Stephen Gill, from the series Coexistence, 2012. © Stephen Gill

As Berenice Abbott once noted, photography is “science’s child,” a familial relationship well illustrated by revisiting
the medium’s early decades. Historian Jennifer Tucker looks back into the nineteenth century, when photographic “first glimpses” of microbes, solar eclipses, or the surface of Mars had lives as both news items and entertaining spectacles,
and when the young medium of photography was itself still viewed as something of a technical marvel. Tucker points
out that in today’s atmosphere of image inundation “first glimpses”—if they still exist at all—make a less breathtaking impression. The images recently transmitted from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, for example, are uncannily similar to familiar photographs of the Earth’s deserts. Such comparisons of the terrestrial with the alien are investigated here by David Campany, who discusses photographs by an eclectic group—Man Ray, Frederick Sommer, and Sophie Ristelhueber, among others—that may cause viewers to wonder exactly what they are seeing. Curator Joel Smith examines an equally inscrutable group of images, by Katy Grannan, Frank Gohlke, Naoya Hatakeyama, and others, in his guide to making (and making sense of ) “photographs of nothing.”

While some artists have more or less intentionally confounded viewers, researchers in other realms of image making have used photographs to show us the world as it
is, in an attempt to come to a deeper understanding of the phenomena that surround us. Science historian Peter Galison and artist Trevor Paglen discuss the history of objectivity,
as well as how images—now digital, searchable, everywhere—may be shifting from being mere depictions to performing specific functions.

Whether obliquely sidling up to our attention or demanding it outright, one thing that photography has always done is reveal. Harold E. Edgerton, through his famous flash experiments, slowed time down to unveil what had once been “invisible” actions. Berenice Abbott, too, aimed to bring the strangeness and beauty of scientific subjects to the public—as with her renderings of interference patterns in light, or her illustration of static electricity, featured on this issue’s cover. Photography historian Kelley Wilder discusses Abbott’s work along with that of Edwin E. Jelley, a little-known research scientist at Kodak who was fascinated by the forms and structures of light. Jelley’s work paved the way for the commercially available color processes that would be taken up by artists such as Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, who experimented with color photograms in the 1930s. Moholy-Nagy’s images in turn
offer a departure point for Thomas Ruff’s latest body of work, also featured in this issue: photograms for the digital era, created with 3-D imaging software. German photographer Horst Ademeit was, by contrast, terrified of technology: his enigmatic and obsessive project, introduced here by curator Lynne Cooke, used the instant Polaroid form to document what he named “cold rays,” an unseen force he believed emanated from his apartment’s electrical sockets. While Ademeit’s fraught attentions were absorbed in an intensely insular world, other photographers train their lenses with equal fervor outward, toward the mysteries of the atmosphere and the celestial bodies. Lisa Oppenheim follows this impulse with her recent “lunagrams,” heliograms, and more, taking her cue from nineteenth-century astronomical imagery.

Whether investigations originate in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century, by using the latest technologies or by reviving older ones, the desire to lay bare the unknown is perpetual. Yet, whether the realm is art or science, photography—like any medium of investigation— may lead not to answers but to further questions: as Joel Smith observes here, photographs can “doubt as well as certify, negate as well as indicate, embody absence as well as substance.”

—The Editors

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #1 (Version 2), 2010. All works © Lisa Oppenheim and courtesy Harris Lieberman, New York, and The Approach, London.

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #3 (Version 2), 2010.

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #9 (Version 2), 2010.

Lisa Oppenheim, A monstrous column of roaring flame. Star Oil Co. Loucke No. 3 on fire since Aug. 7, 1913. Most disastrous fire in Caddo oil field and largest single well fire in history of U.S. of A. Daily loss of oil estimated at 30,000 barrels. 1913/2012 (Version V), 2012. From the series Smoke, 2011–12.

Lisa Oppenheim, Billowing. As we were driving up to Norfolk yesterday I saw the Enfield fire; where a Sony distribution centre sat ablaze by rioters was just pouring out smoke over the motorway. The sheer amount of smoke was quite surprising, and today smoke was still covering the motorway. I feel such despair at people who have taken to looting; so angry at the destruction people can cause. 2011/2012. (Version V), 2012. From the series Smoke, 2011–12.

For nearly a decade, Lisa Oppenheim has teased apart the individual steps of picture-making, wringing from the medium’s technical apparatus a surprisingly broad range of meanings. She is informed by the legacy of Conceptual art, but her most recent series, sampled in the following pages, reach back further in time for their inspiration. Time is itself a central focus of this work, which meditates on the various ways photography registers duration—the length of the exposure, the gap between a picture’s making and its viewing—and how our sense of it dilates in a photograph’s presence. This effort is in the service, the New York– and Berlin-based artist has said, of recovering the surprises offered by photography’s materials, and of dwelling in “the magic of the photographic process.” Through cool calculation, Oppenheim has devised an art of surprising affectiveness, equal parts romantic and rigorous.

The emotional resonance of Oppenheim’s works has often rested in her use of (quite literally) universal subjects. The sun and the moon—giver of light and the ultimate light reflector—feature regularly, from a 2006 slide projection in which the artist holds postcards of sunsets in front of the real thing to a two-channel 16mm film installation, made in 2008, that is based upon images of the Earth and the moon made the night of the Apollo mission’s first lunar landing. The moon recurred as the subject of a 2010 series of unique silver-toned photograms she dubbed Lunagrams. To make these works, Oppenheim borrowed from the archives of New York University mid-nineteenthcentury glass-plate negatives by John and Henry Draper depicting the moon. She made large-format copy negatives, placed them on photographic paper, then exposed them to the moon at the time of the lunar phase depicted in the original. Decades collapse as one image, made by an enthusiast whose work was as much science as art, begets another. A related series of Heliograms was made in 2011: she exposed a photograph of the sun originally taken on July 8, 1876, to sunlight at different times of day during each month that year. Irregular amounts of sunlight means not every work is equally exposed, and there are gaps in the series where Oppenheim’s obligations prevented her from capturing a scheduled image. The individual results once again warp our understanding of two distinct instants, but when seen in aggregate, the Heliograms also chart the passage of the artist’s days. These silvery and golden works possess an elemental allure—the metals themselves, the primitive processes used by the medium’s first exponents—but also acknowledge that copies are always already imperfect, and that life and time conspire to make them so.

Lisa Oppenheim, Passage of the moon over two hours, Arcachon, France, ca. 1870s/2012, April 11, 2012.

Oppenheim literalizes her attempt to translate the essence of earlier images in her 2011–12 series Smoke. There, she isolated details of smoke from a wide range of images of fire, then turned these semiabstract compositions into digital internegatives. Rather than use the light of an enlarger to expose these negatives, Oppenheim used the flames from a match, from a culinary torch, and from other sources to expose—and solarize—these images. From a 1913 oil-field explosion to World War II–era aerial surveillance to journalists’ images of the 2011 North London riots, the absent fires implied by the smoke have been made visible by altogether different flames. The resultant works, which look like polished-silver outtakes from Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, add a canny rumination on presence and absence to Oppenheim’s usual investigation of temporality. As with all her recent works, the Smoke series resides in interstitial spaces: between two images separated by time and place; between materialist and conceptual approaches to the medium; between intellect and emotion. In these seams Oppenheim finds a locus of mystery.

Top row: Lisa Oppenheim, Heliograms, July 8th, 1876/December 8th, 2011, 2011. Middle row: Lisa Oppenheim, Heliograms, July 8th, 1876/December 14th, 2011, 2011. Bottom row: Heliograms, July 8th, 1876, December 21st, 2011, 2011.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

Martin Parr Beach Party and Portrait Shoot. Photograph by Sophie Finkelstein.

On Saturday, May 18, Aperture presented an all-day portrait shoot and beach party with the one and only Martin Parr, in conjunction with the release of the beach-bag-size edition of his monograph Life’s a Beach and the related exhibition at Aperture Gallery. Aperture patrons and the public joined us to have beach-themed portraits snapped by Parr, accompanied by friends, family, and even cherished pets. Click through the slideshow above to see a selection of highlights from the event.

This event was made possible with support from Canon U.S.A., Inc., Gosling’s Rum, and Mondrian Soho. Music by Milo McBride. Event photography by Sophie Finkelstein.

—

Life's a Beach Limited Edition Towel

$75.00

Life's a Beach

$25.00

Life's a Beach

$300.00

Anne Hardy, Notations (2012). All images © Anne Hardy and courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Anne Hardy, Script (2012).

Anne Hardy, Two Joined Fields—Field (/\) and Field (decagon) (2013).

Anne Hardy, Fieldwork (materials) (2013). Interior view.

Installation view of Anne Hardy, Maureen Paley, London, 2013. From left: Fieldwork (materials) (2013); Shelf (2013); and Script (2012).

Brian Sholis: For years you’ve created objects and built environments to photograph, yet this is one of the first times you’ve allowed exhibition viewers to have access to these materials and spaces. Can you speak about the privacy of the studio and the decision to exhibit things that had otherwise gone unseen by the public?

Anne Hardy: In 2011 I was an artist-in-residence at the Camden Arts Centre. Though private, the studio itself felt like a gallery, and sits alongside the venue’s gallery spaces. My ambition for the residency was to build one of the “sets” I construct for my photos, but also to have the chance to evaluate one of these structures outside the context of my own studio, and to invite others to see it as well. In a way, the time at Camden was transitional for me, and allowed me to connect two environments that had previously been separate in my practice—the private space of the studio and the public space of the exhibition. I had become increasingly interested in the structures I was building in order to realize my images, and wanted to think about what further role—if any—they might play in my work, or if they (or something like them) might in fact be the work. They have physical and material qualities, and allow for the viewer’s movement through them, that I cannot replicate with photographs.

Working in the gallery for a month before this exhibition felt a bit like a second residency, but with the added clarity of the space being given over to an exhibition at the end. In this exhibition there are three sculptural spaces—rooms you can enter that have not been used to make the photographs that they are exhibited alongside. They are independent sculptures, built specifically to fit the space in a particular way. For example, it’s important to me that you do not see the doors of two of them as you walk into the gallery, but must walk around them in order to access their interiors.

BJS: So these constructions are no longer “process materials.”

AH: Well, last year, as I was preparing for my show at the Secession in Vienna and its accompanying book, I began to think about how I could open up other ways into my work without presenting work-in-progress studio shots. The small photograph Shelf (2013) is a product of this. It’s one of several smaller images meant to act as a detail without actually being a detail of any particular work—it’s like a newly made potential detail. The two larger photographs in the show at Maureen Paley also use materials from my working process in new ways.

Anne Hardy, Field (decagon) (2013). Interior view.

It’s exciting to finally exhibit physical spaces that people can enter. I have thought about it for a long time, and wanted to do it only at a point when I felt they would not be seen as subsidiary to the images. I’m happy to see the photographs and the structures face one another equally and hold their own ground. I now feel like I can explore the relationships between environments, images, and objects.

BJS: Was your years-long desire to find a way to achieve this balance intrinsic to your studio practice? Or was it fostered by the relationship between images and objects in the culture at large? Or both?

AH: I am interested in the indeterminate state I perceive in cast-off materials and objects—in rubbish. Something that appears unimportant can become significant and meaningful for an individual who chooses to invest time with it. I think these things can create a space for the imagination that is quite free. I want this quality to be intrinsic to the materials I use in my work, and in the relationship between physical spaces and the images. What previously was captured by single images can now, I hope, open out across an entire exhibition of works.

BJS: How does the fact that your photographs nearly always depict a shallow space, bounded at the back by a wall, play into this? Are you attempting to create an “inhabitable” space for this free play of thought?

AH: Yes, in recent images such as Rift, Script, and Notation I really concentrated on making image-spaces that are less interpretable, that are flatter or more confusing in their spatial layout, in order to open up how the image could be read. I want viewing these works to be in part about the process of reading them, coming to understand them.

Anne Hardy, Shelf, 2013.

BJS: And is making an image as much about the “process of reading” as about the actual space depicted a way of creating a metaphorical link between the construction of space and the “construction” of a self? Put more simply, to what extent are the spaces you photograph meant to be psychologically charged?

AH: I hope that the process of comprehending the new photographs is less about resolving a depiction of a particular kind of place, in which you say “Oh, this reminds me of that” and in so doing distance yourself from it. Instead I hope the ambiguity will cause viewers to be more aware of what they are projecting onto the image. The sculptural works take this one step further by involving you physically with the work—you can literally step into them.

I want the psychological charge of the work to come from this combination of myself, the viewer, and the imagined potential of these spaces and objects.

Photo by @heathersten on Instagram

We recently asked Aperture readers to post portraits of themselves with the Spring 2013 relaunch issue, “Hello, Photography,” on Instagram with the tag #myaperturemag. We sorted through dozens of great entries (see a slideshow, including the four runners-up, below) and chose the photo above, submitted by @heathersten, as the winner. For submitting the winning photo, @heathersten will receive a free one-year subscription to Aperture magazine and $125.00 to spend at the Aperture Gallery and Bookstore in New York or online.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @aperturefnd, and remember to check our Instagram feed regularly for future contests.

Also, stay tuned for Aperture magazine‘s Summer 2013 Issue, “Curiosity,” available this month on newsstands and online.

Photograph by @scriptorsum on Instagram

"(After Jeff Wall)" Photography by @clutterandvine on Instagram

Photo by @acmillerphoto on Instagram

Photograph by @ walkyourcamera on Instagram

Photograph by @heathersten on Instagram

Description:
For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of magazine photography, through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the medium, from photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, focusing primarily on the past fifteen years, long-time New York Times Magazine Photo Editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative, creative processes that have made this magazine the leading venue for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media.

The exhibition is comprised of ten individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that has been presented in the pages of the Magazine. The featured projects mirror the Magazine‘s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage and portraiture as well as fine art photography.

Kuwait Oil Fields, Sebastião Salgado; Dream House, Gregory Crewdson; Assignment: Times Square, featuring Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, and Larry Towell; Olympic Portraiture, Ryan McGinley; Korengal Valley Afghanistan, Lynsey Addario; A Response to 9/11, featuring Andres Serrano and Steve McCurry; Great Performers, featuring Hellen van Meene and Rineke Dijkstra; Fashion Crossovers, featuring Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, and Jeff Koons; Where the Protons Will Play, Simon Norfolk; Conflict Photography, Paolo Pellegrin.

The exhibition also includes contextualizing reading material for all the projects on exhibit, and an extensive series of selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty years of the Magazine.

Curated by Kathy Ryan and Lesley A. Martin.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Video from Palau Robert, Barcelona, On view: September 20, 2012–December 2, 2012
 

Contents:
The exhibition consists of 126 works by thirty-five artists spread over ten modules. Contextual material includes contact sheets, snapshots, six video works, personal correspondence, tear sheets and original magazines that offer further insight into the creative process. Artists are: Lynsey Addario, David Armstrong, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roger Ballen, Lillian Bassman, Chuck Close, Fred Conrad, Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Angel Franco, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Edward Keating, Jeff Koons, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Steve McCurry, Ryan McGinley, Jeff Mermelstein, Abelardo Morell, Simon Norfolk, Michael O’Neil, Paolo Pellegrin, Jack Pierson, Sebastião Salgado, Alfred Seiland, Nancy Seisel, Andres Serrano, Malick Sidibé, Larry Towell, Lars Tunbjörk, Hellen van Meene.

Book:
The New York Times Magazine Photographs
Edited by Kathy Ryan
Hardcover with jacket
11 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.
448 pages
500 4-color images

Participation Fee:
Please call Annette Booth at (212) 946-7128.
$25,000 for an 8-week showing. The host venue is responsible for pro-rated shipping and insurance.

Availability:
The exhibition is available through 2015.

Current Venue List:

• Les Rencontres d’Arles
  Église de Sainte-Anne, Arles, France
  Monday, July 4 – Sunday, September 4, 2011
• Foam
  Keizersgracht 609 Amsterdam, Netherlands
  Thursday, March 22 – Thursday, May 31, 2012
• Palau Robert
  Passeig de Gràcia, 107, Barcelona, Spain
  Thursday, September 20 – Sunday, December 2, 2012
• Centro de Extensión, Universidad Católica de Chile
  Alameda 340, Santiago, Chile
  Monday, April 15 – Friday, May 31, 2013
• Fotofestiwal Lodz
  Lodz, Poland
  The New York Times Magazine Tearsheets
  Thursday, June 6 – Tuesday, June 25, 2013
• MOCA Jacksonville
  333 North Laura Street
  Jacksonville, FL 32202
  Saturday, April 26 – Sunday, August 24, 2014
• Hunter Museum of American Art
  10 Bluff View Avenue, Chattanooga, TN
  Monday, November 24, 2014 – Sunday, March 29, 2015

Description:
For over thirty years, the weekly New York Times Magazine has shaped the possibilities of magazine photography, through its commissioning and publishing of photographers’ work across the spectrum of the medium, from photojournalism to fashion photography and portraiture. In this exhibition, focusing primarily on the past fifteen years, long-time New York Times Magazine Photo Editor Kathy Ryan provides a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative, creative processes that have made this magazine the leading venue for photographic storytelling within contemporary news media.

The exhibition is comprised of ten individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that has been presented in the pages of the Magazine. The featured projects mirror the Magazine‘s eclecticism, presenting seminal examples of reportage and portraiture as well as fine art photography.

Kuwait Oil Fields, Sebastião Salgado; Dream House, Gregory Crewdson; Assignment: Times Square, featuring Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, and Larry Towell; Olympic Portraiture, Ryan McGinley; Korengal Valley Afghanistan, Lynsey Addario; A Response to 9/11, featuring Andres Serrano and Steve McCurry; Great Performers, featuring Hellen van Meene and Rineke Dijkstra; Fashion Crossovers, featuring Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, and Jeff Koons; Where the Protons Will Play, Simon Norfolk; Conflict Photography, Paolo Pellegrin.

The exhibition also includes contextualizing reading material for all the projects on exhibit, and an extensive series of selected tearsheets and covers from the last thirty years of the Magazine.

Curated by Kathy Ryan and Lesley A. Martin.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Video from Palau Robert, Barcelona, On view: September 20, 2012–December 2, 2012
 

Contents:
The exhibition consists of 126 works by thirty-five artists spread over ten modules. Contextual material includes contact sheets, snapshots, six video works, personal correspondence, tear sheets and original magazines that offer further insight into the creative process. Artists are: Lynsey Addario, David Armstrong, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roger Ballen, Lillian Bassman, Chuck Close, Fred Conrad, Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Angel Franco, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Edward Keating, Jeff Koons, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Steve McCurry, Ryan McGinley, Jeff Mermelstein, Abelardo Morell, Simon Norfolk, Michael O’Neil, Paolo Pellegrin, Jack Pierson, Sebastião Salgado, Alfred Seiland, Nancy Seisel, Andres Serrano, Malick Sidibé, Larry Towell, Lars Tunbjörk, Hellen van Meene.

Book:
The New York Times Magazine Photographs
Edited by Kathy Ryan
Hardcover with jacket
11 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.
448 pages
500 4-color images

Participation Fee:
Please call Annette Booth at (212) 946-7128.
$25,000 for an 8-week showing. The host venue is responsible for pro-rated shipping and insurance.

Availability:
The exhibition is available through 2015.

Current Venue List:

• Les Rencontres d’Arles
  Église de Sainte-Anne, Arles, France
  Monday, July 4 – Sunday, September 4, 2011
• Foam
  Keizersgracht 609 Amsterdam, Netherlands
  Thursday, March 22 – Thursday, May 31, 2012
• Palau Robert
  Passeig de Gràcia, 107, Barcelona, Spain
  Thursday, September 20 – Sunday, December 2, 2012
• Centro de Extensión, Universidad Católica de Chile
  Alameda 340, Santiago, Chile
  Monday, April 15 – Friday, May 31, 2013
• Fotofestiwal Lodz
  Lodz, Poland
  The New York Times Magazine Tearsheets
  Thursday, June 6 – Tuesday, June 25, 2013
• MOCA Jacksonville
  333 North Laura Street
  Jacksonville, FL 32202
  Saturday, April 26 – Sunday, August 24, 2014
• Hunter Museum of American Art
  10 Bluff View Avenue, Chattanooga, TN
  Monday, November 24, 2014 – Sunday, March 29, 2015

Cuny Janssen
Yoshino
Snoeck Verlagesgesellschaft mbH
Cologne, Germany, 2013
Designed by -SYB-
18 ¼ x 13 ¾ in. (46.3 x 34.8 cm)
54 pages
19 color photographs
Hardcover
snoeck.de

Cuny Janssen’s photographs of the sacred and beautiful Japanese mountain of Yoshino make you feel like you’re there. Her camera directs your eye to the blossoms and branches, streams and forest floors. In one image you float, ghost-like, above the other tourists. She invites us
to imagine we are sharing these views with the ancient writers whose texts are interspersed between Janssen’s images. In combination with the texts, Janssen’s photographs become an enraptured revisiting of pre-photographic scenes of Yoshino.

Yoshino’s cover is a Sharpie-pen sketch of woodland; its swaying trunks and entwined limbs are like animist spirits. The book begins with traditional Japanese texts (translated
by Jos Vos, who also contributes an essay), which fan out over five widening pages. Janssen’s images don’t appear to be in any seasonal order; rather, they are a series of vivid stills that fix you in their moment of beauty, and are interleaved with writing praising the same occasion.

The book form and design brilliantly serves to narrate the experience of Yoshino. Its size is like a large sketch book, such as you’d take to draw outdoor scenes. Holding this book and turning through its pages is an intimate experience, and the smaller pages of poetry and prose about Yoshino—tipped in on a different paper stock cut to varying sizes—propel the reader along into each sequence of Janssen’s images. I experience the texts between the photographs like a drama’s chorus, exhortatory voices that punctuate longer, more contemplative passages and spur on this storybook. Janssen matches the different tones of the writings with the forms in the photographs—the bare rectitude of the deciduous trees’ trunks is contrasted with the playful, exotic, splayed sprays of kerria, with cherry-tree blossoms, and with the red-gold-green badges of maples. Her photographs convey a sense of personality in nature—particularly in the later images, where Yoshino’s natural glories butt up against human structures. You start to feel that some of the trees—the cherry trees at the back of the house and in the Shinto cemetery, the bright persimmon in the vegetable patch—are indeed spirits. By photographing them, Janssen makes them active, watchful participants in her scenes of Yoshino.

Vos’s essay describes a pilgrimage to Yoshino in steamy August and an arduous climb through the hills in the poets’ footsteps. Through it runs a nice thread about the fallibility 
of memory as it relates to place. This is underscored by two small, lonely black-and-white photos, which remind me of the depopulated photographs in W. G. Sebald’s books and follow glumly after Janssen’s glorious portraits of nature. Yet Vos and Janssen have created a harmonious book, one that expresses the enduring desire to share some collected memories of Yoshino, a place of pilgrimage, retreat, and return. As Vos writes: “It is as Tanikazaki once said: you can go and party under the cherry blossoms in a Tokyo park, but enjoying the same kind of blossoms at Yoshino, surrounded by spirits of the past, is a totally different thing.”

Or you can just get the book.

Colin Greenwood plays bass guitar with the English group Radiohead. He enjoys photographing the other band members on tour, and is interested in the history of photography. He has recently come back from working with the South Africa–based Children’s Radio Foundation and enjoyed documenting his trip on crf.waste.uk.com.

We’re delighted to bring you the fourth issue of The PhotoBook Review. Many thanks for your continued interest if you are joining us again—and if this is your first time to pick up an issue of PBR, cheers and welcome. The PhotoBook Review 004 launches at the Los Angeles edition of Paris Photo, and is available once again to Aperture magazine subscribers, at the Aperture gallery, and at the Milan Image Art Fair, extending our audience to the west coast and across the Atlantic.

In addition to launching this issue together at the Paramount Studios, Paris Photo is also our intrepid partner in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Prize, the second edition of which we are pleased to announce will be open for entries May 6. Open to self-published, boutique- and indie-published, and mega publisher–published books, we look forward to taking another dip in the river of creativity that is photobook publishing now. Check out the PhotoBook Prize website (aperture.org/photobookawards) for more details on how and when to enter.

Finally, a big thanks to Charlotte Cotton for taking the helm of this issue. For each volume of PBR
 we invite a colleague who has given the photobook serious consideration to help shape the issue and to tap contributors for inclusion. Miss Cotton brings to us the combined perspective of an author and curator—one who has written her own best-selling book, contributed to a slew of other people’s books, and, perhaps most radically, in Words Without Pictures, reformulated the idea of and process by which books come into being. A collection of talks, conversations, essays, and responses to those essays, Words Without Pictures was originally published online; subsequently appeared in a print-on-demand edition from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and is now available as an Aperture/LACMA copublication. It functioned, in essence, as a community-sourced snapshot of the state of photography during a critical moment of transition. In our first issue of this journal, we outlined the importance of community to The PhotoBook Review’s philosophy, acknowledging that “those of us who care about the photobook come to the table with a vested interest.” In this issue, Cotton injects an ontologically broad and digitally grounded set of definitions to the idea of the photobook and its community, expand
ing the set of concerns to include photography that lives not just on the printed page of a book, but also on record covers, in ebooks, and in magazines. Other additive ingredients are the contributions of aficionados who are knowledgable but not specialists—musicians Kieran Hebden and Colin Greenwood, magazine editor Penny Martin, and design critic Emily King—in addition to an international coterie 
of deeply immersed advisors and photobook veterans such as Jeffrey Fraenkel, Richard Misrach, and others. Our thanks, as always, for the generous responses of all involved. In this issue, we’re treated to a perspective on community as an evolving delivery system for networked knowledge that is both personal and observant. Most critically, it is built on a set of recommendations that don’t just reaffirm what we already know, but open the doors to ideas we’ve yet to encounter.

—Lesley A. Martin
Publisher, The PhotoBook Review

Paul Kooiker
Heaven
Van Zoetendaal
Amsterdam, 2012
Designed by Willem van Zoetendaal
13 ⅜ x 9 ½ in. (34 x 24 cm)
176 pages
494 photographs
Hardcover
vanzoetendaal.com

Paul Kooiker is best known for his startling and singular photographs of voluptuous female forms, yet his individual images are incomprehensible except as a part that cumulatively make up his psychologically charged oeuvre. Kooiker’s photographs do not allow for comfortable looking, instead demonstrating his fascination with the game of perception. He uses a visual language that is both dry and delicate, and that pushes at the limits of the unnerving, forcing us to keep our guard up and making us acknowledge our act of looking at these women’s bodies.

Kooiker’s work continues themes explored frequently throughout the history of representation: the relationship of the artist and the model, between the subject and the object of representation. Voyeurism is an ineluctable constant in his work, but it seems as if an explicit sexuality has been (somewhat surprisingly) kept away from his images. Furthermore, he manages to endow the female bodies of his models with a rotund material quality that goes beyond the merely corporeal, and is in line with artists such as Carlo Mollino or Boris Mikhailov.

In Heaven, his most recent publication, the author invites us to consider personal imagery gathered during the last twelve years through a selection of almost five hundred Polaroids that span multiple genres. From his most intimate photographs to the preparatory works created during studio sessions, from landscapes to street photography, these images always convey the fresh and direct style that results from the mastery of a tool that is at the service of his needs. In a sense, he shares with us his creative process when it is still unfinished. It seems that each step of the decision-making process is shared with his audience—as if we are voyeurs peering in upon the process of a voyeur.

The complex and, apparently, random narrative structure is the most prominent feature of this photobook, which is conceived as a journal that records Kooiker’s anxieties and obsessions in the course of everyday life. Notwithstanding the personal nature of this work, it is important to point out the impeccable editorial production of this title. Wise choices as to the format, materials, design, and printing strengthen Kooiker’s project and denote the close and prolific relationship he maintains with his editor, Willem van Zoetendaal, with whom he has published the majority of his books. The rhythm, the typology, and the number of images per page change through the book in a manner that seems to follow the author’s impulses. Throughout, Kooiker adheres to the grid, a very demanding element in terms of layout, in an exercise of Cartesian rationalism that counterbalances the personal nature of the imagery. Added to this is the disquieting presence of blank space, used as a narrative element that allows us to perceive, over and over again, the idea of the ellipsis—that is to say, what is missing, what is left out.

Iñaki Domingo is photographer and photo editor. He is a founding member of the NOPHOTO collective and his photographic works are represented by Ines Barrenechea Gallery. He is co-editor of the blog 30y3.com, which specializes in Spanish contemporary photography, and he is editorial coordinator at Ivorypress publishing house, where he is the photo editor of C Photo.