In: Library
John Bellany, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012
June 28, 2021John Bellany, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012
John Bellany’s (1942 – 2013) work melds the recognizable with a vision that is unique, sometimes uncomfortable (as with his many self portraits) but also very engaging, with a play of the absurd and the immediate. Bellany’s figures and scenes are marked by a “vigorous—at times rather tormented—Expressionist style. He was born and brought up in a fishing village near Edinburgh, and the imagery of his work is often derived from the sea, although it is transformed into a kind of personal mythology.” John Bellany (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2012) was published to coincide with Bellany’s 70th birthday and accompanied the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of his work since the National Galleries of Scotland organised the retrospective in 1986.
This book contains over 80 illustrations of Bellant’s finest works including paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints from all the key periods of the artist’s career. It’s not hyperbole to state that Bellany changed the course of painting in Scotland. From the book: “His intensely felt paintings of fisherfolk and their precarious life at sea were a direct challenge to the much diluted Scottish colourist tradition and its landscapes and still lifes. The sheer size and raw emotion of Bellany’s canvases, their depictions of a way of life that the artist knew from growing up in a Port Seton fishing family – and their elevation of that life onto a symbolic level – were at odds with the decorative, drawing-room pictures of much contemporary Scottish painting in the 1960s.”
You can see more from this lovely publication here, where you can also order a copy. I encourage you to also see more of his imaginary – yet very honest – painted narratives of his life and community here, and here. ~ Bart Gazzola
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Patti Smith – Land 250
June 3, 2021Patti Smith
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Currently Out of Print, copies available on Amazon or at specialty bookstores.
Patti Smith Land 250 is a collection of images taken by the legendary musician/artist/poet using her beloved Polaroid 250. The 250 camera creates instant images using polaroid (and later Fujifilm) peel apart instant black and white or colour film, whose production was discontinued in 2016. The camera is unforgiving, relying on a small electronic sensor to automatically set exposure, leaving the photographer only to select focus and composition. Smith plays it like a violin, coaxing romantic, sonorous photos of everything from a taxidermized bear to the gravesite of Yeats.
There is a beauty in the photographs that comes from both the subject matter she chooses but also inherent to the time period in which the camera was created. It is a tool of the 1960’s and reminds us, like all photography, of things past, frozen for an instant and captured for posterity.
~ Mark Walton
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Dark and Dystopian Post – Mortem Fairy Tales
May 26, 2021Mothmeister, Dark and Dystopian Post – Mortem Fairy Tales, 2021
The Belgian artistic duo known as Mothmeister have just released their second book of images entitled ‘Dark and Dystopian Post – Mortem Fairy Tales’, which are a continuation of their beautifully morbid and dark tableaux that they’ve described as Wounderland. These are images that might be described as inappropriately beautiful, with a meticulousness in staging and shooting that might seem in opposition to the subject matter, but are really just a contemporary version of the rich history of memento mori, whether in painting or photography. Their words: “In this luxurious coffee table book we pay tribute to the many muses that incited our unsettling and eccentric dreamworld. These range from artists around the globe, legendary figures and myths and a quirky taxidermy collection to desolate places where our most grotesque and often melancholic characters were born, such as the macabre Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, the abandoned unearthly town of Pyramiden in Spitsbergen and the site of the Chernobyl disaster.” Follow them on Instagram, and you can buy the book here. ~ Bart Gazzola
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Saul Leiter Early Color
May 19, 2021Saul Leiter
Steidl
Currently Out of Print, copies available on Amazon or at specialty bookstores.
Saul Leiter – Early Color is a must have for the library of any street photographer who shoots in color. Leiter’s work is not as confrontational as that of Robert Frank and seeks to find moments of the sublime in every day life and scenes. Shooting with expired and “artisanal” films in the 1950’s gave Leiter a palette unmatched by others, making Early Color breathtaking in it’s ability to capture one with a block of red and yellow on a taxi, or to draw you in to the lives of those sitting behind a window in a New York café.
Originally a rabbinical student (Leiter’s father was an important Talmud scholar), Leiter rebelled against his parent’s hopes for him and started shooting black and white fashion photography in New York. He embraced color before many of his contemporaries.
~ Mark Walton
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Greg Girard: Under Vancouver 1972-1982
November 15, 2021Self published
Available HERE
“These photographs of Vancouver from the 1970s and early 1980s show the city’s final days as a port town at the end of the railway line. Soon after these pictures were made Vancouver began to be noticed by the wider world (Expo 86 is generally agreed on as the pivotal moment), refashioning itself as an urban resort on nature’s doorstep and attracting attention as a destination for real estate investment. Back then, long before post-9/11 security concerns sealed off the working waterfront from the city, many of Vancouver’s downtown and east side streets ended at the waterfront, an area filled with commercial fishing docks, cargo terminals, and bars and cafés for waterfront workers and sailors.
Made in and of the moment, they show a young photographer’s earliest engagements (often featuring the underside of the city). And although it was never the intention, the pictures now form a record of a Vancouver that has all but disappeared.” – Greg Girard
Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer who has spent much of his career in Asia. His work examines the social and physical transformations taking place throughout the region.
He is represented by Monte Clark Gallery (Vancouver). More of Greg Girard’s work can be enjoyed at his site.
~ Peppa Martin
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Dance With Desire
May 8, 2021Irving Layton, Dance With Desire, Selected Love Poems with Drawings by Richard Gorman, 1992
It’s interesting to consider the vagaries of cultural history: what falls in and out of the community mind, and how something that was once a touchstone of cultural discourse may be forgotten. Dance with Desire (Selected Love Poems) by Irving Layton, with illustrations by the late Canadian artist Richard Gorman is notable in this light. Layton (1912 – 2016) offers poems that are often blunt and unflinching, whether about desire or despair in the realms of love and lust (‘...your unopened / Brittle beauty troubles an aging man / Who hobbles after you a little way / Fierce and ridiculous’). Comparisons to Catullus are appropriate. Gorman (1935 – 2010) intersperses and augments the text, with monochromatic, frenetic drawings, aswirl and emotional: one might see faces and forms, of lovers, perhaps entangled or trying to remove themselves from the fray. This was published by Porcupine Quill’s Press and Lake Galleries (the latter producing an additional 110 copies with numbered and signed prints by Gorman, as a limited edition artwork in book form). You can purchase it here. ~ Bart Gazzola
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Prairie Gothic
April 20, 2021George Webber
Rocky Mountain Books, 2013
$50.00 CND
If I was asked to pick 1 book of Canadian photography to be on a desert island with, it would be George Webber’s Prairie Gothic. I was lucky enough to be in Calgary when George had an exhibition at the small Art Gallery space downtown in 2008. The work, much of it from this book, changed me. Much like Walker Evan’s photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the American south of the depression era, Prairie Gothic is a momentous testament to the landscape and people of the Canadian West.
~ Mark Walton
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IOWA
April 20, 2021Nancy Rexroth
University of Texas Press, 2017
$55.95 CND
This reprint of Nancy Rexroth’s seminal survey of images, taken with a toy Diana camera in the 1970’s, influenced a wide array of photographers, including Sally Mann, who referenced it as an inspiration in her book Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings. Anyone who adheres to the principal of “less is more” needs to buy this.
~ Mark Walton
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Shadow Chamber
April 20, 2021Roger Ballen, Phaidon Press, 2005
I’ve been familiar with Roger Ballen’s work for several years: the direct yet unsettling images bring to mind the works of Eugene Meatyard or Diane Arbus, and with hints of a performative macabre that goes beyond those two, and perhaps edges up against Joel Peter Witkin (but with less demonstrably ‘freaky’ and more subtle, and thus more pervasive, characters and settings that are more disturbing in their supposed banality) . In an introductory text to this wonderful collection of Ballen’s photographs, Robert A Sobieszek offers the following: “To discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may not be only futile but missing the point.” I’d argue that Ballen’s work is a glimpse of the very real, and it’s stark and unflinching. A good introduction to this prolific artist’s aesthetic.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Jason Langer : Twenty Years
April 30, 2021Published by Radius Books, 2015 www.radiusbooks.org
Also available through D.A.P. at www.artbook.com
Jason Langer was born in 1967 in Tucson, Arizona and raised in Ashland, Oregon. He has been making
photographs since 1980, and has published two monographs through Nazraeli Press.
Twenty Years represents Jason’s first mid- career anthology of work. This collection of tightly edited
monochromes bristles with tension and mystery, with many of the images made in the unaffected dark
of night. Langer deftly employs high contrast for its evocative qualities, dominating the light spectrum
with inky blacks. Tight framing of subjects intensifies the composition, and his judicious use of blur gives
the viewer the sense of being present alongside, in the moment.
Langer now lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.jasonlanger.com/
IG: @jlangerphotos
~ Peppa Martin
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