by Teju Cole
In a time of omnipresent digital images, books remain one of the most powerful ways of showing the riches of photography.
A photo book is a stubbornly old-fashioned technology. It allows for some experimentation, with scale, paper and color, but it is ultimately a sequence of photographs printed on paper and bound into a portable volume. In a time of a torrential flow of online photographs and omnipresent video, such material simplicity is almost quaint. But a form invented in the mid-19th century remains one of the most vivid ways of conveying the power of images.
I think about my “year-end” list of photo books all through the year, poring over publishers’ catalogs. I’m sent many books and buy many others. I sift through hundreds of volumes. Each book is finally chosen on its own merits. This is not a list of “relevant” or “important” books. I care only for photo books that work, photo books that have somehow merged form and content to create a third thing, full of its own life, vital and resonant. Here are 10 that hit that mark for me in 2018.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, ‘The Land in Between’
“The Land in Between” is the catalog of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s retrospective exhibition of the same name presented at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in the summer of 2018, and it conveys very well what made that exhibition among the best I saw this year.
Schulz-Dornburg, born in Berlin 80 years ago, has over the decades created a varied body of work is motivated by a consistent imaginative quest: how to photograph landscapes in political transition. There are all kinds of obvious ways of going about this, but Schulz-Dornburg has largely deployed her efforts in idiosyncratic locales, mostly in the Middle East and in the former Soviet countries. She has photographed in Syria, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Russia. She has photographed borders and deserts. One memorable series was about Armenian bus stops, photographed directly so that they begin to resemble modernist sculpture. Another was on the marsh Arabs in Iraq in the 1980s; the fragile, intricate structures she photographed would soon be permanently lost to political upheavals and war. But like that of all serious artists, her work was more than how it can be described: a keen political intelligence combined with a poet’s feeling for light, stone, form and shimmering horizons.
MACK, 254 pages, 177 images.
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