It Might Get Loud : Duncan / Channon SF

When SF advertising agency Duncan Channon commissioned us to create a group portrait of their team for their forthcoming feature story in CA, we left the meeting a little confused.

Should we get risers for people to stand on? How are we going to get everyone to smile? Oh...I have an idea: let's get the really crazy people up front...can we do that?

In the end, the agency wasn't really able to tell me what this experience would be like, and I was totally unprepared to address what we'd find. Let's just say it was more of a large scale collaborative performance art piece than an executed photograph really. It felt like creativity, like live performance in the most immediate way. And in the end we all were in awe of our epic creation. Art direction by Anne Elisco-Lemme and retouching by Faye Champlin.

See the image in all it's splendor HERE and see it in context in this month's Communication Arts magazine.

Photographs Not Taken / Sneak Peek

A preview copy of Photographs Not Taken, the collection of essays edited by Will Steacy and published by Daylight came in the mail the other day. It does not disappoint....this collection is wonderful.

My essay is essentially boring to me...I lived it, there is no surprise ending of course. But I'm wedged in the Roger Ballen, Juliana Beasley, Elinor Carucci section and couldn't be more flattered.

Pre-order this book from Daylight HERE.

It's Coming...

Photographs Not Taken is a collection of photographers' essays about failed attempts to make a picture.

Editor Will Steacy asked each photographer to abandon the conventional tools needed to make a photograph--camera, lens, film--and instead make a photograph using words, to capture the image (and its attendant memories) that never made it through the lens. In each essay, the photograph has been stripped down to its barest and most primitive form: the idea behind it. This collection provides a unique and original interpretation of the experience of photographing, and allows the reader into a world rarely seen: the image making process itself.

Photographs Not Taken features contributions by: Peter Van Agtmael, Dave Anderson, Timothy Archibald, Roger Ballen, Thomas Bangsted, Juliana Beasley, Nina Berman, Elinor Carucci, Kelli Connell, Paul D'Amato, Tim Davis, KayLynn Deveney, Doug Dubois, Rian Dundon, Amy Elkins, Jim Goldberg, Emmet Gowin, Gregory Halpern, Tim Hetherington, Todd Hido, Rob Hornstra, Eirik Johnson, Chris Jordan, Nadav Kander, Ed Kashi, Misty Keasler, Lisa Kereszi, Erika Larsen, Shane Lavalette, Deana Lawson, Joshua Lutz, David Maisel, Mary Ellen Mark, Laura McPhee, Michael Meads, Andrew Moore, Richard Mosse, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Laurel Nakadate, Ed Panar, Christian Patterson, Andrew Phelps, Sylvia Plachy, Mark Power, Peter Riesett, Simon Roberts, Joseph Rodriguez, Stefan Ruiz, Matt Salacuse, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Aaron Schuman, Jamel Shabazz, Alec Soth, Amy Stein, and others.

BUY HERE.

American Photography 27

American Photography 27, bigger than any phone book if you all still know what those things look like, came in the mail the other day.

Happy to see ECHO, as well as so much fascinating stuff, too much really to do justice to. Here are some great spreads I grabbed from Peggy Sirota, Tim Flach, Tony Fouhse, Michael Lewis and Balazs Gardi.

Best Photo Books Of 2011

Oh...I almost forgot. It's January 2nd and everyone has come out with their lists of the best photo books of the year...from every different angle and every different author. Here, we live very simply: we choose one book. This year...we chose two.

Cruising by Chad States and Low Life by Scot Sothern.

A book about marriage, secrets, parenting and giving voice to the voiceless, Sothern's book feels a bit like Studs Terkel, but the person confessing this time is the author. Shot between 1986 and 1990 but blown into the publishing stratosophere in 2011. You'll never forget where you were the first time you dug into Sothern's story. I already wrote about it HERE. Buy it HERE.

Cruising by Chad States first came to my attention as a self published Blurb book. Next thing I know it's out via powerHouse and is stately and beautiful. The publisher for once describes the book better than anyone with the following intro:

Sit in your car in your car and wait or take a walk through the trees.

“Cruising” has always been a part of gay culture; the word itself is a code, innocuous to outsiders, but representing an incognito hunt for sexual partners to those in the know. Over the years, men with particular desires found spaces—certain parks, public restrooms, and roadside wooded groves—out of sight and yet in plain view, where they could meet, and with the use of silent signals and cues, pair off for intimate encounters. It is these spots, nationwide, and the men making use of them, that Chad States photographs in Cruising.

Buy CRUISING by Chad States HERE.

 

Royalty Time Machine

Got a strange thrill the other day when I got word from Process that there were royalties headed my way from my book Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews. In this day when artists are paying greatly to have their monographs published, this simple note and check from an esoteric book seemed like something from another era.

I had long written off that project as something that did many things to define me and alter the shape of my career, but never really was a publishing success story. I cherished the collaboration with the publisher Process / Daniel 13, and did feel bad that they didn't have the home run on their hands that we all had hoped for. But together, we did makes something we all thought was special.

See the book/buy the book Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews HERE.

BLACK FRIDAY SALE

Buy ECHOLILIA / Sometimes I wonder, the award winning book that has been celebrated in more places than we can enumerate and traveled to more countries than we could ever hope to visit.

Eli and I sign every book. 

We both write in cursive.

We are open 24/7 during this holiday season.

Now available via Photo Eye and directly from us as well.

Buy it HERE.

Photographer Slugging Nazi With Camera

Was enjoying Tony's blog DROOL last night and could not resist blantantly ripping off, sharing the wonder of these photo literate comics created between July 1944 and 1946. The goal was to capitalize on kids interest in the growing hobby of photography, published by The U.S. Camera Publishing Company.

Any kid would love to see a girl braining a Nazi with an SLR, but I don't think even the most intense photo nerd would savor a comic version of the life of Matthew Brady or William Fox Talbot? Gimme the Riddler or something....geez....but there it is, part of history.

See the rest of this collection HERE.

What Is Going On In Atlanta?

So...what exactly are we doing in Atlanta? Isn't it a big Atlanta Celebrates Photography month? Is it true you are being tried for art crimes or some ethical violation? Well...yes and no...here is the deal:

Brian McGrath Davis, a grad student at Emory University approached me in the late spring about putting together a series of events at Emory based around my book/project ECHOLILIA/Sometimes I wonder, with both Eli and I in attendance.

Over the course of the summer we put together an expanded ECHOLILIA installation and a series of talks co-sponsored by ACP, Emory School of Medicine, and the Emory Center for Ethics. We are doing a bunch of stuff with various departments, but the two events open to the public are as follows:

A Conversation with Timothy Archibald
Thursday, October 27th at 6:00pm / Center for Ethics Commons, Room 102
Moderated by Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, with introductory remarks by Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, Director of Center for Ethics and Dr. Ami Klin, Director of Marcus Autism Center.

Timothy Archibald / ECHOLILIA
Friday, October 28th at 7:00pm / Emory University School of Medicine, Room 110
Exhibit Opening, Artist Talk, and Reception

Read more about the event HERE.
ECHOLILIA for sale HERE.

Sex Machine Time Travel

Tom Griggs of Fototazo asked me to write an essay about an image last week and suggested this image from 2004 when I was so wrapped up in the project that became Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews. It really had been a long time since I thought about that world...and really I had to kind of think back, collect my thoughts and travel back to get into the mind set of that project.

In this internet hungry time, where there are so many photo blogs, so much of an internet community in our photographic world, this Sex Machine project suddenly has enjoyed a rebirth. A few months back Russian Esquire assembled a web gallery of the story that they originally and bravely published back in 2006. Then it got super busy when popular site Design You Trust published a big book excerpt in August, with words and images, that really delivered the vibe of the project. At first I didn't know how I felt about DYT laying it all out like that...but realized this project is meant to be shared, the wonderful book published by Process is meant to be celebrated, so yes...bring this to a new audience.

For me, I took the work off of my commercial site years ago. Images of giant phalli attached to hardware was not always awesome for the clients to see. The creatives...now they appreciated it...but the actual clients did not. So it was gone...never to return again, really. I just simply allowed the work to exist quietly elsewhere...and in the book...but not on my site. But of course, these things were easy to find.

Just in case anyone is now curious...here are some links the spell it all out:

Conscientious published the best interview ever on the book's reverberations on HERE.

Fototazo essay is HERE.

Dig in to it's excerpt on Design You Trust HERE.

Buy it HERE.

I Found This And Was So Happy I Liked It

So this book I discovered earlier in the year, Maske by Phyllis Galembo was so consistently mind blowing that it is easily going to be the best photobook of the year...from this blog at least. I really have cut myself off from collecting photography books and now try to buy one book a year...and this one was it. I wrote about it HERE.

Like with discoveries in music or art or anything, you immediately try to go back and see what else is available that the artist has done. Here I find Dressed For Thrills : 100 Years of Halloween Costumes by Phyllis Galembo...and it is selling for $7.58! I had to buy it.

Is this an art book? Kind of...subversively. Is it historically important? Kind of ...alot of the stuff looks like it should be in some campy wing of the Smithsonian. Who is this aimed at...crafty soccer Moms going to Michael's or photo literate intellectuals? Well...both I think.

There is this unexpected thrill with this book, for sure. It is the experience where you are expecting the book to simply be a chronicle of the costumes, and boom, there, suddenly, is the most thought provoking photograph you've seen all week. The image at top depicting Red Riding Hood ( circa 1941 ) and Brown Bear (circa 1940) is one of those photographs for me. I really can't stop looking at it.

Find this and other books by Galembo HERE.

Photo Eye Sells ECHOLILIA

Photo-Eye Bookstore in Santa Fe and online joins forces with Echo Press ( me and my kid in our garage ) to promote and market ECHOLILIA / Sometimes I wonder.

The good folks at there were super helpful in selling Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews and really sold more signed copies than anyone. Now they have set up a beautiful web prescence for the book that displays it more elegantly than ever before..the BookTease they put together really captures the arc of the book.

See it and love it HERE.

fototazo : What Makes A Great Portrait 2011

Tom Griggs of the online magazine fototazo dropped me a line last week asking if I could contribute and essay to his series " What Makes A Great Portrait". A great collection of interviews, including essays by Cori Pepelnjak, Anastasia Cazabon, Margo Ovcharenko, Shen Wei, Lucas Foglia, Susan Worsham, Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell and Jess T. Dugan.

I was so enthusiastic by the copy of Maske by Phyllis Galembo that this essay really just flowed out of me. Hopefully it wasn't too easy. Here it is:

A great portrait is like a great book or a great song....it has the thing that it is supposed to be about, but then, at closer inspection, it can be about anything, everything, things that are personal to your journey and things that are universal.

It can be this thing you can project into and learn things from all at the same time.

How does a photograph achieve that? That...well that is the hard part...its just too hard to explain how to create it...one never really knows how to do it, but you know it when you see it.

A recent book that was filled with what struck me as great portraits is Maske by Phyllis Galembo. The attached image is titled "Surprise Box, Jacmel, Haiti 2004". There is no question that I would be able to look at this image time and time again and get something from it. The content is candy coated...the color and lighting gives us some visual splendor to suck us into the image. But look closely: a hooded man, shiny body, holding a box with a plastic E.T. in it. It's folk art, and pop art, and anthropology all wrapped up and presented to us...but that is just the candy packaging. Look at it long enough and its like looking at a Rothko painting. Is that guy me? Is that guy the photographer's alter ego? The body language and gesture...the act of giving a gift. Is it generosity...emotional and spiritual generosity....or is it simply American junk? And the pose...is it Madonna and child esque? Baby Jesus in the shape of E.T.? Really...I could go on and on and on. When that feeling overtakes me...the sheer enthusiasm in which I could really just spit out a stream of consciousness list of all the open-ended things in an image and their possible meanings and references...that is when I feel a portrait is great.

Explore all the is fototazo HERE. See my essay HERE.

Father's Day Is Coming

Editions of the second printing of ECHOLILIA / Sometimes I wonder are still available and can be shipped in time for Father's Day. This book has been celebrated in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Discover Magazine, CNN, Zeit Magazine in Germany, Photo + in Korea, Communication Arts, American Photography, Photo District News Photo Annual and blogs all over the effing world!

What do the critics say?

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It’s free of any sense of frustration and reverberates with love, acceptance and humor.

-Anastasia Cazabon / Fototazo

Echolilia is one of the most intriguing and revealing photography books on children. It goes beyond the lyrical and the physical to examine how his son Elijah, and children as a whole, think, see and behave.

-Colin Pantall

As an artist, Archibald easily slips into that half-world of alternate reality --the space between the echos-- appreciating and documenting. I've always felt autism's gift was the redefinition of language, and I've never seen if so beautifully expressed than here.

-Shanna Philpson

There is a very faint sentimentality in the photographs and a sense of eccentricty that result in an unusual beauty; you can tell that these are dear subjects to him, without feeling as if he is imposing his affection on the audience. The emphasis of form and shape and the anthropmorphic quality of the young boy's gestures and activities make for some of the most interesting photographs I have seen in a very long while.

-John Edmonds

Buy ECHOLILIA/ Sometimes I wonder HERE.

Colin Pantall's Book Is So Great

Did I get the first copy to land in the states? Maybe...
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Colin Pantall's book "Sofa Portraits" arrived directly from Bath, England last week.
What comes to mind when leafing thru it? Oh...lots of things.
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Handmade, hand stitched...my wife was charmed by the book qualities and how intimate of an object it was. Me...I didn't care about the book construction, it was the images that spoke to me.
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Seeing the project collected like this, you really get taken into the inner life of this child, the spectrum of emotions and the thoughts within her head.
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Watching these emotions is like watching a cloud darken and then erupt with rain: the changes are subtle and imperceptable, but at the end it all hits you...and in a big way.
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If you want to learn the secrets of these images, the book is how you get them... and get to revisit them. See it HERE. Buy it HERE.


Images from Sofa Portraits by Colin Pantall

Speaking Of Books

Gift Wrapped Echolilia with Union Invite, 2011
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Speaking of Colin's book, which is being sent to my home in California from Bath, England as I type this...there are still plenty of copies of ECHOLILIA/ Sometimes I Wonder being sold out of my garage. It is the second printing, shown here in elegant gift wrapping. We sold our first copy of the new year yesterday. Buy it HERE.

Then...I found this insightful review of ECHOLILIA written by John Edmonds. I've been saving it for so long, I figured now was as good a time as any. Enjoy:

So, It's been a while since my last official blog entry and even longer that I've come across a photograph that I really get excited about. It was recently that a good friend introduced me to Timothy Archibald's work. His series and book entitled Echolilia shows photographs of his son and miscellaneous scanograms of his. What struck me immediately about this series was the beautiful contrast of light and dark. I appreciate Archibald's work for his boldness in creating dark, mystifying portraits. Unlike many other photographers who work with their children as subjects creating photographs that have a light, airy quality, Archibald goes for the obscure. Rarely does the art community see a collaboration between father and son in photographs. More often there is a joint effort between mother and child, husband and wife, or photographers and their immediate families, versus fathers working with their own children. I found it quite refreshing that Archibald has been working with his son.

There is a very faint sentimentality in the photographs and a sense of eccentricty that result in an unusual beauty; you can tell that these are dear subjects to him, without feeling as if he is imposing his affection on the audience. The emphasis of form and shape and the anthropmorphic quality of the young boy's gestures and activities make for some of the most interesting photographs I have seen in a very long while. Archibald's photograph's are reminiscent of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs of young boys against abandoned houses and throughout the fields on overcast days; yet, with the same ominous beauty, Archibald's work has a refined, pristine quality to it.

Above is my favorite photograph of the series. There's something wonderful about how ethereal the photograph feels, without having blown out highlights and having an almost silhouetted form. I love the shape of the feet, the line of the boy's back and back light. The boy is on a table in such a suggestive stance that mimics a cat, sniffing flowers; this serves as the photograph's punctum, along with how that one specific strand of hair on the middle of his head mimics the delicacy of the flowers in the vase. I especially like the warmness in the tones, the water in the bottom of the vase and curtain as a framing device. The photographs of in Echolilia are interesting because of the subject's commitment. His personality carries the stories told in these photographs. Whether or not Archibald is directing him, the scenes are very believable. Part of the success comes from leaving the viewer interested in the unknown and curious to know the what is really happening in the images. They're ambiguous in their content, but inviting in their alluring beauty.

Read John Edmonds blog HERE.

BUY: Sofa Portraits by Colin Pantall

Sofa Portraits by Colin Pantall / cover

One of my favorite projects over the past few years has been Sofa Portraits by Colin Pantall. In an intro to the work on his site statement, Colin writes:

Sofa Portraits is a series of images showing my daughter, Isabel, as she watches television.
These portraits portray the flawed physicality of childhood and its mental and physical freedoms - but also the constraints that are applied by the adult world - the furnishings Isabel is so often pushing against, the dress determined by the educational system she is now part of, or even the attitudes to her physical self-expression as she watches television.

Sofa Portraits is now available in bookform - 42 pages, 29 pictures, measuring 30cm x 21cm, in an edition of 60.

Again, in his words:

It's handmade with a Japanese stab-stitched hardcover binding. I was looking for a cover that matched the sofa in the picture. I couldn't find one, but worked out with normal bookcloth the time limitations, imperfections and design flaws of a handmade book more than matched the dilapidated state I was trying to recreate. It's not perfect in other words.

If you would like a copy, they are £60 - made payable to colinpantall@yahoo.co.uk at paypal. Postage and packing is included in that.

There has been a big buzz about this series since it was first made public. This book seems to take the project on some new tangents, as books often do. I'm eager to see where it takes us. Drop him a note and buy this book.



Sofa Portraits / interior page



Sofa Portraits / interior page

Interview with Myself 11/2010

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Q: Why did you publish a photo of a kid doing his homework?
A: That's my kid. He's not doing homework, he's signing the book we are selling. We both sign them when we sell them. He signs his name, I sign mine.
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Q: I thought you guys already signed a bunch. What up?
A: Oh, we published 20 books, figured we'd sell 7 of them and then have the rest hanging around for Xmas gifts or something. We sold all of them!
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Q: How did you do that?
A: We got lucky. Discover Magazine did a beautiful spread and story in their BRAIN issue. Then TIME did an online book excerpt and then the next week NYT's did a story on LENS, written by Jane Gross. News of the book spread out of the photo community and into the mainstream and we started to sell a bunch.
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Q: Any memorable moments with all the media?
A: Yah. The most fascinating thing is all the response I've gotten from other parents who really see their own kid in the images Eli and I made. People sent me photographs of their kid, things their kid created, and these shots could have fit directly into my book. It was the same channel, the same manifestations.
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Q: Did it make you think about this differently?
A: Yea, for sure. I think that really this ECHOLILIA thing I made photographs of is going on in every home of every family that has a kid like Eli. All I did is operate the camera a little more elegantly than the average parent who has a snapshot camera. I was there to document it, but all these other parents are seeing these things and feeling these things too.
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Q: Any low points?
A: One Sunday afternoon CNN was promoting TIME's book excerpt and had turned my photograph " The Tooth Fairy, 2008" into a click here button.
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Buy the second edition of ECHOLILIA/Sometimes I wonder HERE.
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Chuck Close Up Close

I was in the library with my kids this weekend and found this book in the children's section: Chuck Close Up Close, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. I grabbed it for them, but when I got home I realized it was really for me.
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Maybe because its a kid's book, it really distills things down to the basics, but the important basics. How he started making art, the drive to make art, the drive to make art after adversity, and the hunger for the creative process. If this was a book for adults, I think it would devolve into gossip, name dropping, who he was getting it on with, who he partied with, etc. As a kids book, it really is in its pure state.
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There is really nothing more I want to say...I don't want to do a review...I just want to share my enthusiam here. I'd recommend any creative out there to grab it and dig in.

Time Echo Book Excerpt

Mark Rykoff of TIME online put together an insightful ECHOLILIA book excerpt that went live today. Kinda cringed when I saw the headline...but it is what it is but still makes me pause a moment. Just felt very thankful about having this massive media entity throw support behind our simple self published book that was all shot within our house. It just shows what you can kind of do these days with an interesting idea and the technology to share it.
Enjoy it HERE.