I really enjoyed writing last weeks post on emerging Japanese photographers and the contrasts in their work so I thought I would take the theme a step further this week with a titanic contrast; we are talking East v West, big v small and lavish v modest, along with some more subtle contrasts of approach that I hope to bring out in the writings. The two books being looked at are Katy Grannan’s ‘The Ninety Nine’ and Maika Elan’s ‘The Pink Choice’. I chose these particular books because they both deal with people on the fringes, but as we shall see, in a very different way. Just to further spice things up I have also decided to do a very short weekly closing section focusing on one of my favourite photos, and this weeks is a very beautiful photograph by Ernesto Bazan.

Without further ado, fire up some of your favourite Sunday music ( I am on Bill Evans of course) grab a coffee and lets go.

Katy Grannan, The Nine and the Ninety Nine

The book(s) being looked at here came to me by way of a recommendation and the set actually consists of two separate books, one a black and white environmental landscape type publication, and the second a set of colour portraits of ‘Skid Row’ type people all taken I believe in South 9th street in Modesto California. Both books are pretty large scale and come beautifully packaged in a white sleeve with cutouts where the 9 becomes 99 and there is an embossed third nine whose only purpose seems to be to make the numbers look like 666 when turned upside down, ahmmmm……………..

Anyway, that aspect of the presentation aside, make no mistake this is a seriously lavish and large coffee table style book and I am sure that many of these will be adorning San Fransico lounges. I get the sense that the intent of the book is more salon style and based around selling prints as its also published by a couple of galleries and that gives it a catalogue feel which I don’t think is a good thing for a photo book. Let’s look at the books though and for simplicities sake I will start with the black and white ‘The Nine’

This is going to be completely unfair I know but I am going to say it anyway, the current benchmark for me in American urban landscape photography is the very beautiful ‘She Dances on Jackson’ by Vanessa Winship, and there are a number of extremely good reasons why I believe that to be the case and many of Katy’s photographs highlight that very well for me. Too often Katy resorts to the lone figure from behind, perfectly positioned in the frame, pleasing on the eye, sure, intriguing, evocative, erie, wistful, timeless, mysterious and striking at your subconscious, no, not at all.

Its the same for me with the above photo, I can see a gorgeous shot here without the person talking on the mobile phone, all of the ingredients are there. I know that Katy’s intent was to show the environment that the people she is focusing on live in and then show them in portrait in the other book, but I personally believe she would have achieved that so much better by removing the people and inferring the human presence as Winship does in her non-portrait shots. This creates a completely different platform for the introduction of people in the portrait shots. Having said that, there are a couple of these urban shots that do work very well and I just wish that there were more of this quality and also that she had developed these in the colour portrait book. Here is a very good example of this where the human presence does make the photo for me and I find myself wanting to know more.

I also have a problem with the structure of the book and the two thirds spread of the photos across the pages. It shows the grand scale well but I keep feeling uncomfortable with the break points in the spread. I guess that some of these shots, like the one above would look stunning in large scale prints and maybe that is where they are at there best. to bring the ‘Nine’ part of the review to a close, I should say that, along with the previous shot there is one other that works particularly well with Katy’s themes and its the following photo which I also think is a good point to leave the book on. Incidentally, there are a few very nice full landscape shots in the book that seem completely unrelated to the themes at play and again, I can only assume that there inclusion is to help showcase them for print sales.

On then to the ‘Ninety Nine’ which is the colour portraits accompaniment to the urban landscape ‘Nine’ again, all shot it would appear in an edgy area of Modesto around 9th Street. I feel compelled to say that shooting this kind of subject matter has become pretty commonplace and it therefore has to have something special to lift it above the classics on this theme and I am afraid that, for the most part, this work really fails to do that.

Time after time I found the slightly bleachy looking photos shot in hard light (I think this is a kind of trademark of Katy’s) very uninteresting, uninspiring and in many cases, cliched. They might give some wealthy Californians some feeling of being close to down and out edginess but for me, its the equivalent experience of looking at animals in a zoo. They can’t hurt you and you get utterly no insight or sense of their real lives, thoughts, fears or longings.

And then, out of the blue come the following two stunning photographs that show the potential of what could have been achieved here. Here is the first one and just compare it to the previous two shots that I showed.

For me there is an obvious depth and mystery to these portraits that is completely absent in the others. Like in the landscape shots that work, I find myself intrigued and have a desire to know more. Here is what I think is the most important observation that I think I can make about Katy’s work and that is that in most of her shots I can sense a camera, I can feel the shot being composed and structured whereas in these two I don’t and my mind is free to imagine the realities that may or may not exist in this place.

I am very fond of these two photographs and I found myself repeatedly returning to them as I read the books and I think that’s a sure sign of their success from my own personal viewpoints. I don’t want to draw any conclusions about Katy’s book at this point as part of my purpose here was to develop the theme of contrasts so here we go with Mika’s book.

Maika Elan, The Pink Choice

I bought this book from my friend Kevin at IPA where he has a nice selection of Asian books for purchase. Many of these are self-published and hard to get so have a look and see if there is anything that interests you. Maika is a very popular and respected photographer in her home country Vietnam and she is now becoming better known on a bigger stage.

The book itself as you can see is a little complex in its delicate packaging with a nice string and brown paper wrapping. This looks great but in practice I find that its very tricky to reassemble and I found it a bit of a challenge to return the book to the sleeve in particular. I also found the concept of the postcard type prints a little weird but its entirely possible that I am missing something in the intent behind this. For me it adds nothing to it as a book other than to make me worried that the perforations are going to break and one of the individual photos will fall out. All very fragile and delicate and I am guessing that this is that actual intent to support the theme of the work. Enough about the physical structure, lets look at the content and contrast it with the previous book of Katy’s.

It soon becomes obvious that, just as Katy used harshness of light and processing to support her themes, then Maika uses softness and I find a big difference here in that the colour choices actually support the work much better than Katy’s which tended towards bringing out the wrinkled and haggard skin tones only. Maika’s subject matter is also fringe based and is focused on gay people in Vietnam and I understand that they are normally portrayed in the Vietnamese media as faceless, garish and often as guilty of some criminal offence. Maika it would seem wants to show that is far from being the case and these are very normal people with real personalities and lives. This lies at the heart of the contrast that I wanted to explore here, both are fringe people themes but I never understood what Katy wanted me to know or feel through her photographs whereas I do with Maika and for me, she really succeeds in showing that these people are real, they do have lives that are not as they are stereotypically shown and as a double benefit, she does that in a photographically and artistically satisfying way.

Sure, some of the shots have a ‘staged’ feel to them but I didn’t find it objectionable and even in these shots I found myself intrigued by the composition and context as opposed to simply being aware of it. As in Katy’s work, in all of the photos the subjects are aware of the photographer but Maika manages to suspend that awareness where I don’t think Katy achieved that very often. I get a real sense that the relationship that Maika had with her subjects was completely different and much deeper and that shows in the work.

As in Katy’s book, there are a couple of real stand out shots in this book and its important to say that there is nothing exotic or contrived about the subject matter or environment of these shots, these are just the mark of a very good photographer at work.

I think its obvious by now that Maika has not sensationalised her subjects in any way and the sexuality is always present but never exploited. She has for my money (and it is my money, which makes me feel entitled to critique these books) used good photographic artistry and technique to really empathise with the her subjects and develop her themes. There is an undoubted female delicacy at work here and it would be interesting to see a somewhat different and harder male view at some point to counterbalance this but all in all I find this a delightful little book that succeeds in spite of the unnecessary complexity and trickiness of its packaging.

Ok, I hope you managed to stay with me on this and of course this is only my opinion and it may be fundamentally flawed by how little I know about either of these artists. I have a very simplistic approach to the books that I buy though and that is that its the books and content that I look at only, what I may or may not know about the artist is irrelevant and the material has to succeed in its own right.

Now that I have that out of the way I am probably going to be completely unkind to Katy here but I want to give my honest opinion. I feel that when I look at her book I see coffee tables, designer lounges and beautifully presented prints in expensive galleries. I was never clear though on what she wanted me to feel or imagine when I looked at her work, I just saw something lavishly packaged to sell. So for me the book(s) don’t work by what I look for from a good photo book, despite having some extraordinarily good shots inside which only lead to compound my frustration with what this might have been. As I said, I saw this as a review based on contrasts that I found personally interesting, and, despite some rather obvious flaws in its design, I think that Maika’s little book is infinitely more successful as a photo book. Her subject matter is thoughtfully and sympathetically explored and I very rarely felt that any of it was contrived to make a point. Having said that, for my personal tastes it didn’t take me into any fantastically new territory either but it did work as an interesting and worthwhile purchase. At the end of the day this is just my view and like everything in life its better you make up your own minds on these things, I am simply commenting from my point of view and trying to raise awareness.

As I said at the beginning, I want to finish this week with a look at a favourite photo and this week its a portrait from Al Campo by Ernesto Bazan

Some people who know my own photography may find this a surprising and interesting choice, people who know me well won’t be at all surprised. One of the reasons I write this blog, and believe me it takes me ages every week, is to educate myself by being more explicit in understanding photography and developing and deepening my own knowledge. I often look at this photograph and I really had no clear understanding of why. Al Campo is a book full of lovely, interesting photographs on the loose theme of the Cuban countryside but that is, I believe in my mind, about the true beauty of Cuba and its people, the real heart of the place. So why this particular photo, let me try to explain as best I can.

Ernesto Bazan is a fantastic documentary photographer with a real humanistic touch. For me he has done for Cuba what Robert Frank did for the US with his ‘Americans’ book, he has shown the reality of its people in an artistic and realistic way without resorting to sensationalism and all of the time there is the very real depth that comes from truly caring about people and that is what sets Frank apart for me as well. The reason I say this is that I truly believe that Ernesto cares very deeply about the people he photographs and this shows in the images. So when I look at this image I think the heart of its attraction to me lies in the fact that Ernesto has created something universally beautiful and that the photograph is a framework for my lifetimes experiences and memories. I see my mother, I see my grandmother, I see beauty despite age, I see a desperate longing to hold onto beauty, I see an utterly clear link between beauty and nature, I see timelessness, I see the cycle of everything, I see dignity, I see that all things must pass and I could go on here for a very long time but I hope you get my point. This is what sets the very best photography apart for me, rather than close you down into what the photographer wants you to see in the frame, the truly great photographer bursts you out of the frame into a world of imagination. That is why this photograph is so special to me.

Lastly this week, thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond to me on these musings, I am delighted if only even one or two people take something from one of these articles, that is success for me.

Colin Steel, Sunday 31st August, Singapore