Click to Enlarge Erwin Olaf By Erwin Olaf
Check out more photos from this book, Photographing America, Meadowlands, and The Places We Live in the gallery below.
Gallery Preview
AMERICAN DREAMS
Erwin Olaf By Erwin Olaf
Aperture, 111 pages, $65 Shortly after 9/11, Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf envisioned an homage to Norman Rockwell, but as he re-created the scenes of happy, bygone America, he realized the Rockwellian vistas of the Eisenhower era didn’t honestly apply to modern America. The people in his images seem to be caught while standing on an emotional precipice—stuck in the moment before they must react to a crisis. This series became Rain, which inspired the follow-ups Hope and Grief, all of which are housed in Olaf’s new, self-titled book. While Hope and Rain are filled with emotionally detached characters who have yet to respond to crises, Grief is what Olaf calls “the study of the first tear”—capturing the moment after they respond. The images are seductive and mysterious, inviting us to fill in the awkward spaces and moments of silence with our own narrative. Olaf’s goal was to depict the kind of emotion that is kept restrained for the sake of proper social conduct, which is illustrated by Grief’s combination of exquisite interiors and wardrobe that almost overpower the fragile subjects. Olaf says his work is “inspired by lying …or telling a fan¬tasy.” So perhaps he has paid homage to Rockwell after all. —Lindsay Sakraida
TWO FOR THE ROAD
Photographing America: Henri Cartier-Bresson & Walker Evans
Introduction by Agnes Sire, essay by J.F. Chevrier; Thames & Hudson, 160 pages, $43
Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote: “If it had not been for the challenge of the work of Walker Evans, I don’t think I would have remained a photographer.” The proof of that statement could be seen in a masterpiece of an exhibition held last September at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Set up like a dialogue between the two great photographers, the show demon¬strated how both men approached the vast subject matter of America, matching the cold detachment of Evans with the quasi-paparazzi spontaneity of Cartier-Bresson. This new book captures the spirit of the exhibition perfectly, making it an important addition to the literature of photography. Inside, critic Jean Francois Chevrier writes: “Evans and Cartier-Bresson have one essential thing in common, something almost immediately recognized in New York (but ignored in Paris): They became artists by reinventing photography.”
Though published in France to coincide with the Parisian exhibition, Photographing America will be released in the United States this April. —Jean-Jacques Naudet
BEAUTY AND THE MARSH
Meadowlands By Joshua Lutz
powerHouse Books, 108 pages, $50
The Meadowlands of northern New Jersey is a quiet but disquieting place. A patchwork of wetlands just across the turnpike from Manhattan, it hosts a grisly sort of ecosystem—polluted by years of dumping and favored by mobsters for the disposal of corpses, yet inhabited by wading birds, migratory fish, and tunneling muskrats. Toxic chunks of it have been reclaimed for everything from a football stadium to the city of Newark. Vivisected by the densest human population in America, it clings to a marshy but debased life.
Joshua Lutz’s handsome, oversized first book captures the redolent mix of depressed, surreal, bourgeois, and gritty that is the Meadowlands. Its images show a foul canal floating a barge of crushed cars; a stiff-collared priest standing inexplicably in overgrowth; a plaid-shirted mannequin lying face-down in a watery ditch; a bowhunter shooting at something way beyond the plane of focus. Even unoccupied images are about human needs and intervention: the Delayed Cares Motel, the Happily Ever (no After) Bingo Club. Yet few of these photos are free-standing in their impact. Their sum creates a powerful feeling of place, not a dry record of fact. While the Meadowlands may be for most people “a place to pass through and forget on the way to someplace else,” as Lutz puts it, for him it is rich ground for bittersweet art. —R.H.
LIVES IN THE ROUGH
The Places We Live By Jonas Bendiksen
Aperture, 200 pages, $40
This is an illuminating yet heartbreaking look at life in the fastest-growing habitats on earth—urban slums. Over a period of three years, Bendiksen lived among slum denizens in four cities: Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Caracas, Venezuela. He interviewed residents and shot atmospheric portraits, creating digitally stitched panoramas showing the four walls of one-room homes, made of makeshift materials and filled with rag-tag possessions. Yet these photos share an uncanny sense of beauty and empathy. “Has there ever been such an expansive visual representation of claustrophobia?” writes Philip Gourevitch in the intro. Bendiksen’s work reveals not only his subjects’ poverty but also their ingenuity; as Gourevitch points out: “People are adaptable.” —J.C.
Print
Stumble It 
Comments
Be the first to comment!