Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Happy New Year


Wishing you peace, light and serenity for the new year ahead.

2014 marks two hundred years of peace in Sweden - remarkable and thought-worthy in many respects (and with what influence one might ponder)...

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Stargazing at Sokcho.



Stargazing at Sokcho. By Boomoon. Nazraeli Press, 2006. 24 pp., illustrated throughout, 32,5x42,5cm. Images from here.

Book description:

"'Stargazing' is a record of hours enchanted by the night sky more than a literary approach to the starts.

Constellations are continuously moving but they are permanent indicators of time and season fort everything on earth.

Boomoon was often absorbed in gazing stars anywhere he found a clear night sky. He composed a monumental 'Stargazing' measuring 250x840cm with 60 images shot in various places in Korea, Europe and North Africa.

'Stargazing at Sokcho' published by Nazraeli Press (Tuscon, 2006) contains 19 early works of the series."

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The Weather and a Place to Live.



The Weather and a Place to Live. Photographs of the Suburban West. By Steven B. Smith, essay by Maria Morris Hambourg. Duke University Press, 2005. 128 pp., illustrated throughout, 10x9". Images from here.

Book description:

"In compelling, often stunning black-and-white photographs, 'The Weather and a Place to Live' portrays the manmade landscape of the western United States.

Here we come face to face with the surreal intersection of the American appetite for suburban development and the resistant, rolling, arid country of the desert West. Steven B. Smith’s extraordinary photographs take us into the contemporary reality of sprawling suburbs reconfiguring what was once vast, unpopulated territory.

With arresting concision and an unblinking eye, Smith shows how a new frontier is being won, and suggests too how it may be lost in its very emergence."

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Question of Hope.



The Question of Hope. By Robert Adams. Nazraeli Press in association with Portland Art Museum, 2013. 56 pp., illustrated throughout, 8,5x9,5". Images from here.

Book description:

"The question of hope is especially urgent because of environmental threats.

One such peril, deforestation, is the subject of the first half of this book, where pictures of it suggest a war zone.

The subject of the second half of the book, light on the sea, might initially seem disconnected from the first, but in combination they have about them what Samuel Johnson once called "the stability of truth", in this case a recognizable balance of harsh facts and dateless, mysterious consolation.

Robert Adams has studied both elements - our failed stewardship and the promise implied by beauty - across much of the American West. He has over the years also photographed them near where he lives on the Oregon coast, and it is this local caring that gives 'The Question of Hope' much of its intensity."

Monday, December 09, 2013

Prayers in an American Church.



Prayers in an American Church. By Robert Adams. Nazraeli Press, 2012. 40 pp., illustrated throughout, 6x9". Limited edition of 1000 copies. Images from here.

Book description:

" 'Each of us welcomes quiet. As a private person, a citizen, and a photographer, these are some of the words I find myself remembering and repeating'. —— (Robert Adams)

This small volume, with just 12 quoted prayers and 17 photographs by the artist, is among the most personal of Robert Adams’s books.

'It is an old man’s book', he says, 'and reflects my conviction that art and religion come from the same sense of dependence'.

Friday, December 06, 2013

Rest in Peace Nelson Mandela


Today we mourn a great loss for humanity, an enduring peace symbol.