Judging by the number of new photography books on the shelves this year, there`s no recession on Publishers Row. The number of books seems greater than last year and so do the prices. Other trends: more and more color, including photojournalism (newspapers are gradually converting to all-color darkrooms); and more male nudes (whether it`s the Mapplethorpe effect or fin de siecle decadence is anyone`s guess).
The unusual family album is another trend this year, in books by Sally Mann and Larry Sultan. Mann`s Immediate Family (Aperture, $35) is this year`s most controversial book. It is a striking collection of pictures of her young son and two daughters that is embarrassingly intimate but possessed of unusual power and grace. Nothing seems too private for Mann`s camera. In about half the pictures, the children are nude; bedwetting and bloody noses are prominently displayed in others.
Is Mann exploiting her own children or is this some kind of inspired collaboration? Edward Steichen`s 1955 ”Family of Man” exhibition offered one kind of fiction, this Family of Mann offers another, and if this one is more disturbing, it may be because the pictures tap something primal in the viewer. Meanwhile debate will swirl around these haunting pictures. Highly recommended.
Larry Sultan`s Pictures From Home (Abrams, $39.95) is the work of a photographer who distrusts the power of photographs, particularly the ones we carefully file away in family albums. Sultan`s book might be described as a deconstruction of the family album, but that sounds cold and academic. Despite the extensive critical apparatus surrounding this project, Sultan has a human story to tell, and he tells it so honestly that a reader is finally won over. ”Pictures From Home” is just that: snapshots, stills from home movies, pictures of his father from old corporate reports and Sultan`s own pictures taken during the past 10 years. What makes this book compelling is that it is both a narrative (Everyman`s Family) and a critique of that Official Version at the same time.
Is it the real story of Irving and Jean Sultan? Certainly not; there is no one true story. But it is a more interesting fiction than most families tell.
Evidence, by Luc Sante (Farrar Straus Giroux, $40, $16 paper), is that rarest of objects: a brilliant original. Sante ”takes” photographs, but in a different way. He takes them from old file cabinets, in this case, from the files of the New York Police Department, specifically photographs of homicides between 1914 and 1918. In Sante`s hands, these homely pictures become objects of aesthetic, forensic, historical and philosophical inquiry.
Who were the people in these pictures? How did they live? Why did they die? Can we ferret out the truth from these (or, for that matter, from any)
pictures? Matters of life and death, theirs and ours, are the real subject of Sante`s elegant, witty speculations. Don`t miss this one: You`ve never seen its like before.
The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963 (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $75) is an attempt to give definition to a group of 16 photographers whose work shares certain characteristics, the most notable being an affinity for the aesthetic of the film noir. To advance her thesis, Jane Livingston, formerly the chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery, has wedded the monograph and the coffee-table book. Her work begins with a lavish and large-scale presentation of photographs (allowing the work to speak first), and follows it with a long essay that searches out the influences on these photographers and their influences upon each other. The layout of the book and the quality of the reproductions admirably capture the pictures` muddy, moody, kinetic quality.
Several of this year`s books fall into the ”visitor with a camera”
category, in which an inquisitive photographer attempts to capture the essence of a place or a people. This year, the visitors seem particularly interested in cultures in transition.
The Russian Heart: Days of Crisis and Hope (Aperture, $40) is traditional photojournalism by David C. Turnley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, who spent two months touring the Soviet Union before its dissolution. His book is a portrait of the commonplace (lovers flirting, neighbors mourning, children waiting for their fathers after work) and the extraordinary (the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August of 1991). Turnley has a subtle and compassionate eye, but this necessarily remains an outsider`s view.
Egyptian Time (Doubleday, $60) is also a work by an outsider, but Robert Lyons` pictures are elliptical: they suggest rather than explain, and seek to capture essences, not events. The title emphasizes the monumental and the timeless in Egyptian life, and Lyons` pictures concentrate on the long, slow process of change that is gradually overtaking the people of the desert. There is nothing easy or obvious in these images, no simple juxtapositions, no cliches to mask the truth, which makes the slow study of these rich and complicated pictures all the more rewarding.
Joel Sternfeld explores a similar process of change in Campagna Romana:
The Countryside of Ancient Rome (Knopf, $60). The landscape that captivated Poussin, Lorrain and Thomas Cole is home now to condominiums, blacktop highways and water parks instead of villas and aqueducts, as Sternfeld shows us in this collection of large, handsome plates. Many of his pictures are suffused by a rich, golden, Italian light that he uses to compose his elegy-for a rich past that is largely ignored, for a present that too often despoils as it displaces.
Leo Rubinfien possesses a different point of view, neither outsider nor insider. A Map of the East (Godine, $40) is a subtle, personal, somewhat enigmatic tour of Asia conducted by a Westerner who lived in Tokyo as a child. Rubinfien`s eye defies categorizing. His pictures are neither journalistic nor picturesque, just as his book is neither guide nor map nor travelogue. If it is ”about” anything, it is the gradual insinuation of Western ways in Asia, but that is an oversimplification of this collection of original pictures.
One of the delightful surprises of the year is The Jazz People of New Orleans (Pantheon, $50), which contains more than 90 of Lee Friedlander`s photographs, taken between 1957 and 1974. Jazz and Friedlander seem perfectly mated: both employ freewheeling, improvisatory styles that mask their art. Invaluable for its portraits of people and their places, and the way it has been organized, the book is also an excellent guide to the increasingly complex structure of Friedlander`s pictures. A Whitney Balliet reminiscence of New Orleans concludes the book on just the right note.
Ernst Haas: In Black and White (Bulfinch, $55) broadens our understanding of a photographer known primarily for his work in color. Jim Hughes and Haas` son, Alexander, have selected some 150 photographs (about half of them unpublished before) from an immense archive and grouped them into brief essays on postwar Vienna and London, New York in the 1950s, the American Southwest and portraits of the famous. If this fine book has one weakness it is that it should be two or three times its size.
Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Random House, $65) is a collection of famous pictures from the files of the Magnum agency, with a cobbled-together benediction on fame and physiognomy by John Updike. There is nothing new here, unless it is Magnum`s determination to repackage its past one more time. From the same publisher, Mapplethorpe ($125) bills itself as the definitive Robert Mapplethorpe collection. Weighing approximately seven pounds, it is the size of a small tombstone, which seems fitting, because as much as any other object, this book marks the death of the `80s.
