Those Bookish Photographers
Mark L. Power, Books, 1980
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Now and then I find myself opening a book, not to read it but to photograph it. The idea probably began with this 1980 picture of pages fluttering in the wind, and that image probably had its genesis in a Wright Morris’ photograph of books.
Wright Morris, from “God’s Country and My People”
Morris was a wonderful novelist, consistently undervalued to this day and an equally skilful photographer. His amalgam of fictional texts with factual photographs were well ahead of their time and paved the way for many postmodern experiments with fiction, text and images.
Mark L. Power, 1990
At first I was interested in the pages as warm paper surfaces reflecting and absorbing light, and then my attention began to focus on the illustrations and handwritten annotations. But I ignored the text in the book. Texts generally function as a messenger, carrying you into the mind of the author, then vanishing. I was less interested in the authorial voice and more interested in the messages that possibly lay hidden beneath the illustrations. I also welcomed the unseen reader in the form of hand-written annotations. It was my intent to see if I could decode these subliminal messages that lay beneath the ostensible subject matter of the book.
I found myself concentrating on three American books published in the pre-Civil war years: a family Bible, my own as it so happened, a book called “The Farmer’s Enyclopedia” and a monthly periodical published for women, the Cosmo of its day, “Godey’s Lady’s Book’”. The images - mostly engravings and mezzotints –along with the occasional presence of a reader - I thought might form a collective portrait of life in America before the Civil War. Here are a few pictures from that group which I have called “Peace before the War: 1830-1862.” The others can seen in the Pages section on the right in the gallery , Peace before the War.
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Anyone who works in this vein owes a debt to the pioneer of visual history, Michael Lesy, a writer and professor at Hampshire College and I am particularly indebted to his first book “Wisconsin Death Trip.” In 1973 he re-created some of the glass plate negatives made by Charles J. Van Schaick of Jackson County, Wisconsin and combined them with reportage from a local newspaper, in the process, creating a mini-history of that morbidly inclined county. In 2000, a film was made of “Wisconsin death Trip” and I vaguely remembering seeing it and thinking at the time that the book better preserved Michael Lesy’s own voice.
Michael Lesy, from Wisconsin Death Trip, 1973
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Working on this project made me curious about other photographers who photograph books and here are some I came across:
Rosamond Purcell, from “Bookworm”
Rosamond Purcell, sometimes called the ‘doyen of decay’, photographs books as if they are the last remnants of civilization. Like some intrepid 19th century naturalist, Rosamond haunts the specimen archives of various museums and with a series of books has created her own natural history Museum. Her Book of Books is called “Bookworm”.
Abelardo Morell, photographer and a professor at the New England College of Art is better known for his camera obscura images. But he has photographed books, among them dictionaries, transforming them into architectural monuments.
Abelardo Morell. “Coliseum”
A Hungarian artist, more noted as an illustrator than a photographer, Balint Zsako, playfully explores both form and content in the book and he occasionally peeks into its pages.
Balint Zsako
Thomas Allen, a photographer from Minnesota, slices and dices pulp fiction books from the 40s and 50s to form his own noir narratives.
Thomas Allen
David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame but also a photographer of some originality, photographs books, often giving them fictional titles, before encapsulating them in an elegant frame. I think his 1995 book of photographs, “Strange Ritual” is very underrated. It is a book which foresaw many a photographic trend.
David Byrne
Victor Schrager treats the form of the book as a cool paradigm of color and light, and the results are elegant postmodernist still lives which seem both abstract and architectural, yet also manage to remind one of prehistoric dolmens.
Victor Schrager
And finally a few words about that enigmatic ceramic artist that I mentioned a few posts back, Nishimura Yohei. Instead of photographing books, he interleaves their pages with clay and throws them in a kiln. What emerges are archeological finds, not unlike some of Purcell’s photographs, great hunks of barely recognizable fused clay that an ancient time ago might have been books.
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Nishimura Yohei
I suspect that Nishimura has had more than a casual look at at some of Anselm Kiefer’s work, especially his lead and clay books which also seem to be ruins found in the ashes of some forgotten civilization.
Anselm Kiefer
This six-foot high book sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, made of lead and cardboard, guards the entrance to a show currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, “Blood on Paper“ which is a display of various hand-made book by artists. I don’t have the complete roster but it seems there are only a few photographers in the show, Martin Parr being one.
shirley True wrote,
Dear Mark L. Power,
Your essays (text & photos) are brilliant. I love the banality, wit, humor, profundity . . . all of it.
If they give Nobel prizes for blogs you will get one.
HOWEVER, it drives me nuts that there’s no way to SUBSCRIBE.
If they can invent a vacuum cleaner & a way to go to the moon, YOU & YOUR TECHNICAL ADVISOR CAN CREATE AN EASY WINDOW THAT SAYS “SUBSCRIBE.”
Link | May 11th, 2008 at 7:38 pm