|~dayBlog~| “Legends of Guatemala” Photo Exhibit (www.chrisengholm.com)

“An awesome reception! Thank you for coming, and for all the wonderful and inspirational comments about the images…I’m walking on air!” – Chris Engholm

You can view a slide show of the exhibition here.

 

Most Anticipated New Photography Books in 2008

Attended BookExpo ’08 and Lived To Tell About It (from http://www.chrisengholm.com)

Last weekend I attended the BookExpo in LA and lugged out 100 pounds of publishers catalogs. The big fun was pawing at the new high-end Taschen titles and those at the deNeues booth.  Aperture had some great stuff too, and their rep was really informative.  (I got all the dope on art book publishing that I hoped to get by attending the expo.)  After perusing the million booths and all the handouts, here is my Christmas list of most anticipated photography book titles for Fall, 2008. 

“Araki Meets Hokusai” 288 pages. $70.  September.

“India”  Raghu Rais.  100 pages. 16×12″ format. September. 

“French Kiss”  Anders Peterson. 116 pages. $39. September.

“Moscow Nights” Antonin Kratochvil. 120 pages. $25.  December. 

“The Black Is Waiting for the White” Mario Giacomelli. 250 pages. $60. January, ’09.

“Crude Reflections” and “Green Gold”  Both cover Amazon oil drilling.  November/September, respectively.

“2nd: The Face of Defeat” Sandy Nicholson.  128 pages. $40. September.

“Female Body Builders” Martin Schoeller.  96 pages. $50. September. 

“Almost Paradise”  David Graham. 80 pages. $30.  September. 

“Nurturing Walls” (about wall art in India)  Madan Meena. 64 pages. $25.  October. 

“Gregory Colbert Pictures 1995-2002”  50 pages.  Nepalese paper, large format.  $1,700.  (From his Ashes and Snow exhibit–Looks awesome)

“Unseen”  Elliot Erwitt. 160 pages. $65.

“Eyes Over Africa” Michael Poliza.  408 pages. $125.  

 

Please list others on the horizon you’ve heard about…and I will do the same as I slog through the rest of my 100 pounds of catalogs.

Chris 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: “Jan Saudek” published by Taschen (from www.chrisengholm.com)

One of the most important photographers of erotica, Jan Saudek is a crazed poet-genius of gargantuan fame in the Czech Republic, and growing in notoriety elsewhere. This book is 400 pages of beautifully reproduced images, enlightening text, and great layout. You can get the book new on Amazon for $37, making this one of the best bargains in photography book publishing. Some won’t like all of Saudek’s personal documentation and myth-making. Some won’t want to see the same approach to background and lighting repeated over the course of 20 years. But his is important and ground-breaking work, testimony of the power of photographs to tell a story and even a fictional one at that. These are black and white prints that have been hand painted. The effect is transcendent, and not to be missed. Makes the top 5 in my collection of 350 photography books. Bravo Taschen.

Book Review: “Art Photography Now” by Susan Bright

This one is a must-have for the coffee table. Everyone good is represented with illuminating narrative and quotes from the artists, and a sampling of work from each. Martin Parr, Thomas Struth, Richard Misrach, Sarah Jones, Uta Barth, Wang Qingsong, and many others. Worth the $35 price tag. Published by Aperture in large format color of 220 pages. Most fun is to see the reaction of others who pick it up in my home. Some see a bunch of contrived garbage. Others see the deeper meanings the artists are trying to convey. My 10-year old loves this sort of stuff, partly because he is conditioned to expect the truth from a photo, and here literal truth is twisted into something unexpected and often hilarious. Highly recommended as a sourcebook for artists and collectors.

Book Review: “Photography Reborn: Image Making In the Digital Age” by Jonathan Lipkin

“The artists in this book have demonstrated that for them, digital photography is no more than a means to an end, a medium through which to transmit their ideas.” That’s from the Conclusion in this medium-format, soft cover, 127-page, color photography book, which the author divides into chapters that cover portraits, the body, landscapes, etc. I don’t think it competes for space on the coffee table, but the book does provide a handy sampling of digitally manipulated shots from the likes of Nick Knight, Jeff Wall, Pedro Meyer, and Moriko Mori. Handy because you might avoid being duped into buying an expensive book by an artist who perhaps should have waited awhile. There is little in this volume that i really like, unfortunately. You see adept retouching but frankly, not enough in the way of a beautiful rendering of an idea. So much of what we call ‘digital art’ is offensive to the eye and just plain trite, as if the artist is celebrating reaching a new level of computer technique rather than saying anything from the heart. Now, there is an Andreas Gursky shot that I would welcome on my wall, but what is so “digital” about Gursky other than stitching shots together? A Loretta Lux portrait made the cover…with the typical kooky denuded visage of a child against prefab clouds. Yes, these experiments are taking us somewhere, but where is clearly not yet known. I recommend this as a reference volume and you can get it on eBay for as little as $5.