If you’re like me and you’ve been in photography for a while, you have more than a few photography books on your shelves. Some you bought because you like the artists, some you  got in a yard sale, or found them remaindered in a  second hand bookstore. Some were gifts and some just appeared there as if by spontaneous publishing, and you have no memory of how they got there.

In the process of his haphazard acquisition over the years, you find yourself with a few books that are deeply strange or in many cases, deeply shallow.  In my mind I thought I had a shelf filled with these oddballs but when I went to look for them  there were many less than I thought. But I did find a few which I’ll share now …

 

 

The first is a little book book, “Dali’s Mustache”  that did its best to subvert the reputation of its collaborators, the painter Salvatore Dali and the photoigrapher Philippe Halsman.  This heavy-handed joke has somehow remained in print. I say ‘heavy-handed’ because evidently Halsman and Dali spent many months producing pictures which should have taken no more than a drunken afternoon to produce.

Curiously, Dali’s reputation is stronger than ever despite this unfunny assault on his reputation while Philippe Halsmann, in the 40s and 50s a famous magazine photographer,  has seen his star dim, more a result of changing tastes it must be said, than the publication of this book.

The economics of ‘Dali’s Mustache’ defies the usual trend. A new  reprint can cost $20 while the original edition can be had for as little as $3.50.  But here’s that joker, Senor Dali, revealing that originally it cost $1.50.

 

 

 

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John Everard’s well-fingered books can be found on the shelves of almost any second hand bookstore. Ostensibly produced as an aid to artists who couldn’t afford a model, Everard’s books feature lifeless black-and-white photographs of naked women in various wooden poses. Airbrushing protects us from the sight of female genitalia although naked children in Everard’s books are seen without  alteration, a bit of a change from today when female nudes are seen all their hirsute glory while photographs of naked children are generally banned.

 

 

Particularly offensive is the Everard book on my shelves, “Oriental Models”. The photographs of naked Asian women from around the world are casually racist but it’s the text, written by Everard’s wife, Jane, which offends the most. “When a natural characteristic was… contrary to our  our accepted ideas of loveliness – for instance the flattened nose of the negrotio – we chose a girl  who had the nearest approach to our own version of that feature”. Enough said.

 

 

Everard  notes in exhaustive technical detail his making of these images which amazingly took almost a year of traveling throughout Asia.  Hard to believe because many of the photographs look like they could have been made in Everard’s back yard, like this one, which seems to feature a painted backdrop. Others seem to be rip-offs of a series which you could often find in photo fairs and used bookstores, these days more likely on eBay, photogravures and postcards of “Arab” nudes, made mostly in the 20s and 30s, many from Morocco. Needless to say the original photogravures, one of which I own, have an vitality completely missing from Everard’s imitations.

 

‘Aarab’ nude postcard, 1916

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L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, claimed many accomplishments and many careers, some of which were fictional and some of which were fact. He didn’t invent nuclear fission as he claimed but he was the author of many science fiction works, many still in print. And of course he did invent Scientology, a science-fiction-become-fact religion which has become more successful than even he imagined. So it was not surprising to find that this protean ego also claimed to be a masterful photographer. 

I came to admire Hubbard’s imagination for its sheer gall and ambition. Not only did he admit to being  a great photographer and the founder of a religion, he proclaimed he was an expert explorer, a fine-artist, an innovative scientist, a freedom fighter, a master mariner, a philosopher,  a poet, and a writer.  Ron has published books backing up these claims which I haven’t read except for this one which I couldn’t resist, “L. Ron Hubbard: the Photographer, Writing with Light”.

 

 

I’m afraid the book proves that Ron was more a camera collector than a photographer – he had a collection that probably  rivals that of the George Eastman house, and the best photographs in the book are sharp, well composed color images ( no credit given but they’re too technically accomplished to be Ron’s work) of his collection. For instance, Hubbard’s Rolleiflex collection:

 

 

The book contains many thousands of words of advice to the novice photographer on how to take pictures. “Composition is locating things as they would be expected and for impingement, locating things that wouldn’t be, ” says Ron impishly, and later with slightly more clarity, he adds, “Recognize a picture and take it.”  The book also has a letter Ron  sent to Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid, on ways to improve his invention. Mr. Land’s response is not included.

But sadly, Ron’s photographs reveal he didn’t take his own advice: he took many a picture but left out the recognition part. Most of his efforts are glum black-and-white images, stupefyingly dull and uninteresting. Here is one Ron said he took for National Geographic proudly displaying the pillage of a rain forest. When I first saw the this anonymous lumberman I thought he was pregnant. No, it turned out to be his hat, called a pith helmet I believe, by the exploring community, playfully held to his stomach to pull off this intriguing  illusion.

 

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Next are two books which I have no idea how they got on my shelves. First is Fred Bacher’s “Tension: a book about family relationshops”, self-published in 1970. Bacher’s photographs are as strong in imagination as they are weak in craft, and many are wildly funny.  According to the images, Fred has a large family who frequently come to grief over holiday dinners, something we can all sympthize with, and Fred has savagely rendered his own version of these disastrous meals with surreal cut-and-paste collages. One wonders what Fred would have done had digital imagery and Photoshop been available; it’s quite possible that an improvement in craft would have dulled his satirical edge.

If Fred is still with us, he doubtless is still suffering over the turkey, and late at night after everyone has gone home, one can readily imagine him hunched over the dining room table, glue pot at hand, wicked scissors flashing away. 

 

 

 

 

Fred made the book in the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester and I would have dearly loved to have sat in on a class session with Fred and Nathan Lyons or his wife, Joan who ran many of the book workshops, because working with Fred Bacher must have been an adventure.

 

 

Another curious book, how acquired I know not,  but one I’ve become fond of, is a little paperback called “Removals/ Reductions” by Jerrold Burchman. Jerrold, near as I can tell from an unusually reticent Google search, is a California  painter, a sometime teacher, who has been in many West Coast exhibits here and there. I assume he is the author of this book but it might well be another Jerrold Burchman. This work, also published in the 70s, combined fourteen of Burchman’s enigmatic images with thirteen found photographs.

 

 

 

 

The sequences are startling and satisfying; not so much surreal as slyly satirical. You have a nuclear explosion followed by  photograph titled ” elephant shit”  and that’s what it depicts, little piles of elephant shit. A working elephant appears later on, and aside from elephants the only two pictures that have any link are images of a little girl and a man urinating. Departing from bodily functions, other combinations are a stained mattresss and a TV shot of an astronaut on the moon and  a parachutist and a block of frozen fish. There is also this forlorn picture of a cashier’s window which I specially like.

 

 

 

 

In a way, these poorly reproduced pictures of mundane objects presage William Eggleston’s attention to objects we usually overlook.  I find Burchman’s enigmatic combinations strangely satisfying without feeling any need to understand what they mean.

I often wonder if the reclusive  Jerrold Burchman produced any other explorations with photography.

 

A Final Thought: 

It seems the days of the odd book are numbered because nowadays they are flooding the market. Thanks to the internet and the prolifieration of print-on-demand book services like Apple books or Blurb books, anyone can make an odd book for little money and I fear the result is that odd books won’t be so odd anymore.