The amazing flowering of the Dutch photobook (published in 2012)

Volkskrant komt met uitgebreid overzicht fotoboeken

28 november 2012 »

Door

PhotoQ

Het katern V van de Volkskrant pakt vandaag uit met een overzicht in acht pagina’s van de dit jaar tot nu toe verschenen fotoboeken. Een groot aantal wordt uitgelicht en voorzien van toelichting door de maker, waaronder ook oplages en productiekosten.

In de verantwoording lezen we: ‘V presenteert (bijna) alle Nederlandse fotoboeken die tot en met november 2012 zijn verschenen.’

Dat bijna klopt, want we missen in elk geval heel erg de twee bijzondere boeken met werk van Peter Martens die post editions voor en na de zomer uitgaf: Few loving voices en American Testimony.

En ook het overzicht Own van Erwin Olaf komt niet in het verhaal voor.

Wel in het overzicht van de Volkskrant:

Aan de overkant, leven in Amsterdam-Noord - Maaike Koning

Anima - Charlotte Dumas

Atze. Om het lijf - Atze Haytsma

Brandgang - Herman Wouters

Censorship Daily - Jan Dirk van der Burg

Cette Montagne C’est Moi - Witho Worms

Characters of Jante - Ursula Jernberg

City Island - Real Estate - Annelou van Griensven

Concresco - David Galjaard

Don’t Forget - Mariken Wessels

Enduring Srebrenica - Claudia Heinermann en Sonya Winterberg

Goed volk - Joost van den Broek

Gouden Epke - Klaas Jan van der Weij en Frans Wolfkamp

Heaven - Paul Kooiker

Hier woont mijn huis - Eddo Hartmann

Holland - Erik Hijweege

I am a girl - Claudette van de Rakt

Ik ben Amsterdam - THomas Schlijper

In het voorbijgaan - Flip Franssen

Kemal’s Dream - Ahmet Polat

Kiev - Rob Hornstra & Arnold van Bruggen

Koeraaij Koeraaij - Marjoleine Boonstra en Céline Linssen

Lapponensis - Michiel Brouwer

Liefde in uitvoering. Portret van een Hortus - Elsbeth Thijsen & Hannah de Groot

Lunar Landscapes - Marie-José Jongerius

Mapping - Kim Boske

Men of the Rotterdam - Ruud Sies

Narco Estado - Teun Voeten

Nederland uit voorraad leverbaar - Hans van der Meer

NIeuwe Feiten - Anne Geene

November 2012: Speed. Every Day a New Book - Wil van Iersel

Nurture Studies - Diana Scherer

O. Niemeyer - Erik van der Weijde

Offside - Dirk-Jan Visser en Arthur Huizinga

Olympisme - Tom van Heel en Lars van den Brink

Photoworks Beyond Reality, Volume II - Schilte & Portielje

Popel Coumou - Popel Coumou

Poppy - Robert Knoth en Antoinette de Jong

Reprinting the city - Stephan Keppel

Roxane - Viviane Sassen

‘t Hok - Peter de Krom

The Eyes of War - Martin Roemers

The Man of the Crowd - Elisabeth Tonnard

Things - as they are - Elspeth Diederix

Thuis. Staatsliedenbuurt Utrecht - Lotte Sprengers

Tussen keukentrap en helikopter - Eric Kieboom

Unfolded - Schelten & Abbenes

Wehn I open my eyes - Wout Berger

Yoshino - Cuny Janssen

Zie verder ook :

Album Beauty - Erik Kessels

Footprints - Co Rentmeester

Men at work - Thijs Heslenfeld 

Wordt vervolgd - Cornelie de Jong

The Dutch Photobook

Editors: Frits Gierstberg, Rik Suermondt
Authors: Wim van Sinderen, Claudia Kussel, Patricia Börger, Pim Milo, Flip Bool, Karen Duking, Max van Rooij, Tamara Berghmans, Mirelle Thijsen, Bart Sorgedrager, Mireille de Putter, Pieter van Leeuwen, Karin Krijgsman
Photography: Hans Bol

Design: Studio Joost Grootens, Illustrated (colour), Hardback, 240 pages, 24 x 28 cm
English edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-846-8,
Dutch edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-845-1

The Dutch Photobook describes the relatively recent history of the famed Dutch photobook. Editors Rik Suermondt and Frits Gierstberg chose over 120 of the most significant Dutch photobooks and placed them in the context of developments in photography and society.

The post-Second World War Dutch photobook is unique because of the long tradition of graphic designers and photographers working closely together. It is highly prized abroad, and many photobooks have become part of the collections of museums and private collectors. This book shows the immense variety and allure of the Dutch photobook and makes it accessible to a broad audience.

Six chapters, organized both thematically and chronologically, examine company photobooks, photobooks about youth culture, landscape books, city books, travelogues and autonomous photobooks. For each theme, the 20 most noteworthy books are described and represented by gorgeous illustrations of their covers and parts of their contents.

Despite - or perhaps because - the digitization of photography, the traditional medium of the photo book is (still) enormously popular amongst contemporary photographers. They see the book as the ideal form to present their work and to tell their story. The Dutch photo book has built over the years a certain reputation. The close collaboration between graphic designers and photographers determined in the period after 1945 the quality of the Dutch photo books. Gerry Badger wrote: ": ‘One of the most active photobook cultures in the postwar years was Holland, rivalling and perhaps exceeding even France.” 

Photograph albums for Let us now praise famous men / photographs by Walker Evans

Let Us Now Praise Famous Photo Albums: Walker Evans’ Albums for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

October 12, 2011 by Jeff Bridgers

Floyd Burroughs, Sharecropper. Volume 1. Photograph by Walker Evans. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003656560/

During the summer of 1936, Walker Evans, a preeminent photo documentarian of the New Deal, worked with writer James Agee on a project originally intended for Fortune magazine about the devastating effects of economic conditions on white tenant farmers. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty in Hale County and Perry County, Alabama. Special photo albums preserved in the Prints & Photographs Division  represent the photographic essence of what later appeared as the landmark  book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published first in 1941.

Allie Mae Burroughs. Volume 1. Photograph by Walker Evans. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003656560/

The stark, stunning black-and-white photographs within these two albums show the family members, farms, and houses of the three families and include portraits, details of rooms and belongings, cotton, activities such as washing clothes, stores in the vicinity, meeting house, and Sunday singing.

Learn More:

Photograph albums for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / photographs by Walker Evans:

• View the digital files of original album pages for Volume 1, Pictures of the house and family of an Alabama cotton sharecropper
• View the digital files of original album pages for Volume 2, The house and the family of Frank Tengle near Moundville, Hale County, Ala.

See more than 500 images credited to Walker Evans in the collection of Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Find out what happened to the sharecropping families after the publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the bookAnd Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, first published in 1989 by Pantheon Books (http://lccn.loc.gov/88043136) and re-issued in 2004 by Seven Stories Press (http://lccn.loc.gov/2004022848).

Open publication - Free publishing - More essay

Wolfgang's Truth Neue Welt Wolfgang Tillmans Photography

Life as Wolfgang sees it

Tillmans's latest project sets its sights on the world

Over the period of more than two decades, Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the medium of photo-imaging with greater range than any other artist of his generation. From snapshots of his friends to abstract images made in a darkroom without a camera or works made with a photocopier, he has pushed the photographic process to its outer limits in myriad ways. For this collection of photos, his fourth book with TASCHEN, Tillmans turned away from the self-reflexive exploration of the photography medium that had occupied him for several years by focusing his lens on the outside world—from London and Nottingham to Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Saudi Arabia, and Papua New Guinea. He describes this new phase simply as “trying out what the camera can do for me, what I can do for it.” The result is a powerful and singular view of life today in diverse parts of the world, seen from many angles. Says Tillmans, “My travels are aimless as such, not looking for predetermined results, but hoping to find subject matter that in some way or other speaks about the time I'm in.”

The book features a conversation between the artist and Beatrix Ruf, director of Kunsthalle Zurich.

TEN GOOD REASONS TO LOVE WOLFGANG TILLMANS

• October 7th, 2012
• By Luca Fiore

I did not have a penny in my pocket and I left it there. I mean Neue Welt, the new book by Wolfgang Tillmans (ed. Taschen). I leafed through it. I’m going to take it in the coming days. It is a beautiful book, as indeed are his others. On October 6, has opened a major retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (until 20 January). While at Kunsthalle in Zurich there is an exhibition of new works, which is called, in fact, Neue Welt, the new world (until November 4). 

To tell the truth, I am not able to write an organic reflection summarizing the reasons why I think that Tillmans is one of the artists I love the most. I try but I try to list a few ideas:

1. He is not a photographer who takes pictures fine art, but an artist who uses photography
2. He photographs beautiful things and ugly things. But his photos are always beautiful
3. He is a very conceptual artist, but you do not need to be smart to rejoice in his works
4. It is one of the best portraitist I know. Perhaps the best
5. His amazement for nature is the same as the amateur photographer. The difference is that he knows how to communicate without tricks
6. His love for the little things in life is a form of maximalism (reminds me of Carver)
7. The way of combining the images (both in books and in exhibitions) breaks through the wall of poetry
8. The abstract photos are sensual and mysterious. If there were no one should invent
9. It combines the best ways to be German: romantic, rational, transgressive
10. He can make you cry photographing an onion. Without cutting it

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More exhibition

Wolfgang's Truth Neue Welt Wolfgang Tillmans Photography

Life as Wolfgang sees it

Tillmans's latest project sets its sights on the world

Over the period of more than two decades, Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the medium of photo-imaging with greater range than any other artist of his generation. From snapshots of his friends to abstract images made in a darkroom without a camera or works made with a photocopier, he has pushed the photographic process to its outer limits in myriad ways. For this collection of photos, his fourth book with TASCHEN, Tillmans turned away from the self-reflexive exploration of the photography medium that had occupied him for several years by focusing his lens on the outside world—from London and Nottingham to Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Saudi Arabia, and Papua New Guinea. He describes this new phase simply as “trying out what the camera can do for me, what I can do for it.” The result is a powerful and singular view of life today in diverse parts of the world, seen from many angles. Says Tillmans, “My travels are aimless as such, not looking for predetermined results, but hoping to find subject matter that in some way or other speaks about the time I'm in.”

The book features a conversation between the artist and Beatrix Ruf, director of Kunsthalle Zurich.

TEN GOOD REASONS TO LOVE WOLFGANG TILLMANS

• October 7th, 2012
• By Luca Fiore

I did not have a penny in my pocket and I left it there. I mean Neue Welt, the new book by Wolfgang Tillmans (ed. Taschen). I leafed through it. I’m going to take it in the coming days. It is a beautiful book, as indeed are his others. On October 6, has opened a major retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (until 20 January). While at Kunsthalle in Zurich there is an exhibition of new works, which is called, in fact, Neue Welt, the new world (until November 4). 

To tell the truth, I am not able to write an organic reflection summarizing the reasons why I think that Tillmans is one of the artists I love the most. I try but I try to list a few ideas:

1. He is not a photographer who takes pictures fine art, but an artist who uses photography
2. He photographs beautiful things and ugly things. But his photos are always beautiful
3. He is a very conceptual artist, but you do not need to be smart to rejoice in his works
4. It is one of the best portraitist I know. Perhaps the best
5. His amazement for nature is the same as the amateur photographer. The difference is that he knows how to communicate without tricks
6. His love for the little things in life is a form of maximalism (reminds me of Carver)
7. The way of combining the images (both in books and in exhibitions) breaks through the wall of poetry
8. The abstract photos are sensual and mysterious. If there were no one should invent
9. It combines the best ways to be German: romantic, rational, transgressive
10. He can make you cry photographing an onion. Without cutting it

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

Open publication - Free publishing - More exhibition

The Christmas Rose It happened on a clear day Artist's Book Laura Samsom Rous Photography

Laura Samsom Rous

In her series ‘It happened on a clear day”, Laura Samsom Rous creates her own landscapes in the middle of Amsterdam, with the help of parked cars. The landscape doesn’t really exist, it looks like a dream. But still, they’re all real.

“She didn’t change anything in the scenes she photographed. She didn’t add a raindrop, removed a petal or changed the dust. If we only had looked better ourselves, then we could have seen them as well. But we didn’t, we had to go on. At the horizon always the wipers, they will awake in due time and vanish this paradise in one sweep – but then we already saw it.” (Text Cornel Bierens). 

Laura Samsom Rous studied anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and was a lecturer at the Academy of Art in Utrecht and The Hague. Her photographs are in international collections. Together with Hans Samsom, she worked for the United Nations, the Anti Apartheid Movement and the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. They work and live in Amsterdam.

It Happened on a Clear Day. In Amsterdam, 2012
WINDSCREEN WIPER HORIZON

Looking at the photographs by Laura Samsom brought to mind Paul Klee’s famous comment, from his work Schöpferische Konfession (1920): ‘Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible’. An excellent statement, so it has always seemed. But now it was suddenly clear that it is only half true. Laura Samsom makes visible, certainly, but she does so by reproducing only what is visible. She has orchestrated nothing, manipulated nothing, has not wiped away a single raindrop, added a single leaf or moved the finest particle of dust. If we had paid more attention we might have come across these very images ourselves. But we paid no attention, we did not have the time. This book shows us nevertheless what we have passed by: pure landscape painting.

How is it possible? All of the photographs were taken in Amsterdam’s city centre, by a photographer who twisted herself into the weirdest positions on top of car bonnets. On the haunches of the holy cow, that dream capsule which has made us lovers of liberty, conquerers of new lands. That stinking city monster, lined up street after street in battle array, straining at the leash to hurl itself snarling into the chase again. How we hate that beast, and how we love it. Where would we be without the idea that we could get in at any time and travel to a better place, less crowded, less stressful, less calculated. Paradise is never far away – as shown here by Laura Samsom, who has conjured it up out of the monster, photograph by photograph.

She has an artistic predecessor in Jan Dibbets, who once made a series of close-ups of car doors, car bonnets and mudguards. Monochrome photos, with only the occasional faint reflection of a tree or house front. Colour studies, he called them. But that was in the 1970s, when art still sought after purity by leaving out as much as possible. How liberating that meanwhile that pure splendour is teeming once more with natural life: flower-buds like angels, water drops like fantastic fish, the navigator’s suction cup on the windscreen like a moon shining by day. And always on the horizon the windscreen wipers, which, when they awake from their deep sleep, will wipe away this paradise at a stroke – but we will have seen it by then.

Cornel Bierens, Amsterdam 2010

Open publication - Free publishing - More interview