...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins
Keuken, Joan van der Wij zijn 17. [Text S. Carmiggelt]. Bussum / 1955 / First edition / 64 p. / in wrappers / 24x16cm / 29 pl. of ill. / - / NN / Buch / Photographie - Monographie - 20. Jahrh. - Carmiggelt, S. / Text nederl. See for more Joan van der Keuken ...
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger: The Photobook: A History volume 1/ The Indecisive Moment: The 'Stream-of-Consciousness' Photobook In 1955, the 17-year-old Joan van der Keuken caused a stir in Dutch publishing with his book Wij zijn 17 (We are 17), prefiguring the even greater furore that would greet the publication of Ed van der Elsken'sEen Liefedesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain des Pres (Love on the Left Bank) a year later. Van der Keuken's book was as innovative as Van der Elsken's in its treatment of a section of society - not a class exactly, but a societal group - that was beginning to be regarded as a class apart.
It is sometimes forgotten in these days of 'youth culture' that it was only from around the 1950s onwards that the young were first talked about in this way. Previously they had been regarded - give a modicum of wild oats sowing and youthful high spirits - largely as replicas of their parents. In the 1950s, however, with its anxious air of repressed rebellion, such attitudes were overturned. The Beat Generation, the Beatnik movement, James Dean - the original rebel without a cause - and a pouting, gyrating phenomenon called Elvis Presley, drew the world's attention to the fact that, since the war, a new alien seemed to have been dropped on the planet - the teenager.
Van der Keuken's two books, Wij zijn 17 and his followup, Achter Glas (Behind Glass, 1957), caught this mood perfectly. Whilst perhaps not stream-of-consciousness in style, they certainly are in terms of attitude, capturing a moment's experience in which nothing much happens except for the moment itself. The 30 pictures in Wij zijn 17 are tellingly simple. Students lounge around in their rooms, doing nothing very much, as if waiting for their adult lives to begin. The mood is uncertain, capturing that moment when childhood ends and youth must take a deep breath and step out into the world.
This was also the theme of Achter Glas, Van der Keuken's second foray into the new form of the 'photonovel'. Two sisters, Georgette and Yvonne, do little more than sit by a window, day-dreaming. And it was this youthful lassitude, this apparent aimlessness, perfectly expressed by Van der Keuken, that caused a degree of controversy. But this view of teenage rebellion at the sulky rather than more active stage rings painfully true. It became a model for other books examining the same phenomenon, not he least of which is the recent work of Van der Keuken's compatriot, Helen van Meene, whose similar view od Dutch adolescents - now in colour - has also proved controversial.
The American artist Paul Strandhad a long and productive career with the camera. His pictorialist studies of the 1910s, followed by the coolly seductive machine photographs of the 1920s, like the contemporary work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped define the canon of early American modernism and set its premium on the elegant print. Experimenting with Charles Sheeler, Strand then pushed further in describing the movement of the city in the short film Manhatta (1920). In the 1930s, he became seriously involved with documentary film and, from the 1940s until the end of his life, he was committed to making photographic books of the highest quality. After 1950, when he relocated to France, landscape, architecture, and portraiture (the traditional humanist genres) continued to inspire Strand to embody the spirit of his subjects in the very materials of the photographic print. The high regard for his mature work suggests that he succeeded in his goals, and that his standards of excellence and his constancy of subject answered very human needs in a century of radical change.
Strand was introduced to photography as a high school student at New York City's Ethical Culture School. His first photography teacher, Lewis Hine, instilled in Strand a deep sense of commitment to the social betterment of humankind. In 1907, the school's camera club took a field trip to Alfred Stieglitz's Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, where they saw an exhibition of photographs by members of the Photo-Secession, including Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Clarence H. White, Frederick H. Evans, and Joseph Turner Keiley. For Strand it was a defining moment: he decided that day to become a photographer. During the next seven years he applied himself to this task, shadowing in his development that of Pictorialists a generation older, and consciously emulating Steichen and White.
In early 1915, his mentor Stieglitz criticized the graphic softness of Strand's photographs and over the next two years he dramatically changed his technique and made extraordinary photographs on three principal themes: movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits. During the 1910s, New York thronged with pedestrians, carriages, and automobiles, and the streets became the unavoidable symbol of flux, change, and modernity. Photographers such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and Karl Struss and many painters, including John Marin, pursued the "great hastening metropolis" as a vital subject. Being a very deliberate artist, however, Strand was not initially taken with the "rush and go" but instead structured his images on relatively slow movements, usually of a single person, as is seen in From the El (1915; 49.55.221). Soon he increased the complexity and upped the tempo of his compositions with the multiple rhythms of midtown and downtown crowds.
Following Stieglitz's exhibitions of avant-garde European art at 291 and the Armory Show of 1913, several other New York galleries began to show modern European painting. Thus by 1916, Strand had repeatedly immersed himself in the new artistic idioms, especially as represented by Cézanne and Picasso. Upon arriving at the summer cottage his family rented every year at Twin Lakes, Connecticut, he set about learning "how you build a picture, what a picture consists of, how shapes are related to each other, how spaces are filled, how the whole thing must have a kind of unity." Scavenging some crockery and fruit from the cottage kitchen, Strand made arrangements on the porch, learning how to create movement and depth in the compact universe that became the picture. First tilting the bowls, then the rocking chair and table, and then further rotating his photograph ninety degrees, Strand gradually abandoned the recognizable and comfortable for a space that is largely incomprehensible, a pattern of tones of extraordinary authority and dynamic formal coherence. These stunning photographs, including Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut (1916; 1987.1100.10), were the first significant abstractions intentionally made with a camera.
For a long time, Strand had wanted to make "portraits of people such as you see in the New York parks and places, sitting around, without their being conscious of being photographed. … I felt that one could get a quality of being through the fact that the person did not know he was being photographed … [and I wanted to capture] these people within an environment which they themselves had chosen to be in, or were in anyway." Strand set out for Five Points, the heart of the immigrant slums on the Lower East Side, with his camera rigged with a false lens to distract attention. Approaching a potential subject, Strand turned ninety degrees away and aimed the false lens in the direction he was facing. The real lens, on an extended bellows, stuck out under his arm toward the person, whom Strand could see by looking into his lens hood sideways or sneaking a glance over his shoulder. The clumsiness of the operation made it exceedingly difficult and "nerve-racking," but it allowed Strand to capture his subject unaware.
Many of the people Strand photographed were classic New York types of the period: unshaven toughs, red-nosed Irish washerwomen, Jewish patriarchs, aging Europeans, blind peddlers (33.43.334), and sandwich men. Like Lewis Hine, Strand was collecting the poignant evidence of poverty among the cultures that crowded the metropolis. Treating the human condition in the modern urban context, Strand's photographs are a subversive alternative to the studio portrait of glamour and power. A new kind of portrait akin to a social terrain, they are, as Sanford Schwartz put it, "cityscapes that have faces for subjects." See for more Paul Strand ... Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Posters of Palestinian suicide bombers before their mission are put up after their mission is accomplished. Documentation of the posters, reprinted in A3 format on mat paper. Folded in half and bound by cotton form the entire content of this 'docartzine'. The centre fold printed on white paper references and translates.
Until paradise - posters and graffiti in Palestine Ad van Denderen has visited Israel and Palestine many times in recent years. In 1997 he published his work regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the book Peace in the Holy Land. The exhibition Until paradise was comprised of photographs that Van Denderen made in 2002/2003 of posters and graffiti on the walls of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Through these posters and graffiti Palestinian martyrs are commemorated immediately after their death. The visual vocabulary of the posters reminds one of the posters for combat films such as Rambo. The posters are only briefly to be seen. During their nightly raids on the West Bank the Israeli army seizes Palestinian men from their beds and forces them to remove the posters again. Until paradise documents without taking sides the many ropagandistic outings in this seemingly unsolvable conflict and grows out of the policy of the Nederlands fotomuseum to reflect on the use of photography in various forms of expression. With this exhibition useful photography #4 is being published, devoted to the posters on the walls on the west bank and in the gaza strip. Lees meer... See for more Ad van Denderen...
Softcover Rotterdam, R.L. nd.[c. 1935]. large 8 . orig. lettered & pict. stiff wraps, printed in 2 colours (black and white), orig. very thin paper dustjacket preserved. String through spine, recte of upper-wrap silver-coloured with white lettering. Title-p. printed in 2 colours (blue & white), with on left part track-map with legenda in black & blue with white lettering. Introd. on 2 L.l. with a beautiful illustration in centre-fold., 5 Ll. with short text descr. 4 passenger-ships of the company with large illustrations of the ships and their interiors on opp. page, folding-out, with more general information on last 2 L.l. A stunning piece of advertising-art, describing four major passenger-ships of company"s fleet, the Ms.s. "Baloeran, Dempo, Sibajak and Indrapoera". Graphic design by Johan von Stein. See also the Dutch Poster Museum...
Softcover Rotterdam, R.L. nd.[c. 1935]. large 8 . orig. lettered & pict. stiff wraps, printed in 2 colours (black and white), orig. very thin paper dustjacket preserved. String through spine, recte of upper-wrap silver-coloured with white lettering. Title-p. printed in 2 colours (blue & white), with on left part track-map with legenda in black & blue with white lettering. Introd. on 2 L.l. with a beautiful illustration in centre-fold., 5 Ll. with short text descr. 4 passenger-ships of the company with large illustrations of the ships and their interiors on opp. page, folding-out, with more general information on last 2 L.l. A stunning piece of advertising-art, describing four major passenger-ships of company"s fleet, the Ms.s. "Baloeran, Dempo, Sibajak and Indrapoera". Graphic design by Johan von Stein. See also the Dutch Poster Museum...
...Photography is the visual medium of the modern world. As a means of recording, and as an art form in its own, it pervades our lives and shapes our perceptions...
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