Under a stained glass roof, creative booklovers unite for the annual Melbourne Art Book Fair, hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria.
At an art book fair, anything goes. There are no rules about what is or isn't an art book — it's an inclusive community, with a niche for everyone (even me). I shared a table with my friend and fellow photographer, Sarah Abad (we share an affinity for tangible photographic vessels).
5 Press (always one of my favourite tables) is a collective of Melbourne-based print makers, including August Carpenter whose monochrome monoprints and hand-bound books posess the gravitas of unique and fragile objects echoing the landscapes they represent (watch this space for a possible collaboration).
I recently flew across the sea, with a suitcase full of books, to Photobook NZ, a festival that connects New Zealand's photobook community with the world. Held in Wellington at the Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa and the College of Creative Arts at Massey University, the second biennial festival welcomed high calibre international guests from around the world.
Throughout the lectures I was fortunate enough to attend, the act of returning again and again to a place, and the weaving of poetic words with photographs reverberated. I sadly missed Carolle Bénitah’s talk, who’s work literally strings together photographs, using “beads, coloured threads and scissors to alter her family photographs and albums to explore the memories of her childhood, and as a way to help her underst...
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Title: Library of Ashurbanipal
Year: 7th Century BC
Description: "Late Babylonian clay tablet: table of lunar longitudes. Contains a table for the daily change in the duration of the visibility of the moon on the thirty days of the month of the winter solstice according to the tradition of the city of Babylon." From a series of cuneiform clay tablets excavated in Kouyunjik, northern Iraq, believed to be the remains of King Ashurbanipal (668-c.630 BC) of Assyria's great library.
Significance: These clay tablets have weathered thousands of years, and still retain enough information for us to read. How long will our modern tablets last? I suspect that the iPad I am typing on will not be able to show you these words in a few decades, let alone hundreds of thousands of years...
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The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto exhibited Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, buried in 1944, dug up in 1945.
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Artist: Dayanita Singh
Year: 2013
Description: "File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people."
Significance: Dayanita Singh's photographs of papers printed on beautiful matte paper and bound in a book is a cyclical celebration, as is much of her work including Museum Bhavan which repackages museums into concertina books or miniature museums which were subsequently exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her work is proof that the SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS + SEE MORE
Artist: Patrick Pound
Year: 2017
Description: "An avid collector, Patrick Pound is interested in systems and the ordering of objects: an attempt, perhaps, to make things coherent. As Pound says, ‘to collect is to gather your thoughts through things’."
Significance: Pound’s practice includes purchasing orphaned photographs on eBay, in his words, “photographers used to put photographs in albums and in boxes to be viewed and reviewed at will. Photographs were never made to be scanned and redistributed on eBay. Whether they are analogue or digital, printed photographs have an afterlife that no one saw coming.” His collections of prints, highlight clichés, in both subject matter and treatment of photographs, for example the destruction of people no longer wanted in physical memory. Through his work, Pound observes the ubiquitous changing nature of photography which, “used to be the medium of record. Now it is equally the medium of transmission.”
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Description: "In A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted violently, spewing pyroclastic flows across the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The eruption has become one of the most famous in history because the speed of the hot gases caught the locals unawares. The intense heat captured many features of city life, including individuals as macabre still-lifes. Much of this detail was then preserved beneath huge volumes of ash that rained down on the region. One of the discoveries made in 1752 in Herculaneum was of an intact library. This contained large numbers of papyrus scrolls of philosophical texts, many associated with the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. This is the only complete library that has survived from antiquity. And while many of the rolls were destroyed by workmen at the time and by scientists and archaeologists later, some 1,800 rolls survive, most of them in the Naples National Archaeological Museum in Italy."
Relevance: Today the scrolls are somewhat visible (mediated by technology) only because of their physical structure. "The material itself is built up from crisscrossed papyrus fibers that form a perpendicula...
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365 WAYS TO DESTROY A PHOTOGRAPH
Artist: Anonymous
Year: 2014
Description: "Beginning on July 25th, 2014, one photograph will be destroyed each day for a period of one year. The remnants of every photograph will be collected, documented, saved, and exhibited at the conclusion of the year." Although the project appears to have been abandoned on day 72.
Relevance: This systematic destruction of physical photographs reveals what remains after deliberate destruction. To me, destroying digital photographic data seems like it would more finite – data you've handed over to someone or something else is a different story.
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Artist: Stephen Gill
Year: 2006
Description: Stephen Gill created a photobook of pictures buried where they were taken."The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the amount of rainfall. The depths that the pictures were buried at also varied, as did their positioning. Sometimes they were facing each other, sometimes back to back or sometimes buried singly... Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and in a way collaborating with place — allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture — felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark."
Significance: The artist has introduced an element of chance, of manufactured wabi-sabi to his work. It is not the first time photographs have been buried...
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Artist: Sarah Abad
Year: 2015
Description: "Whether a hand written note, a number representing the batch or the negative, the brand of the paper or the name of a photographic studio, each of these markings presents a story and are beautiful and fascinating in their own right."
Significance: Inspired by the discovery of a tin of old photographs in a garage, this book highlights the materiality of photographic prints, celebrating the often overlooked photographic vessel.
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Artist: Erik Kessels
Year: 2011-2014
Description: "Thanks to the wealth of image sharing sites and the availability of digital cameras, the world is subjected to an avalanche of new photos every single day. For ‘24 Hrs In Photos,’ a single day was chosen, and the images for that day printed out. The result were mountains of photos, reaching from gallery floor to ceiling."
Significance: A key issue I have independently identified is the abundance of photographs, a sea of information, and we’re barely keeping afloat. This work beautifully manifests the concept.
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September 2011: The first memory I have of consciously taking photographs, rather than just happy snaps, occurs in Paris. Although disposable, my camera had three aspect ratios; standard, wide & panorama. This was new and exciting for me, before each precious exposure I made a careful decision, and subsequent composition. The memory of my nine-year-old self standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower – in awe – lining up my shot, is almost as clear as if I held that same camera in my hands today. The results were rewarding, especially after searching Paris to find a place that would develop and print my panoramas. Perhaps the great printing cost to my parents, who were probably wondering why they ever bought me a panoramic camera to begin with, paid off.
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