Interesting, if rather long (1 hour and 15 minutes) presentation by Stephen Shore.
In case anyone reading this doesn’t know who Mr. Shore is, Wikipedia describes him as follows:
Stephen Shore (born October 8, 1947) is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
In 1975 Shore received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1971, he was the first living photographer to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he had a solo show of black and white photographs. He was selected to participate in the influential group exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), in 1975-1976.
In 1976 he had a solo exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 he received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.
Alec Soth is a well known photographer. According to his Magnum profile:
Alec Soth’s work is rooted in the American photographic tradition that Walker Evans famously termed “documentary Style.” Concerned with the mythologies and oddities that proliferate America’s disconnected communities, Soth has an instinct for the relationship between narrative and metaphor. His clarity of voice has drawn many comparisons to literature, but he believes photography to be more fragmented; “It’s more like poetry than writing a novel.”
Aside from his many critically acclaimed personal projects, selected clients include The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W Magazine, Vogue, GQ, Wall Street Journal Magazine.
Much of Soth’s work is tied to an interest in the photobook and in 2008, he started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. His major series have all become critically acclaimed monographs; the first Sleeping by the Mississippi (Note I have a copy of this one), was published by Steidl in 2004, NIAGARA (Steidl, 2006), Broken Manual (Steidl, 2010), Songbook (MACK, 2015), I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (MACK, 2019).
Soth has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial and career surveys by Jeu de Paume (2008), Walker Art Center (2010) and Media Space (2015).
Soth, who is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis.
He became a nominee of Magnum Photos in 2004 and a full member in 2008.
As mentioned above Soth (rhymes with Both) loves photobooks and has a massive collection. About a year ago he started a YouTube Channel where he discusses photobooks in general and uses photobooks from his collection as examples. I find the videos to be absolutely fascinating, and I like Soth himself – he seems to be a very genuine person.
Man Ray‘s photograph, ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’ sold this month for a record $12.4 million far surpassing the previous record set by Rhein II by Andreas Gursky, which sold at auction in 2011 for $4.3 million (CNN).
Berenice Abbott knew my idol Eugène Atget in Paris (See: Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott) and was instrumental in saving his work after his death and making it known more broadly . Atget spent considerable time photographing a Paris, which was rapidly disappearing. On her return to New York Abbott wanted to do the same for New York. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as planned.
The publisher’s summary describes the book as follows:
The recreation of a landmark in 1930s documentary photography.
The 1939 book Changing New York by Berenice Abbott, with text by Elizabeth McCausland, is a landmark of American documentary photography and the career-defining publication by one of modernism’s most prominent photographers. Yet no one has ever seen the book that Abbott and McCausland actually planned and wrote. In this book, art historian Sarah M. Miller recreates Abbott and McCausland’s original manuscript for Changing New York by sequencing Abbott’s one hundred photographs with McCausland’s astonishing caption texts. This reconstruction is accompanied by a selection of archival documents that illuminate how the project was developed, and how the original publisher drastically altered it.
Miller analyzes the manuscript and its revisions to unearth Abbott and McCausland’s critical engagement with New York City’s built environment and their unique theory of documentary photography. The battle over Changing New York, she argues, stemmed from disputes over how Abbott’s photographs—and photography more broadly—should shape urban experience on the eve of the futuristic 1939 World’s Fair. Ultimately it became a contest over the definition of documentary itself. Gary Van Zante and Julia Van Haaften contribute an essay on Abbott’s archive and the partnership with McCausland that shaped their creative collaboration.
In my opinion this is a very accurate summary of the book. Will be of interest to anyone interested in the work of great photographers. The machinations (on the part of the publisher and others), which prevented this book being published in its original form are a real eye opener. Wonderful book! I really enjoyed reading it.
