list page.
A Photo Book Club suggests physical meetings, and it is something we have always wanted to be part of, and help facilitate. And so you can now find a map on the ‘Meet-ups’ page which we hope to get populated with people and meeting places.
Wayne and I will take part in potentially the first meeting this September as part of Photobook London although if anyone has a meeting before let us know!
Actually, there is no book for August! We were planning to look at Nan Goldin’s ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ but have recently agreed to several events in September, and so are going to take a month out.
We will be looking at Goldin’s masterpiece in October now, and September itself will be a special month, with Ken Schles joining us to get involved with the discussion of his book ‘Invisible City’.
And so what are these events? Well, more details will follow shortly and be posted here, but for now we can say they involve the two following exciting projects.
While we prepare a video for Sultan’s ‘The Valley’ for those who have not been able to get a hold of a copy, here is a selection of images from the series via Bill Charles.
As the end of the month draws near, I think it is also worth reflecting further on the creative and personal connections between Avedon and Robert Frank. As Wayne mentions, and as best narrated in Jane Livingstone’s book on the New York School, Avedon and Frank both worked for and studied with Brodovitch in the 1940s and 50s, although Avedon certainly had a closer relationship with the mentor.
As I was working on my dissertation, I spent a lot of time paging through old bound issues of Harper’s Bazaar in my university library, and I found a lot of product still lifes and other commercially motivated images bylined to Frank.
But I think it is most interesting to consider the relationship between The Americans and Avedon’s In The American West. Although the approach to photography of the two books could hardly be more visually distinct, I believe that Avedon set out to put his own mark on the kind of photographic grand tour that Frank originally perfected.
Both explored the west and sought to tell its story. And both told a controversial story of the failure of American ideals. Both were criticized for the perceived ugliness of their vision. Avedon photographed Frank and his wife (June Leaf, in what I think is a hidden gem among Avedon’s white background portraits) in the late 70s, and I suspect that their encounter was fresh on Avedon’s mind when he set out on his Western project.
At the age of 17, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) joined the merchant marineʼs photographic section in 1940, where he would spend much of his time producing personnel identification photographs, and occasionally document shipwrecks. Following his discharge from service in 1944, Avedon found a job as a photographer in a New York department store, before Alexey Brodovitch — who Avedon had studied under in his Design Laboratory at the New School of Social Research — hired the 22 year-old as a staff photographer at Harperʼs Bazaar in 1945, where he would be the youngest member of the Russian emigres team.
This appointment would mark the beginning of the creative collaboration between the
inspirational art director, who did much to introduce modern graphic design aesthetics, and modernist European photography to the United States, and the photographer, that
culminated in the publication of ʻObservationsʼ in 1959.
One of the characteristicʼs of Brodovitchʼs design style, was his use of white space on the
editorial pages of Harperʼs Bazaar and his other projects, including ʻPortfolio,ʼ and this
influence is seen in Avedonʼs photography when he adopted the seamless white background in his fashion photography, for which he first became known, and latterly his
portrait work to.
Throughout his career, Avedon was a restless chronicler of our time, that led John Lahr to
write in ʻThe Times,ʼ ʻNo one has given a nation a more wide-ranging, disciplined
photographic document of itself,ʼ which is well reflected in the 150 pages that make up
ʻObservationsʼ which includes portraits of Charlie Chaplin, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Arthur Miller, Picasso, Jacques Cousteau, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Judy Garland, Igor Stravinsky, Katherine Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Gloria Swanson, Louis Armstrong, Humphrey Bogart, Buster Keaton, Georgia OʼKeefe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Truman Capote, amongst many other key people of the 20th century.
A remark made by Avedon in the 1970s reflects this restless nature, ʻIf a day goes by
without my doing something related to photography, itʼs as though Iʼve neglected
something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.ʼ
For a photographer to produce during their career more than one exceptional book — a
volume that sets new standards — is a rarity, Avedon is one of those exceptions. In 1964,
he collaborated with the writer James Baldwin, to create ʻNothing Personalʼ (Atheneum),
which was designed by art director Marvin Israel (a good friend of Diane Arbus), and whilst ʻNothing Personalʼ isnʼt quite of the standard of ʻObservations,ʼ it signalled Avedonʼs commitment to the book format, and in 1985, he published his sixth book, ʻIn the American West 1979-1984,ʼ (Harry N. Abrams) designed by Elizabeth Avedon, who also produced ʻPortraitsʼ (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976) and ʻPhotographs 1947-1977ʼ (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978).
Since then we have received hundreds of suggestions creating a map that currently comprises over 110 of the best stores, galleries and museum bookshops to browse and by photobooks and zines.
The Photo Book Club World Map
A huge thank you to all who have emailed, tweeted and posted their suggestions to this crowd-sourced resource as well as the PDN, Conscientious, Hey Mammoth and FlakPhotowho mentioned the project to their own followers. It was also great being able to utilise Andy Adams’Flak Photo Network for the first time to get feedback from a 1700+ strong group of engaging photographers, educators and writers. To be able to tap into such a valuable community resulted in a much more complete picture of photobook stores around the world.
As mentioned above, the map currently stands at over 110 stores, but i’m sure there are many more: so please keep sending suggestions via email, twitter or in the comments section and they shall be added with a credit.
I have color coded stores in different parts of the world as well as using pins to represent highly concentrated areas, if you have any ideas on how we can improve usability – just let me know.
Now all that is left is for someone generous to send me on a world tour – stopping off at each store and buying a different photobook! I’ll even buy the books myself.
More to follow soon… but if you do or don’t know the book, let us know your thoughts by using the hashtag #photobc in Twitter or share links and blog posts in the comment section below.
Thanks to ‘Here on the Web‘ for sharing the link to Andreas Schmidt’s book ‘The Americans’ in which Schmidt has sourced 83 images from Google to create a current version of Frank’s work. You can see a full preview of the book as well as purchase it, from blurb here.
Andreas Schmidt - The Americans
We would love to hear from anyone who has the book themselves – pop us an email mail@photobookclub.org
Schmidt’s Synopsis:
“Few books in the history of photography have had as powerful an impact as The Americans”, said The New York Times about Robert Frank’s photobook first published in 1958. More than 50 years later and made entirely without the help of a Guggenheim fellowship comes Andreas Schmidt’s take on a portrait of America. Selected from over 20 million photographs found on Google images, 83 photographs tell a story of contemporary America – pictures of normal people, everyday scenes, lunch counters, bus depots and cars, and the strangely familiar faces of people we don’t quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures showing the “American way of life” as we haven’t yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condense the entire life of a nation in classic images that speak to us today, and in another 50 years to come.
Robert Frank’s (1924-) Les Américains, was first published by Robert Delpire on 15 May 1958, the 83 black-and-white photographs had been taken by the Swiss born photographer on a road trip across America he took between 1955 and 1956, and where accompanied by a text on the social and political history of America by Alain Bosquet. Each of Frank’s photographs is placed on a right-hand page, with Bosquet’s text on the left, with the edition forming part of the Encyclopédie essentielle series, which aimed to present foreign countries to a French audience.
In 1959, the first English edition of The Americans was published by Grove Press, New York (released in January 1960), it retained the same visual sequence as the Delpire edition, but replaced Bosquet’s text with an introduction by the poet and novelist Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), whilst the right-hand opposite Frank’s photographs had captions by the photographer, which describe the location of the image.
Although widely criticised when the book was launched in the United States, this seminal work, has since 1959, been published in numerous editions and become, one could argue, the most influential photobook of all time.
Wayne Ford
Get involved
Let us know your thoughts by using the hashtag #photobc in Twitter or share links and blog posts in to comment section below.
Coming next…
Later this week Wayne will take a look at the key editions of ‘The Americans’ as well as the history of the initial project and subsequent books.
Get the book
The current English language version of Frank’s ‘The Americans’ published by Steidl is available from the Amazon link below or from many other book stores.
