This week is a bit of a ‘back to my roots’ trip that was brought on by an enforced journey back to my home city of Glasgow. During the journey I thought that it might be interesting to look at my beginnings in serious photography and book collecting and also to throw in a nice little Glasgow Zine that I picked up on the trip.

Ok, this is where it all began for me three years ago in the wonderful, but sadly now gone, ESPAS photo bookstore in Istanbul where I bought my first ever photo book, the very, very beautiful Wonderland by Jason Eskenazi.

I had been to Huseyin Yilmaz’s Espas bookstore near the Galata Tower in Istanbul a few times to buy some of the marvellous back copies of iZ magazine that he had on sale at ridiculously cheap prices. On this particular day though he showed me Wonderland and gushed about what a beautiful book it was while telling me that Jason was in fact sitting in his back office at that very moment working on curating the Bursa photo festival. After one quick glance through the book I couldn’t believe my eyes and immediately asked if he would mind if Jason signed a copy for me at which point Huseyin invited me to tea with Jason and him on the lovely little balcony behind his office. When I look back on this I could kick myself for not asking Jason more about the book and his thinking as a photographer but I was really at the beginning of my own journey in photography and, as this was the first serious photo book I had ever bought, I lacked the insight to form sensible questions. Nevertheless Jason took some time with me to explain the framework of the book, how it came into being, and later that evening at an unforgettable dinner under the Galata bridge, a little about his philosophy on photography. Lets look then at what makes Wonderland such a special book to me and I will do my very best to try to explain what are sometimes intangible and abstract thoughts that I have about the book and Eskenazi himself as an artist that deserves to be much better known and acclaimed for this incredible work.

Wonderland, a Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith

When I had my all to short cup of tea with Jason on Huseyin’s balcony he explained to me that he had constructed the book loosely around a ‘fairy tale’ structure. In other words, child gets lost from parent(s), ends up with guardians that don’t treat her well and so on, anyone that has ever seen a Dinsney movie will know the storyline well. Having said that, the book does have an unstructured feel to the flow of the photos and I think that is a result of Eskenazi sequencing the photographs rather than trying to fit them into the fairy tale structure too rigidly.

Like some other books that I have I didn’t really want to review this one for the simple reason that you really have to look through this book again and again to enjoy it. If you manage to do so you will be rewarded by one of the highest quality set of images that you can find anywhere, for my money this blows many of the best selling photo books out of the water with its out and out consistency.

Believe me, I have shown this to many friends and they are astonished as they turn the pages and stunning image after stunning image leaps out at them. Just when you think you must have passed the best ones the next page turn will surprise and delight again. So what is it that is so magical about these images?

Well, firstly, and this is not uncommon with the best books that I review here, it was shot over a long period of time, around ten years I believe and that has given Eskenazi real depth in his material and an earned understanding of his subject matter that shows through in the quality of the book. Secondly, Eskenazi is THE master composer. Many of his photographs are beautifully layered and there is nothing but nothing is in these photographs that doesn’t play a part in the overall structure and intent of the shot.

I made a statement in the last review of SIgal’s White Road about everything in the frame playing its part and justifying its inclusion while it only takes one distracting element to ruin a shot. This is where Eskenazi shines. This is very important to me though, I don’t think that its enough to have complex layered shots if they don’t have an emotional soul. There are a number of very well known photographers who excel at complex, layered framing however I find many of their shots to be formulaic and emotionally void. Not so with Eskenazi, please take the time to study the above photograph or better still, find superior copies than mine and just admire the poetry of the composition and emotional validity of his often poignant photography. Everything in this marvellous photograph is important, from the position of the girls hand in the lower left right across to the female face on the far right (my image has cropped it a little to tightly compared to the original) that pushes you back into the incredible set of stories in the image.

Although the book is nicely varied in its thoughtful sequencing, I want to show a few of these multi-layered shots together and out of sequence because, for me, they exemplify what elevates Eskenazi’s work above the norm.

The thing is that, although the shots are complex, they appear economical and flow in a very poetic rhythm. It is my personal belief that this comes in part from having a huge depth of material so that you can afford to pick only the very best images without having to resort to fillers.

Eskenazi is far from being a one trick pony though and the book is sprinkled with these wonderfully quirky shots that catch you a bit by surprise every so often.

So, you may ask, why isn’t this book more popular and Eskenazi not better known? Well, thats a tough one but I did have the courage to ask Jason this self same question and he answered simply and unassumingly that he didn’t crave popularity and in fact preferred to ‘stay off the radar’ Hmmm, I have nothing but the highest admiration for someone that can say something like that in the photography world, especially when they can deliver the goods while meandering around with a beat up old Olympus around their neck. Many of you reading this will know of the fact that he worked as a security guard at MOMA in New York during the Robert Frank ‘looking into The Americans’ exhibition to pay the bills, and, I am sure I read somewhere that he learned a lot about not giving away the whole story with too much detail from a Vermeer exhibition there. I think its fair to say that, like many other photographers, Jason is a quiet and pretty shy person who thinks only about his art and everything else seems peripheral and unimportant to him as a result.

Its incredible to think that this was Jason’s first book and that the only other book of his photography that I could find was a collaboration of portraits called Title Nation. I would dearly love to see the cutting room floor from the editing of Wonderland, I am sure that there will be some absolute gems that he couldn’t fit in here for whatever reason.

Just returning to the fairy tale structure for a moment, I seem to recall that his overall message was that the story revolved around the loss of youth and the hard lesson of independence. You will find a little clip of Jason on YouTube if you search where he explains the following somewhat iconic photo that for him summed up the old guard leaving the Kremlin in the form of the hatted and somewhat sinister man moving off in the bus window. This is a somewhat less complex photo in structure but extremely powerful in content.

I guess that you will know by now just how much I love and am inspired by this book. I discovered a while ago that I personally lack the ability to compose complex frames like Eskenazi’s but that doesn’t stop me admiring what he does and I read this book so much that I am now getting worried about wearing it down and its out of print and getting horrendously expensive to replace so if you come across a copy don’t hesitate to buy it (and one for me while you are at it:) When I left Jason in Istanbul he told me that he was working to finish off his latest project which was called the Black Garden and made the move up from Fairy Tale to Mythology, I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to see this book and I hope that he is close to publishing it.

Goose Flesh Zine, Volume 3

As I mentioned at the start, I picked up this little zine on my recent trip to Glasgow so I wanted to mention it here and have a quick look at it. Firstly though I want to quote the marvellous intro by Scottish author Kirsty Logan:

Goose flesh is a vestigial reflex from our long-ago days of heavy body hair. Sea otters bristle; porcupines raise their quills. They are animals, and once upon a time we were animals too. Our goose flesh proves it. But not now. Now we’re civilised. Now we buy photography journals and sip espresso and purse our lips and say, “yes, intriguing”. The world is ours to own. We capture it in images and then we share it in images. The world is so small we can fit it on a single page.
And so we sit, the clever ex-animals that we are, and we purse our lips to our rapidly-cooling espresso and we open a little set of images of our little world. The pages turn and the images flash; we see red, we see the wet innards of sex and the aftermath of car-crashes, we see danger and lust, we’re hungry and angry. Our flesh raises into bumps. It raises like we’re animals but we know we’re not because look, it’s not the real world, it’s only an image. And we’re not animals, so despite the red we don’t immediately scream or fuck or rage.
We look at the image, and we turn the page.
We see blue, and sleep swells in our chests.
We see yellow, and daylight prickles our eyelids.
Green, and the scent of grass fills our mouths.
We see flames and flowers and rain; sex and death and celebration.
Our bodies react, but we do not. We sit. We look.
With our eyes we capture the world, make it tiny so that whenever we choose, we can close the covers on it, tidy it neatly away - but our bodies cannot be tidy. Our flesh betrays us. Our gaze makes us human, but our flesh is animal.

Jesus, if thats not worth the 5 quid entry money what is? And this is before we even see a photo !!!

I don’t know about you but I find photo zines fascinating and consider them to be the lifeblood of printed photography. They are unassuming but usually highly creative and photographers generally take risks in them that they wouldn’t dare to in a full blown book. Obviously, it is also a way for artists to showcase their work and have a bit of fun at the same time. Given that I only became really serious about photography in the last two or three years when I already lived in Singapore, I know almost nothing about the photography scene in Scotland and was delighted to be given this as a gift following a visit to the streetlevelphotoworks gallery in Glasgow’s Trongate. The zine seems to me to feature young Scottish talent and its great to see something like this from my home city.

As you would expect, the zine is a bit hit and miss but I think it would be entirely wrong to look at this kind of thing with the same critical eye as an expensive photo-book but here are a few images from the book and a couple of thoughts that entered my head when I look at it.

First thought is about the lovely humour of the cover shot and I am sure this is not just the famous Glaswegian wry humour at work because look at how well it is sequenced inside the zine, this is my favourite pair of shots. The zine is somewhat unusually for these kind of publications printed in full colour, and it works.

Some of the shots didn’t work quite so well for me but I think thats because the photographer tackled an extremely difficult context in shooting portraits of people in the street. I think that what makes this so hard is the need to remove camera awareness and, while its fine for the subjects to look at the camera, I couldn’t get rid of the sense that there was a camera there and a photograph being taken. Also, with the odd exception, I don’t think the subjects were interesting enough in their own right. Maybe being hypercritical here given the spirit of the zine, but I prefer to be honest where possible.

Back to my overall thoughts though and I think that the mix of styles and colours in the sequencing really works and full marks to Sarah who edited the zine. I even spotted a couple of shots that looked like they were taken in what is now more familiar territory to me than my home city :)

Anyway, I hope that this was a nice diversion. I certainly enjoyed this little zine very much and I will be looking out for volume 4, well done to Sarah for the creative drive behind this.

Todd Hido
I was tempted to use an Eskenazi shot for the fave photo slot this week, and believe me I could have chosen from many, however, I enjoyed the diversity of styles and subject matter over the last few weeks and wanted to continue that, so this weeks shot is a portrait by Todd Hido from his Between the Two book.

Hido has become a pretty popular ‘name’ now in the photographic world with his beautifully presented, large photo books by Nazraeli Press, and man they do a nice job. Hido’s books always have a lovely, strange but familiar feel to them and, as I understand it, they are based around his search for his childhood environment and days of his youth. I don’t consider it important to know why he shoots what he shoots in the way that he does, but he somehow gets at that David Lynch type feeling of all sorts of weirdness and endless stories behind the most bland and normal people and scenes and that is one of the reasons I chose this particular photo. Hido’s books largely comprise somehow unsettling and intriguing shots of houses at night, people-empty landscapes (often shot through rain smeared windows) and hotel/motel room female encounters. This all combines to create a gnawing feeling of familiarity ( I am fascinated to know if female photographers feel the same way, please leave a comment if you have anything to say on this) and a fleeting sense of the tension of encounters. Sometimes the room photos have too staged a feeling for me and I get a sense of the camera at work and a model posing, this is particularly so in the more explicit shots but not so at all for me in the shot that I have chosen here. A few weeks back I showed a photograph of the old lady from Ernesto Bazan’s Al Campo and praised its universitality, and this photo has exactly that same characteristic. The photo is so simple yet it allows your imagination to run riot as you trawl through your memory banks to try in futility to resolve how you know this situation and person. It might be that I have been cursed/gifted by an overly fertile imagination but that gaze, the knowingness, the weariness, the clothing, the hairstyle, the colour tone, the slight tilt of the head and the ambiguity of the setting all create that David Lynch paradox of familiarity but uneasiness that you can sense that this could all go horribly wrong if it goes any further.

Like many photo books that I like, I think Hido’s work is best treated as a whole to allow him to build his atmosphere however, this is a photo that I go back to a lot when I look at his work and I hope I am not alone in enjoying its mystery and evocative feel.

Well that’s it for this week but I wanted to close with a little footnote on Wonderland. After I wrote the first few paragraphs of this article I decided that I should get a back up copy that I could read so that I can preserve my signed original. Hmmmm, when I went onto Amazon to have a look a new copy is selling for around S$5000 and a used one for S$2000 !!!! Yikes, I never expected that however it does signal that there is enough demand to re-publish this classic and I have a very fond wish that Jason can get Mack or someone to publish this and give it the kind of printing and promotion it so richly deserves.

Colin Steel, Sunday 21st September 2014, Singapore