The recent reissue of Larry Sultan’s brilliant Pictures from Home (Mack), substantially reworked and redesigned from the 1992 original, made me think about narrative and the photo book. Sultan’s photographs of his parents, suffused with affection and anxiety, are intercut with home-movie stills, snapshots, publicity photos, and texts from the point of view of everybody involved. It’s a revealing, richly detailed family portrait, a memoir with pictures – and a model of photographic storytelling. That model has changed radically in the years since Pictures from Home first appeared. As photographs have become more subjective, more allusive, narrative has splintered or dissolved, going off on tangents – moody, poetic, open-ended. In the wrong hands, this approach can be maddeningly self-indulgent. But a smart, sensitive photographer – Alec Soth, Justine Kurland, Katy Grannan, and, just recently, Sam Contis – knows how to balance substance and mystery, document and atmosphere. They’re not telling a story; they’re illuminating a life, a place, a world, and inviting us to experience it through their eyes.
Although she also presents plenty of scene-setting background, that’s what photographer Phyllis B. Dooney does in Gravity Is Stronger Here (Kehrer), a book with prose poems by Jardine Libaire instead of captions. Feeling rootless, Dooney, a self-described Connecticut Yankee, set off in search of America and ended up in Greenville, Mississippi, a Delta town on the skids. She might have kept on moving, but one night in a karaoke bar, she saw a boyish, magnetic 18 year old named Halea Brown rap to an Eminem song and was hooked. She photographed Brown, who calls herself $uperdike, and her extended family off and on for the next five years; Libaire incorporates their voices into her poems. In an introduction, Dooney writes that her position as a regular visitor gave her a certain freedom: “as an outsider, true, but more importantly as a vulnerable journeyer and inquisitive guest who gets to embrace the larger truth of just being mammals together.” The result is a book with a sure sense of place, full of casual beauty and startling intimacy. But a family with a history of neglect, abuse, and addiction can’t escape the cycle of what Dooney calls “hope and hopelessness” – a syndrome she suggests is the American Condition these days. The book’s title is partly explained by a quote that crops up in one of Libaire’s texts: describing the collapse from an overdose, one character says, “All of a sudden – there was so much gravity.” The colloquial vividness of the voices here is matched by the pictures, which seem at once tossed-off and flawless, whether the subject is a field of cotton, a pan full of crawfish, or two girls on a mattress, lit only by the sun through some broken blinds.
Jesús Monterde’s Nemini Parco (RM) gives the reader far less context and virtually no background information. The book, which opens and closes with full-bleed images of blazing fire (cue the brimstone), has no captions, no dates, and only a brief text at the end explaining that the title means “I forgive no one” – the words one can expect to hear when the Reaper stakes his claim. Death hovers throughout the book and Monterde confronts it with relish, hitting a series of intensely operatic notes but also sounding everyday alarms: a flight of bats, a slaughtered calf, a mangled limb, a cat chewing on a coil of animal innards. Apparently, the photographs were taken in rural Spain, at family farms, among the poor and faithful, and much of the drama here seems inspired by Goya, El Greco, and the bloodiest religious art. It’s italicized, relentless, and cathartic. Monterde isn’t looking for forgiveness; he’s fighting furiously for what’s left of life.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
The Shifting Borders of Photojournalism and Fine Art Photography
Disturbed by the lack of a visual record of Americ...
Roe Ethridge: It's Personal
At a time when youth and age seem to be blending i...
Victor Burgin Revisits Photopath
The influential artist and writer reinstalls a landmark work for a new generation of viewers.
Interview: Michelle Dunn Marsh and Sylvia Plachy
Michelle Dunn Marsh, the founder of Minor Matters, the Seattle-based photography book publisher, has championed many photographers over the years.
Photo-Poetics: Works Both Allusive and Elusive
With nearly two billion images posted each day on ...
Fazal Sheikh: Creating Common Ground
About 15 years ago, I came across Fazal Sheikh’s s...
Rosamond Purcell’s Cabinet of Curiosities
On the occasion of her first retrospective at the Addison Gallery, the photographer speaks to Lyle Rexer about photographing natural-history specimens in the “kingdom of the dead.”
Eight Photographs. Eight Ways to Contemplate the Climate Crisis
In a special feature, photograph magazine asked eight professionals in the field of photography to each select a single photograph related to the climate crisis that resonated with them in the last year.
Larry Sultan: Pictures from Home | Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York City
I grew up in the Maryland suburbs, in a town that,...
Image and Object: Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Catherine Wagner
Three notable shows in Northern California this summer provide examples of how sculpture, and the idea of sculpture, are explored in photo-based work: Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Catherine Wagner each make photo-based art and objects that are deeply informed by sculptural concerns.
Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy | International Center of Photography, New York City
Love, Socrates explains in Symposium, is a form of...