Please visit our new site at http://www.onshadow.com.

I’ve had a good time doing this blog and the various projects that 12th Press has been involved in, but there are lots of people who are doing the same thing that I’ve been trying to do, but better and with more success than I’ve been able to.  I’ve never felt that I’ve had the time or resources to devote to 12th Press that it deserves, and in this age of self-publishing and internet ventures, I feel that my energy could be better spent adding to the conversation a new voice rather than joining into the chorus.

That being said, I’d like to point you to 3 great photographers whose work really deserves wider notice, and with whom I had been working to provide that.  Please, check out the work of Rian Dundon, Benedikt Richenbach, and Nicoló Degiorgis.

As for me, I will be taking a break from blogging for a couple of weeks before returning to reorganize this blog to serve as an archive, and probably beginning another with a slightly different focus (the creation of which I will announce here).

Thanks again to everyone who have so graciously allowed their work to be featured here, and to all of you internauts who have read, commented, clicked, and bought here on 12th Press.

This is not new work, clearly, so I’m always a bit shocked (pun!) when I bring this stuff up and no one knows about it. But this happens consistently enough for me to be posting about it here:

Anyways, Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne was a French doctor and photographer of the 19th century. He comes up here, of course, due to his photographic work, though it was a direct result of his actually quite important scientific research.

Duchenne was a solitary ‘mariner-like’ figure in the Paris of his time, concerned exclusively with medical research and the treatment of people of all social classes (somewhat to the detriment of his career). He developed many pioneering techniques in neurology and medecine in general, but one of his most lasting contributions was his work on muscular contraction and facial expressions. This became widely known to the international scientific community through Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, and was originally published with a suite of scientific images (some of the first uses of photography for this purpose) of Duchenne or his assistants applying localized electrical charges to the face of an old man (who, luckily, had zero sensation in his face) in order to induce different expressions.

Duchenne was heavily influenced by physiognomy: He believed that these facial expressions were a window to the soul. In a weird way (one he probably wouldn’t have recognized) he was right: The images he produced have this weird grotesquely unselfconscious power to them. And though their goal was scientific illustration, some of them stray quite far from anything we would recognize as such.

Google images is a good place to start if you’d like to see more of his work… Though the National Media Museum has a pretty good set of them too.

Speaking of Arles, the artist duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss had an exhibition at this past edition that was, in my mind, the highlight of the event. I’ve got nothing to add on this today except to point you towards ‘The Way Things Go,’ the 1987 short film that records a series of casually assembled objects functioning as a Rube Goldberg machine.

Check it out the rest on 01 Magazine’s blog.

From

Sorry I haven’t posted – I was down in Toulouse working on getting together the latest iteration of Le Garage.  Which, incidentally, has a new website.  Check it out at legarage.cc.

In the meantime, though, An-My Lê’s new show “Events Ashore” has opened at Murray Guy.  It’s work on the US Navy, that I first had a sense she was working on due to an appearance in her Art:21 documentary.  It seems a slight departure from her previous work (I find it less lyrical… or more, I’m not sure), but certainly worth a look if you’re in NY.

Also, Carly Steinbrunn of Le Garage showed me this absolutely delightful video about the festival at Arles. This isn’t exactly timely (Paris Photo is closer than Arles), but you gotta watch it if you speak French…

And finally, tiny little water creature photographs.

Next post: much less random, I promise.

Dutch Doc is a (surprise, surprise) Dutch website and blog specializing in documentary photography.  They run essays and blog posts and their twitter feeds all on the main page, but barring a major upgrade in google translate, the site is pretty much uninteligible unless you speak Dutch.

That being said, however, one aspect of the site which is in English is the Docupedia, a project begun to catalogue many of the different photography institutions and prizes all over the world.

Obviously, there are areas (Europe) where they are much stronger than others (Africa and South America don’t have a single entry for example, which is obviously not the case), but it’s the beginning of a valiant effort to provide a one-stop reference to the various photographic scenes.

The lack of coverage of some areas, though, highlights an interesting point – I highly doubt that the people behind Dutch Doc are intentionally or unintentionally excluding photographic organizations in non-western countries.  Much more likely is that they simply don’t know about any. Which is a bit of the problem – as most of the readers of this blog are probably avid internet photography viewers, we probably know plenty of Western photo organizations – they are, after all, the most likely to be plugged in and the most likely to have a website or to appear on a blog. So, the failure of this map (so far, it must be said – it’s an ongoing list) is its very lack of African, Asian, and Latin American institutions.  These institutions are the most likely to benefit from a map such as this, and they are also the most likely to show us something we haven’t yet seen in a way that we have equally not seen (see this graphic for a sense of this), which one might say goes some way to explain the very appeal of photography.

[Randomly, check out 'A Japanese Book' via Eyecurious Books...]

On that topic, Greater Middle Eastern Photo recently posted a timely essay as a response to Perpignan:

Congratulations to Frédéric Sautereau who has won the International Daily Press Award at Visa Pour L’Image for his work on Gaza which appeared in La Croix.

Sautereau is no stranger to the area and has bodies of work including Jerusalem (and other divided cities), the wall separating Israel and the West Bank, Gaza and Hamas. It is a deserving win, though I look forward to the time when photographers from the region lead the way in producing award winning work about their homelands.

Why they don’t go on to greater glory is the crux of the matter, and the author goes on to provide some explanations.  Read more here.

I am very pleased to announce that a project that I had a small part in helping along is finally opening this weekend.

That’s right – Le Bal opens it’s doors tomorrow, Saturday, September 18th, with an exhibition entitled ‘Anonymes.’

Co-curated by Diane Dufour and David Campany, it’s a look at ‘Unnamed America in Photography and Film.’ I’ve seen it, and honestly, it’s a really good exhibition. I highly urge anyone in Paris to check out this new photography space…

So, as mentioned, with the return of fall comes a dump of some of the interesting links that I’d like to share without necessarily adding another word. And so, without further ado, in no particular order:

Blake Andrews’ has decided to teach photography
Rip Hopkins portraits of English living in France (via Hipolyte Bayard). This one kind of depresses me, for some weird reason.
Jacolette: a blog of Irish snapshots and vernacular photography.
Ben Quinton‘s ‘The British Abroad,’ about an English style school in the Rift Valley (via Prison Photography).
This photo that appeared on Contact.
The Morning News interviews Julian Faulhaber, who we’ve discussed before…
Hein-Kuhn Oh‘s ‘High School Girls‘ (via The Sonic Blog).  This one gains added resonance in the context of this. And other things too.
The Burns Archive has a blog.
Toby Burrow’s landscapes. Want.
Phyllis Galembos masquerade work is absolutely astonishing for so many different reasons.
Tinyvices is on the iPhone and iPad. Interesting…
Oliver Farrnbacher‘s quiet work is satisfying, though not quite as ADD as I lean towards these days (via The Sonic Blog).
Motohiro Takeda, as featured on LOZ.
Vincent Fournier from Mrs. Deane’s Mars Week.
Bernard Voita (via Contact).
Ola Rindal, who I heard of from I-can’t-remember-where-sorry.

So it’s September, and here in Paris the 6 month winter has apparently already begun. We’re virtually guaranteed the grey, pissing skies present today until April, unless Summer somehow effects a Lazarus like return from the dead.

It’s not all bad, though: September also marks the rentré, when all of France returns to work. That means lots and lots of stuff going on, as all of the work and events that would have happened in August are crammed into the first couple of weeks of the month of September.

Included in that are two special events I want to draw your attention to. First, Le Garage, the exhibition project I was involved in in Arles this year, will be showing again in Toulouse at the venerable Chateau d’Eau gallery, opening September 24th. If you’re around, be sure to check it out. The Le Garage site is due for an update with details of the show – when that happens, I’ll be sure to mention it here.

And here in Paris (or its environs), Laurence Vecten, of LOZ fame, has gotten together with Laurent Champoussin to present PIY / Publish It Yourself, ‘an exhibition of self-published photobooks.’

The show is next week-end, saturday 11th and sunday 12th, at Maison d’art Bernard Anthonioz, in Nogent sur Marne (16, rue Charles VII, Nogent sur Marne ; 12.00 am until 6.00 pm).

In our selection of books, you may find names you have already seen on LOZ.
Our idea is to show different range of books : monographs, posters, zines, boxes, different types of printing, and of course impulsive choices.

I’ll be checking it out on Sunday if anyone cares to join me…

NEXT UP: All of the links I’ve been saving for you and never had a chance to share.  I’m wading through the folder today, so I should have a nice round up in the next couple of days.

© Melanie Bonajo

It’s the rentré here in France – everyone’s getting back from vacations and jump straight into work.  So, back to the blog.

I wasn’t completely idle over the summer, though. I manage to write a short essay for Le Bal (WHICH OPENS SEPTEMBER 18th, BY THE WAY) on the New Weird.  I urge you to read it:

Obviously, this kind of work has long had a history in the art world – Art world critics, curators, and collectors have long had a much easier time with a work as an independent expression of an idea than has the photography world. The photo world has always had an implicit belief in the photograph as an authentic document that, though not necessarily a conveyer of truth, is the medium for authentic communication between creator and viewer. New Weird photography frequently claims to be nothing more than an assembly of symbols and juxtapositions and that it can be nothing more than some king of photographic Rorschach ink blot to the viewer’s predispositions and prejudices.

More here. This essay, in its current form, is unfinished – I’m interested in expanding upon it, so any comments or input is appreciated.

Others were also not idle – which I’ll get to as I catch up on my linkage.  To start, though, here’s a call for entries from 3/3.  12th Press will be submitting;  You should too.

Little big press  exhibition aims to survey the tendencies that, during the last few years, changed thoroughly the world of photobook publishings.

A more and more increasing vitality is directing photobook evolution towards an independent, self published and scale reduced position, giving life to independent photobooks or fanzines, while small publishing houses are becoming more and more active and prolific all around the world.

Apply at treterzi.org.

UPDATE: I posted the entire essay below.

We, as photographers, are still working through the effects of the digital revolution.  I suspect that this will be the case for yet a few years to come as we come to grips with how new technologies like digital cameras and digital distribution have changed how we view, approach, and create photography.  But, some of these effects have already become evident – one clear example is how you, a distant reader, have found this blog and this essay and connected to a community of photography enthusiasts interested in working through some of the problematics of the documentary image: Our project here at Le Bal.

This interconnectedness has led to interesting conglomerations of photographers and photography styles, connected only by the tenuous links of a common approach and the streams of data travelling over the internet.  A common approach to a medium is by no means nothing new – It has happened at many different moments throughout art history and finding and identifying the causes of these brief moments of synchronicity are one of the prime occupations of art historians.  But I would argue that the internet is increasing the frequency and scale of this, by its very property of making work and information widely distributed all over the world to your desktop computer.

A good contemporary example is the category of photographic work dubbed ‘New Weird‘ or, in previous writing by me, techno-spiritualist photography.  Characterized, in the most general sense, by an approach that emphasizes the visually surreal or weird in the banalities of contemporary life and a strong concern with the construction of the photographic image, New Weird photography exploded on the internet several years ago with the introduction of the blog i heart photography.  Since then it has made its way into the the most exalted of contemporary art institutions and its influence can be found, either directly or indirectly, in huge swathes of the fine-art photographic landscape.

i heart photography (which is still active) was created because Laurel Ptak, its founder, « was just seeing the same work in the same style of photography over and over again, in galleries, on the pages of magazines, everywhere in the established art world, and I just knew there was more going on than that.»  [via] Determined to find an outlet for the type of work that she enjoyed, and taking advantage of the possibilities afforded by an internet environment (which was really just starting to see huge numbers of photographers posting their own work on their personal sites), Ptak began posting on photographers that shared common concerns with her; a do-it-yourself ethos coupled with a post-modern interrogation of the nature of photography through approaches such as collage, archiving, and neo-surrealist work.

If one has to identify only one element that runs through all of this work, it was that none of it fits into the thread of photography that starts with the photojournalists of the 30s, through Cartier-Bresson, Frank, and Winogrand, Arbus, Goldin, etc.; so-called ‘Straight Photography.’  It has none of the faith in the socially transformative power of photography, or even in the narrative abilities of photography.  Instead, it seeks to put a question mark against the entire idea that the visual document can tell anything beyond that with which the viewer originally approaches it with.

Obviously, this kind of work has long had a history in the art world – Art world critics, curators, and collectors have long had a much easier time with a work as an independent expression of an idea than has the photography world. The photo world has always had an implicit belief in the photograph as an authentic document that, though not necessarily a conveyer of truth, is the medium for authentic communication between creator and viewer. New Weird photography frequently claims to be nothing more than an assembly of symbols and juxtapositions and that it can be nothing more than some king of photographic Rorschach ink blot to the viewer’s predispositions and prejudices.

It must be noted at this point how heavily much of New Weird photography is influenced by Surrealist photography. But Surrealism never doubted the photographic document, using it instead to suggest other meanings through association as opposed to suggesting that there may be no meaning or, at the very least, meaning is relative. For example, much of the darkness drawing its roots from the symbols of Freudian psychotherapy present in a lot of surrealist photography has been neutered in its contemporary incarnations.  We don’t really get the sense of danger and perverseness in, say, Melanie Bonajo’s ‘Furniture Bondage‘ as we do in Hans Bellmer’s ‘La Poupée‘.

New Weird photography is a direct product of the internet – a collective unconscious, sanitized and behind a screen, and frequently an easy commodity, arriving on our screens and then clicked through to the next image.  In alot of ways, it mirrors the image factory of the internet itself.  Sites like ffffound and the so-called ’surf clubs,’ results of many collective users trolling the internet for interesting images to share, are frequently eerily similar to the sites of artists who have instead created their work.  That isn’t, of course, to say that the work isn’t without merit, or even to take out the intentionality of the artist. This is instead an acknowledgement of how of-a-certain-time-and-place New Weird photography is.

So, contrary to appearances, this blog is not moribund – I’ve just been busy. Really, really busy. I’m back now, but off again on vacation until the end of August. I hope to see you then, but in the meantime, check out this Taryn Simon project, Contraband, published in the NY Times.

The photo of the confiscated goods at JFK in an American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar was always my favorite, tied with the photo of the Hoh Rainforest, which is where I happen to be going.

Enjoy the rest of summer!

Image courtesy of Mus-Mus

I received a new call for submissions from mus-mus, which I’m happy to pass on:

Team mus-mus is looking for your help with an archive that will let us all see film and flash products that we’re bidding au revoir, leaving behind, or perhaps still clinging desperately to. Since George Eastman first invented an emulsion coating machine to mass-produce photographic dry plates in 1879, commercially available photography technology has been a sustaining feature of the photographer’s practice. As old technologies are increasingly falling away and sometimes re-emerging in new ‘skins’, it will be interesting to take a collective worldwide snapshot of what’s on hand in studios (and maybe flea markets) now that are gone from stores or will be tomorrow.

See details and submit here.  I have too many things to submit…

From the phenomenal site Information is Beautiful.  Click for full size.

Reading the gem of a text that Photography Prison dug up from a Lester Morrison interview on 5b4 that I somehow missed…

In my sophomore year I started doing psychedelics in a rather serious way. Some friends got hold of a bunch of Sandoz tabs. Sandoz was the only pharmaceutical outfit ever to produce pure lysergic acid diethylamide-25 and ergotamine in a form that looked like Pop-Rocks. Ergotamine comes from a fungal rust that grows on certain cereal grains. In high doses can cause vascular stasis, thrombosis and gangrene. That’s how my buddy Ben lost his foot and resulted in me having extreme panic attacks that forced me to drop out of school. Well, that and the foul cholera episode. When it isn’t turning you into a leper, the ergotamine slots so perfectly into the complex serotonin metabolism of the primate cortex. Brings about some random stochastic happenstance, some entropic slippage where – although you have the taste of cat piss in your mouth – you also find yourself trying to poke out the eyes of god. The morning after my first trip, I finally understood colors.

… Brings to mind the color wheel you see above and also Albert Kahn.

In other news, I’m currently engaged in a book project with a photographer who learned to shoot in the 60s – It’s in b+w, but it really gives me a tremendous idea of how printing preferences have shifted over the years.  That is to say that, to a certain extent, you can judge when an image was printed by the particular balance of contrast and density that seems to shift through the decades as printing fashions (!) ebb and flow…

I’ve been a bit busy lately, hence not alot of posting, but I’m collecting things to show you all, so rest assured that I haven’t given up.

In the meantime, though, check out the work of my friends Carly Steinbrunn, Véronique Besnard, and Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine. And, more importantly, visit the page of the Le Garage print sale on Grégoire’s site – it’s to support the running costs of the Le Garage project, which is really shaping up to be great, so don’t forget to submit your book dummies, due May 31st!

So, I’m happy to announce a call for submissions for Le Garage, “an itinerant exhibition project born out of a common love for photography-related books and publications.”

In actual fact, Le Garage will be an exhibition of photobook dummies by both known and unknown photographers, held off-program at the opening week (10 days, actually) of this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. I’ll let you all check out the details on the website, but I will say that it promises to be alot of fun and good exposure too – Arles is always jam packed with photographers and photography lovers that week, and I can promise you that we’ll be putting together an exhibition that will attract them all (or at least the good ones)…

More details later as the project comes together.

I’ve got a big scanning job this week, so I’ll keep it short, but I just wanted to pass on the 3 images you find in this post.  They’re part of a larger archive of found photographs, collected here in Paris that are actually what I’m in the process of digitizing.  And I probably shouldn’t pass this on, but they’re just so cool.

I’m sure you all have seen plenty of mugshots, so this won’t be too revealing…  But check out the text on the back of the images (reproduced below each photograph – click for full size images).  It’s really fascinating.  I especially like the descriptions of tattoos, none of which are visible in the actual photographs, but reveal a world apart from that reproduced by photography.  My mind is going wild imagining into being what these tattoos could look like beneath the dark jackets and pin striped suits.

‘Women in bathing suit…

Or rather, archives that I’ve recently come across.

The University of Washington continues to post selections from their archives on Flickr – They’re mostly photos of leisure activities in the North West in the 10s, 20s, and 30s (with alot of skiing and winter sports), but there are definitely some real gems, like the photo featured above. It makes me miss Washington State, actually.

Also, the London School of Economics has a kind-of-wonderful Flickr set from the 80s thats worth a browse if you like nerds. [via Photography Prison]

Also via Photography Prison, there’s a really really wonderful archive of African American photographs from the 1900 Paris Exposition.  In addition, Pete Brook just posted a link to Hidden From History: Unknown New Orleanians with some phenomenally interesting mug shots… And the UK National Archives.

Gerhard Richter also happens to have online 783 sheets of Atlas, his archive of source material that was presented as a fascinating exhibition a few years ago.  I’m usually a bit dubious of collections whose supposed value is conferred upon them by the famous collector, but Atlas is a phenomenally interesting archive.

So here’s a question that I think gets at what is essential in photography – is photography fundamentally ‘different’ from other forms of representation or is the fact that there is a ‘photography world’ and, for example, this is a ‘photography blog’ just a unique consequence of historical and market forces?

I don’t mean to jump into the debate set off by the Paul Graham essay that recently made the rounds which is essentially arguing for greater photographic inclusion in the art economy. I mean to ask whether there is a reason why we’re all working in, arguing about, and obsessed by this one specific medium and not any other beyond the fact that we happen to find ourselves in it.

Is photography special?

See:
This ancient post
Christopher Rauschenburg on Concientious
Blake Andrews on La Pura Vida
Eyecurious’ take
And, like, the history of writings on photography. People seem to forget this, but Barthes’ and Sontag’s writings on photography were and are still important because their core arguments are that things represented in photography are fundamentally different than things represented in other medias. Does this still ring true, now, when photography is much less an exceptional machine made representation and more part of a general media landscape characterized mostly by its accessibility to anyone regardless of their tools and rather seamless distinctions between mediums?

Also, tangential but unrelated: When are we gonna see an iPad photobook? Will it still count as a photobook?

Also: iPad magazine aps.

Noko Jeans, ‘By Train to Pyongyang’

A brief update on the previous post – right after I published it, I came across a more photographically interesting gallery of North Korea photos taken on a business trip to Pyongyang.  There’s also a small photobook!

It’s short but interesting and brings to mind pictures of the eastern block right after it crumbled; work by Luc Delahaye, Lise Safarti, innumerable others, work that, to some extent, is still being done today.  Can you imagine the tidal wave of photographic coverage if the reclusive regime falls and access opens up to the country…  Tools like North Korea Uncovered, however, lead me to think that this time around coverage would be a bit different.  The former USSR was such an interesting subject because it was so… opaque to Westerners.  I suppose that will, to a certain extent be true in this hypothetical case, but things like the smuggled video cameras in Burma and the limited photographic work already being done in the DPRK make me think that all it would take to radically transform the story from a fingerpointing look-what-sorry-state-this-country-is-in to a much more nuanced and interesting view is a couple dozen digital cameras given to people who have likely never known that such tools even existed…

‘Tongil Street in Winter‘ by Kernbeisser

Via Photography Prison, I came across this interesting Flickr set of Pyongyang in winter by Kernbeisser (who has alot of other North Korea Photos, too) which launched me on this extended internet recollection of interesting things I’ve recently read on the reclusive North Korean regime. Yes, I know, none of this is strictly photo related, but, of course, photography is all about building relationships between otherwise unconnected subjects, so I think you’ll forgive me for this.

Due to the general prohibition on journalistic access to North Korea, the only real way to get a look at the country is via tourist photos, like the Pyongyang set, or via satellite photos, available to us on Google Earth.  If you’d really like to spend some time trying to figure out the country, the North Korea Uncovered add on is invaluable.  Pieced together from news reports and tales from defectors, it provides a map key to the country’s infrastructure, military installations, and the yawning divide between how the country’s tiny elite and the great mass of the population live. [Found via a fantastic On The Media story]

It’s also worth noting, at this point, the excellent VBS.tv 3-part series on North Korea, shot by Shane Smith.  The thing culminates at the Arirang Mass Games, a massively creepy demonstration of autocratic power. Definitely worth watching if you haven’t already seen it.

But the limited access provided to tourists in North Korea, like the tour that Smith took, is not the only diplomatic effort the regime engages in. Besides blackmailing foreign governments by returning kidnapped foreign citizens in return for visits by high profile politicians, North Korea has also opened a series of restaurants in places popular with South Korean Tourists…

But the best recent thing I’ve read on North Korea was a several page article in the always excellent Cabinet Magazine (whose most recent issue has a photo by Alessandra Sanguinetti on the cover, incidentally) on the kidnapping of Choe Eun-hui and her ex-husband Shin Sang-ok. Entitled “All Monsters Must Die,” by Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman, it tells the story of the couple’s kidnapping by the agents of Kim Jong Il and how the film obsessed dictator built a studio and forced them to create films intended to rival the best that South Korea had produced. Unfortunately, the article is not available online, but I was able to find a telling of the story by the BBC, though I assure you it’s worth tracking down a back issue of Cabinet to read all about it.

Michael Lundgren’s ‘Transfigurations

Laurence Vecten, who writes the wonderful LOZ blog, began a project a couple of months ago keeping track of every photobook she and her husband acquire, called One Year of Books. It’s a nice little compliment to LOZ itself, which is really minimal on text, and instead shows a small selection of a different photographers work every day.

One Year of Books also recently announced a book swap, a sort of online I’ll-trade-you-this-for-that. So if any of you have any photobooks that you have doubles of, or ones that you decided you didn’t like after you bought them, visit One Year of Books book swap post for details and pop Laurence an e-mail…

’4 x 2 + 4,’ from AAnonymes.org

I recently came across the blog AAnonymes – it’s all found photographs with a focus on the odd, accompanied by sometimes witty, sometimes mysterious titles.

Strictly speaking, it’s not actually a blog, but rather an ‘online exhibition’ by curator Romaric Tisserand. He’s showing 365 found photographs in 365 days, proposing a type of alternate reality in photographs. From his statement in English (available in the sidebar):

AAnonymes.org shows “abandoned” photographs, antiquities of a reality that has ceased to exist in its original state, images which, like every other photograph ever taken, have contributed to the creation of a photographically modified reality. The very images which Jean Baudrillard regarded as the prime instrument of the lack of reality, pictures of a contemporary world in which images are already pictures, in which everything has been fiction since Nicéphore Nièpce’s first heliograph…

Take a look at AAnonymes.org.

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Pete Brook (who occasionally comments here), over on Prison Photography, just ran part five of a series of posts (1, 2, 3, and 4) on photographers’ activities surrounding the death of Fabienne Cherisma in Port-Au-Prince on the 19th January, 2010.

I have nothing to add except quote Pete in his text of part 4:

I’d like to state that I have no agenda here, I am simply interested in constructing the scene in a wider context. Photographers don’t work in a vacuum and we must demand to turn their images inside out to understand the context in which the images were created.

The series is good and important.  Go read it.

UPDATE: Brook has continued with the series finally finishing, it seems, with part 12. Links to all below…

Part 1: Fabienne Cherisma
Part 2: More on Fabienne Cherisma
Part 3: Furthermore on Fabienne Cherisma
Part 4: Yet more on Fabienne Cherisma
Part 5: Interview with Edward Linsmier
Part 6: Interview with Jan Grarup
Part 7: Interview with Paul Hansen
Part 8: Interview with Michael Winiarski
Part 9: Interview with Nathan Weber
Part 10: Interview with James Oatway
Part 11: Interview with Nick Kozak
Part 12: Two Months On

Please take a moment to browse through – you’ll find that all of the old content is still here. Indeed, one of the motivations for redoing the site was to make the archive for our blog, On Shadow, more accessible and to integrate the blog and the main site more fully. You’ll also notice that we’ve made comments on the blog posts much more present, appearing directly on the front page of the blog so that readers may consult them and immediately see which posts have active discussions ongoing. All of this was done to pave the way for new book projects, which we’ll soon announce.

Anyways, we hope you like the new site – we’d love to hear any comments and feedback on the redesign at our e-mail address, info@12thpress.com. Please excuse the various small errors and problems with images – we’re working on fixing them all and should have everything up to par over the next week or so.

Enjoy!