Some Rare and Superb Propaganda photoBooks from the collection of Martin Parr Archivo Photography

Archivo

Martin Parr (ed)

Amsterdam: Archivo, 2009.
softcover

Archivo is a bi-monthly journal and fully dedicated to the personal archives of photographers.

PYONGYANG

HardCover. Pub Date: 1980 Pages: 304 Publisher: FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUPLISHING HOUSE 

CHILE AYER HOY/CHILE YESTERDAY TODAY

by Anonymous

Santiago, Chile: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, nd [1975] Paperback First edition, first printing. Good paperback with wear at the edges and extremities, a small tear at the crown, and shelf wear; interior clean and bright. BOOKS SHIP THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY, WRAPPED IN PADDING, IN A BOX. 100 pages; 119 b&w and 1 color photograph; 9.5 x 9.5 inches. Text in English, Spanish and French. Published by the military junta after the 1973 coup to show what a better place Chile was now that the Communists were out of power. See Fernandez, The Latin American Photobook, p103.

Nicaragua : la guerra de liberación = der Befreiungskrieg / Ernesto Cardenal, Richard Cross.

[Managua, Nicaragua] : Ministerio de Cultura de Nicaragua

Photo album published by the Press and Publication Office run by Theodore Sarrouf in Jaffa in 1933 about the demonstrations in Palestine.

(RABIN, Yitzhak) (REAGAN, Ronald) Bar-On, Mordechai, Col., editor. Israel Defence Forces. The Six Day War 5.6.67… 10.6.67. Israel: Israel Defence Forces, and the Publications Division of the Ministry of Defence, 1968. Large quarto (10-3/4 by 12 inches), original brown paper boards, graphic endpapers, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition of a seminal early record of the 1967 Six Day War, an exceptional presentation/

association copy inscribed on the second page of text, shortly after publication, by then General Rabin to Ronald Reagan as Governor of California. Rabin, who became Israel’s Fifth Prime Minister, won the Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat one year before his assassination, and Reagan became America’s 40th President. This authoritative work, containing text by both Rabin and Moshe Dayan, features 12 full-page maps with color-outlined overlays and is profusely illustrated with hundreds of photogravures, many full page (15 in color), including photographs by noted photographers Cornell Capa and Don McCullin.

This highly memorable presentation/association copy of Israel Defence Forces is inscribed by Yitzhak Rabin soon after publication to Ronald Reagan, America’s 40th President, who was then Governor of California. As General, Rabin led Israel to victory in the 1967 Six Day War and became Israel’s fifth Prime Minister. In 1994 Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, the same year he was awarded the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, and only one year before his tragic assassination. In a prefatory essay to this important work, Moshe Dayan, as Israel’s Minister of Defence, writes: “During those Six Days, the Israel Defence Forces fought a coordinated campaign without let-up in desert and on mountain, in the air and on the sea, in night and day actions, with amour and infantry, from the walls of Jerusalem to Mount Hermon in the north and to Sharm e-Sheikh in the south.” In his own introduction Rabin pays further tribute to hard-fought struggle, adding: “most important of all was the spirit of the individual fighting man ready to risk his life at all times. This book tells the story of the battles… But it is dedicated to the entire nation of Israel, who stood with steadiness and courage behind their defenders.” With prefatory essay by Moshe Dayan and introduction by Rabin. Text by Nathan Shaham.

Now the Story Can Be Told: The PLO

1957 in Eng land A Sou venir of the lives and times of peop le supporting and accompanying the 47th Bombardment Wing, Tactical United States Air Force during the historic year of nineteen hundred and fifty-seven

Published by United States Air Force, Sculthorpe, Norfolk, 1957

Unpaginated. Front cover creased and dog-eared, and spiral binding broken at the bottom. Contents clean w just a little finger-creasing. Packed with photographs, mainly black and white, a pictorial souvenir of England.

People of Vietnam Will Triumph! the U.S. Aggressors Will Be Defeated!: a Collection important Paperback – January 1, 1965

by COSVN Central Office for South Vietnam (Author)

China.

Beijing: China Album Editing Commit tee, 1959. First Edition. Large folio. One of the greatest propaganda books ever published, with over 500 illustrations, many photographic and printed in rich gravure, with color images, and non-photographic art plates, either tipped or mounted in. Published to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. No edition size is indicated. A beautiful copy in satin boards with inset red Chinese characters, original acetate overlay, publisher's box.

Portugal 1934: Photomontage as propaganda 

This series on Portugal shows the powerful combinations of photographs and text that were becoming common in European propaganda  during the 1920s and 30s. In the Soviet Union Alexander Rodchenko^[1] was using similar layouts to portray technical achievements in USSR in Construction^[2] along with other photomontagists such as Gustav Klutsis. In Weimar Germany John Heartfield was using graphical juxtapositions to highlight the dangers of rising Fascism. 

The illustrations for this exhibition are taken from the book Portugal 1934^[3] published in Lisbon and edited by S.P.N. The acronym stood for the Secretariado Nacional de Propaganda in the days before Joseph Goebbels put such negative connotations on the word that it is still difficult to use it. This book was the official propaganda book for the Estado Novo, the right-wing regime inaugurated by António de Oliveira Salazar in 1933 and it includes photographs by the most famous Portuguese photographers of the time:Alvão, A. Rasteiro, João Martins, Diniz Salgado, Ferreira da Cunha, Francisco Santos, Horácio Novais, J. Benoliel, José Mesquita, Luis Teixeira, Pinheiro Correia, Mário de Novais, Octávio Bobone, Raimundo Vaissier, Raúl Reis, Salazar Diniz, Serra Ribeiro and V. Rodrigues. 
 

---

Footnotes 
  

1. Λ David Elliott (ed.), 1979, Alexander Rodchenko, 1891–1956, (Oxford, England: Museum of Modern Art); S.O. Khan-Magomedov, 1986, Rodchenko: The Complete Work, (Cambridge: The MIT Press); Alexander Lavrentiev, 1995, Alexander Rodchenko: Photography 1924–1954, (Edison, NJ: Knickerbocker Press); Peter MacGill & Gerhard Steidl (eds.), 2012, Rodchenko, (Steidl Pace/MacGill); P. Noever (ed.), 1991, Aleksandr M. Rodchenko and Varvara F. Stepanova, (Munich: Prestel); Margarita Tupitsyn (ed.) & Christina Kiaer, 2009, Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, (Tate) 
     
2. Λ Erika Wolf, 1999, "When Photographs Speak, To Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction)", Left History, vol. 6 no. 2, pp. 53-82 
     
3. Λ Black cover. Fully illustrated with almost 200 photographs. This large format edition was published with three different covers (orange, green and black). The book includes several half-size pages, full double-pages bleeds and fold-outs. 

Photo Magazine ARCHIVO Martin Parr Miroslav Tichy Paul Kooiker Photography

ARCHIVO explores remarkable archives.

The issues of the quirky photo magazine  ARCHIVO are now bundled into one solid folder. Each issue consists of two folio paper quires devoted to the personal archive of a photographer.

The originators of this project, photographer Paul Kooiker and graphic designer Willem van Zoetendaal who both live and work in Amsterdam, selected intriguing images made or collected by young photographers. Their list includes Harold Strak, Eva-fiore Kovacovsky, Johannes Schwartz, Daya Cahen, Paul Kooiker, Qui Yang, Kyungwoo Chun, Erik van der Weijde, Sara Blokland, Martin Parr and the duo Anuschka Blommers & Niels Schumm. Four further issues are devoted to a series of obscure television images photographed by Miroslav Tichy, an overview of the distinctive photography books designed and published by Van Zoetendaal, multi-cultural baby pictures by Lee To Sang and some rare and superb propaganda books from the collection of Martin Parr.

Lee To Sang is the odd one out here, as a retired portrait photographer he could neither be categorized as a promising emerging or as an autonomous working photographer. Still the beautiful baby portraits Kooiker and Van Zoetendaal selected from his immense archive are both revealing and hilarious. To Sang Photo Studio was located in the middle of a 19th-century working class area in Amsterdam with immigrants from Suriname, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, China and Kurdistan, to name a few. Everyone from the neighborhood, including the native Dutch, sooner or later had his or her picture taken at To Sang’s.

The other excerpts from the photographer’s archives can be personal, conceptual or documentary and sometimes all at the same time. Daya Cohen shows her reportage on the growing Russian youth movement inspired by the ideals of Valdimir Putin. Blommers and Schumm recorded a comical costume party with and by designers Victor & Rolf. The contributions of Blokland, Chun, Kooiker, Schwartz and Strak are quite conceptual, but there’s always room for a personal touch and/or a special sense of humor.

All together ARCHIVO represents the adventure, the sheer infinity of possibilities of the medium as a vehicle of creativity, of ways to look at our world. This project is made with knowledge of and passion for photography — and it shows. (text by Han Schoonhoven for Photo-eye).

ARCHIVO de Lee To Sang from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Daya Cohen from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

Archivo de Miroslav Tichy from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Kyungwoo Chun from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

Archivo de Johannes Schwartz from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Martin Parr from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Erik van der Weijde from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Anuschka Blommers & Niels Schumm from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Qui Yang from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Sara Blokland from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

ARCHIVO de Paul Kooiker from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.

Kunsthaefte 16 by Jesper Fabricius Incredibly Small PhotoBooks Paul Kooiker Erik Kessels Photography

Kunsthaefte nr. 15

Jesper Fabricius

Copenhagen: Space Poetry, 2008.
ISBN: 9788776030858
softcover

Kunsthaefte nr. 16

Jesper Fabricius

Copenhagen: Space Poetry, 2008.
ISBN: 9788776030865
softcover

Incredibly Small PhotoBooks Paul Kooiker Erik Kessels

For several years, Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels have organized evenings for friends in which they share the strangest photo books in their collections. The books shown are rarely available in regular shops, but are picked up in thrift stores and from antiquaries. The group’s fascination for these pictorial non-fiction books comes from the need to find images that exist on the fringe of regular commercial photo books. It’s only in this area that it’s possible to find images with an uncontrived quality. This constant tension makes the books interesting. It’s also worth noting that these tomes all fall within certain categories: the medical, instructional, scientific, sex, humour or propaganda. Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels have made a selection of their finest books from within this questionable new genre. Incredibly small photobooks is the second volume (after Terribly awesome photobooks) showing this amazing collection.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2007

Kunsthaefte 1 - 14 by Jesper Fabricius by 5B4 ...

Around the time of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair this past summer I mentioned buying a set of books from a Danish artist named Jesper Fabricius. Jesper publishes small handmade artist booklets that range from 8 pages to 20 pages in length under the imprint Space Poetry. One ongoing series of books called Kunsthaefte is currently 14 books strong and counting (I assume there will be more).

Using snippets from existing printed images from magazines he emphasizes relationships of color and texture while giving hints to the original image’s content. For instance, many of the crudely cut snippets seem to have derived from porn magazines or books published in the late 1970’s and 1980’s so after Jesper’s scissors are through, an image might draw your attention incidental details like to part of someone’s face and a painting hanging on the wall behind them instead of the act of sex.

Kunsthaefte nr. 1 was published in 1998 is the largest in trim size of all of theKunsthaefte series at 8 by 11 ½ inches and contains 8 pages of images in stapled folios. The images use multiple pieces of cutouts placed on the page to create more of a sense of collage than most of the other books have.

Kunsthaefte nr. 2 was published two years later in 2000 and here the trim size has been dramatically reduced to a petite 4 by 5 inches which is the smallest of the entire series. Here the content is abstracted to the point of being a kin to abstract painting. Only rarely does the viewer have enough information of the object the patterns and color were taken from to identify what it is. This is the first of the books that is several folios sewn together in a simple figure 8 stitch as a binding.

Kunsthaefte nr. 3 was published in 2002 is slightly larger in size at 4 by 5 ½ inches and this seems to be the standard for the rest of the series with only a couple exceptions. The content is arrangements of cutout speech balloons. I wish I knew what they say.

Kunsthaefte nr. 4 published in 2002 is one of the shortest at only 8 pages and four images. The content is close up cutouts of a woman or a couple women alternated with two images of a girls hair parted with blue ribbons.

Kunsthaefte nr. 5 published in 2002 is also a short one of 8 pages of women’s breasts.

Kunsthaefte nr. 6 published in 2006 is 12 pages drawing our attention to flower arrangements and plants.

Kunsthaefte nr. 7 published in 2002 is 12 pages of abstracted background patterns some with printed flowers.

Kunsthaefte nr. 8 published in 2003 is a larger booklet of 16 pages at a trim size of 5 ½ by 8 ½ inches. The content is more like nr. 1 with its multiple image collage. Each page has a different background color so the emphasis seems to be on the entire composition of the page rather than on the individual image like in numbers 2 - 7.

Kunsthaefte nr. 9 published in 2004 reverts back to the 4 by 5 ½ inch trim size and it is the first of a few that are sexually explicit in subject matter. Here we are bombarded with creative image grids of close ups of genitalia and intertwined bodies that are bizarre, surreal and often very grotesque.

Kunsthaefte nr. 10 published in 2004 draws our attention to the paintings hanging on the walls just above the faces and tops of heads of people presumably having sex.

Kunsthaefte nr. 11 published in 2007 is 12 pages of photos of vaginas arranged in grids.

Kunsthaefte nr. 12 published in 2007 is 16 pages of photos of penises arranged in grids.

Kunsthaefte nr. 13 published in 2007 is 20 pages of people’s heads. This is an interesting one as the individual pictures are common daily expressions except you notice that some (maybe all) are taken from images of people’s faces while engaged in sex.

Kunsthaefte nr. 14 is 12 pages of individual images of women’s breasts and torsos bound by different configurations of rope.

I like these books for their ready-made and casual look. They probably are labored over by Jesper in their creation but they have an un-precious and disposable feel that suits the imagery. Jesper is one of many artists that uses material at his disposal to re-contexualize the image and divert our attention away from the original intention. As we look, he may be challenging us to pull our mind away from its primal instinct of voyeurism and push our thoughts elsewhere. As we try to evaluate each photo as a new work of art that is complete in its own way, our imaginations and instinct try to expand those boundaries far past what he has presented. This tug and pull is what makes many of these booklets interesting.

The books are occasionally available through Printed Matter in New York City or through the website. Space Poetry. Printed Matter sells most of the recent booklets for around $4.00 US.

www.spacepoetry.dk

www.printedmatter.org

One of the most beautiful books of the G(erman) D(emocratic) R(eplubic) Keine Experimente Dirk Alvermann Photography

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2008

Keine Experimente by Dirk Alvermann by 5B4 ...

The name of the photographer Dirk Alvermann has only been familiar to me for about a year. Surprised by the photographs, design and layout of his book L'Algerie - his account of the Algerian war for independence published in 1960 - he is definitely worth knowing although it isn't easy to find the books nor information on him. While in Paris I found his second book Keine Experimente published in 1961.

Keine Experimente: Pictures of Basic Law is a book about the general attitude of the West German population towards the changes brought about in West Germany with the election of the CDU party. Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany ushered in an era of rapid economic growth for post-war Germany that was essentially a free-market economy that spurred upwards of 8 percent growth per year. Adenauer's"Keine Experimente" (No Experiments) slogan symbolized a more practical approach to politics for people who had just years prior experienced the ideologies and economic upheavals of the war period. Although living standards did improve for most Germans, it was a policy that would have a similar effect to "trickle-down" economics of Reagan in the United States where large gaps between the rich and poor would be created and where wages for workers stagnated.

Alvermann's photographs made between 1956 and 1961 are juxtaposed against the first 9 articles of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany and in part acts as a critique of the consumerism and the attitudes that the free-market brought. The book opens with a page spread of a crowd locked behind a gate reminiscent of a concentration camp. A reminder of a difficult history that many of the population wished to disappear -- something the new economic policies made easier. When the gates open into this new society we are faced with billboards offering the Ten Commandments and bottles of Coca-Cola. The faces of the workers on the following spread seem confused and uncertain.

Much of the work is festive in tenor with many images of carnivals and gaiety. Brass bands and parades of uniformed soldiers march announcing the new era in stark contrast to an attitude of reducing militarism. When he shows similar scenes of workers shuffling along, their lack of energy and despondence is a point of focus.

Alvermann's design and image juxtaposition is full of experiment. He clips and crops images into graphics to make his point. He reminds readers of the Nazi past while the people in the images seem to be more willing to turn away. He focusses on the young children playing in the streets, the young generation which will return to confront the past with more introspection than any since. In many images Alvermann seems to be passing the torch to them, reminding us that they will be the ones to suffer for the populace's will to turn from its history. In one telling image Alvermann photographs a child aiming his toy gun at his own head in mock suicide while a line of saints in a store window stand over him.



Keine Experimente's construction and, again, Alvermann's use of design is most effective. Like with his book on Algeria, he creates a kind of photojournalist's Klein's New York utilizing slivers of photos and graphic pairings that are visually exciting creating new meanings from disparate images -- a kind of assemblage of history and commentary.

Keine Experimente is a pocket-sized book with glossy illustrated hardcovers and is not much larger than a common novel. The printing is on rather cheap paper but the low-fi production is very seductive and adds a gritty edge to a supposed bright reality.