A little while ago, I wrote a post entitled We Need Better Critical Writing about Photography, in which I voiced my frustration about... well, I suppose I don't need to spell it out again. I stand by what I wrote. But I am also happy to report that there is hope, and quite a bit of it, in the form of Gerry Badger's The Pleasures of Good Photographs, released just a little while ago by Aperture. (more)

The Pleasures of Good Photographs divides in three parts, with an interlude ("The Walk to Paradise Garden") separating two bits of about equal size. The interlude shows photographs of paths or roadways, with a one-page meditation by Badger on each image. The other two parts contain essays, each around ten pages long, about selected topics, a grand total of 16 of them, plus a general introduction.

If you are familiar with Badger's writing you know that you are in for a treat. The book not only (re-)introduces the reader with the pleasures to be had from looking at photographs, it also makes the case for good writing about photography. Badger's style is elegant, eloquent, and engaging, even where the author is speaking about photography that the reader might not quite find as moving.

For me, this is the pleasure of being in the presence of good writing about photography: You enjoy the text even when you find the photography in question most disagreeable. Especially in the first essays, Badger talks about some subject matters that might not have need yet another iteration. Not that I find for example Atget's images disagreeable, but I am not so sure I really needed yet another text about the artist and Szarkowski's role. That said, I found myself enjoying it regardless.

Of course, reading an essay about photography I am not particularly fond of is an opportunity to learn something: How much easier is it to gloss over an article about one's favourite photographers - and reconfirm one's already established opinions yet again!

The punchiest stuff comes near the end, in Badger's 1-2-3 combination "From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman: An Exhibition Proposal", "Without Author or Art: The 'Quiet' Photograph", and "Elliptical Narratives: Some Thoughts on Photobooks." (boxing aficionados will hopefully forgive me for extended their expression beyond 1 and 2)

I hope that especially "From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman" will not only be read and discussed widely, but that it will also result in the exhibition (and re-evaluation!) of overlooked female photographers Badger proposes. It is overdue. Needless to say, as someone who has been spending a lot of time looking at and thinking about designs of photobooks "Elliptical Narratives" is another must-read for me.

Clearly, The Pleasures of Good Photographs is a must-have for anyone interested in photography.

Jörn Vanhöfen's Detroit (pdf) is still work in progress, and I'm looking forward to seeing the final result. I do like the presentation in the <a href="http://www.joernvanhoefen.de/detroit.pdf" target="_blank">pdf quite a bit.

"Last year I began a series of paint-by-numbers entitled Southern Sensations. Each of the images began as a photograph, from which I removed all color, shading, and most of the intricate detail in favor of black lines, negative space and numbers which correspond to the colors that were present. It was a long and drawn out process that basically reduced my original photographs into line drawings on watercolor paper, which would have taken me years to make otherwise." - Kristen Sykes

Earlier this year, MAS Studio's Iker Gil emailed me to ask whether I would be willing to write an essay about photography and information for an issue of MAS Context. You'd imagine that's straightforward, but the more I thought about it the fuzzier it got. In the end, I decided to try to throw a curveball, writing mostly about photography and meaning - meaning, of course, being directly related to the information in a photograph (or so we think). The issue of MAS Context is now online, beautifully designed, and you can download a pdf copy here.

I decided to compile my thoughts about Kikuji Kawada's The Map into a post and share them. You can find the piece here.

"Invisible borders is a photographic project that is organised and executed annually by as many as 10 Nigerian photographers. The project is trans African in its orientation, and sees participating artists collectively taking road trips across Africa to explore and participate in various photographic events , festivals and exhibitions. The emphasis is primarily on the individual and collective journey of the participating artists who during, the momentary stops in capital cities; create photographic works that often reflect their individual approach to engaging with the populace as well as local artists and art practioners."

There are quite a few images in Jonathan Levitt's wake to songbirds wake to crows, which might make things a bit overwhelming. Regardless, the project is well worth the visit.

The multiple exposures in Phillip Maisel's A More Open Place were produced by flipping through Facebook photo albums, with a camera pointed at the computer screen. The results are often intriguing.

First things first: That's not the cover of Saskia Schüler's Es hat sich alles einfach so ergeben [Things just happened that way]. Turns out finding the actual cover larger than postage-stamp size online is... errrr... impossible - as is finding a website for the artist other than this one, which in terms of making the work look terrible is a resounding success. Oh, and this isn't even photography. Given I got that out of the way, I might as well talk about the book. (more)

I have the feeling that at some stage, we'll stop talking about photography as something that is completely separate from other forms of visual art. Instead, we will simply accept it as a form of image-making, with at best a fuzzy boundary where photography ends and, for example, computer-generated images start. At that stage, what we think of today as "straight" photography will sit somewhere in a huge matrix of image-making. We will probably call it photography, and we will know (and understand) that its images are as real (or not real) as computer-generated images. We will all laugh heartily at our old selves having debates about how much Photoshop we want to allow etc.

If we think about image making, Schüler's connection to photography or computer-generated imagery is obvious: Hers are images that often are clearly derived from photography or that look, for lack of a better word, pixellated. Take her latest work, for example Er hat immer für sie gekocht (German artists seem to love nothing more than a) pretending that the internet does not exist and b) coming up with mock-serious [or serious? I can't tell] titles for their art works). Its basis is a b/w photograph of the interior of a fridge. Part of that photograph have been turned into a separate image, in which the artist used tiny iron-on beads to recreate (or maybe transform) part of the original photographic image into a different kind of image.

Most of Schüler's art pieces work this way, using very small grids filled with either iron-on beads, seemingly endlessly repeated short phrases (using different colours to create the final image), or rows and rows of repeated patterns, applied with pencils. It's not hard to see how here it's not clear how to divide art and obsession.

What is striking about Es hat sich alles einfach so ergeben is how well the resulting images work. It is important to realize that the fact that the work was created in such an obsessive way is not what makes it. The concept itself is not revolutionary, either. Instead, Schüler shows us a different way to produce images, one that ultimately is not so far from photography - either conceptually or the way it was produced (using photographs as source images).

Maybe this is another way to look at this all: Is photography dead? Yes, it is - in the sense of it being a form of image making that is detached, separate from other forms of image making. No, it isn't - it has actually just got interesting.

Oh, and Es hat sich alles einfach so ergeben (a hardcover!) can be had for 19 Euros - which is around 25 bucks. You might have to order it online, somewhere in Germany, though.

Es hat sich alles einfach so ergeben, art work by Saskia Schüler, 64 pages, Kehrer, 2010

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Almost 2,000 people lost their lives, with an estimated property damage of the order of 90 billion US$ (this is where I found these numbers - just so you have an idea how much money that is, it 's about ten billion US$ less than what is currently being spent every year in Afghanistan to prop up that country's corrupt regime, see this news report). While most Americans were lucky enough to be outside of the hurricane's zone of impact, it still managed to send powerful shock waves across the country. During the first days people watched in horror - on live TV - as New Orleans was flooded, people were fighting for their lives, and no help was in sight. Later, scores of books with images from the immediate aftermath were published, to try to reveal the extent of what had happened. (more)

Richard Misrach's Destroy This Memory is one of the latest examples, released at the occasion of the hurrican's five-year anniversary. The book contains photographs Misrach took with a small digital ("4 MP pocket") camera. "Artist's royalties for this project," we are being told, "are being donated to the Make It Right Foundation, which is currently rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans." Apart from the colophon, there is no text in the book, there are not even page numbers.

Actually, there is text, it's the graffiti in the images, with short messages such as "Destroy this Memory," "Help! Help!," "I am here I have a gun," "Looters shot - survivors shot again," or "Fuck you." There also are phone numbers and names, or longer messages.

Whether these messages indeed "offer a searing testament that continues to speak volumes" (this quoted from the book's description on Amazon) I am not so sure, however. Or maybe I need to phrase this slightly differently: Given that five years have passed, isn't it time to ask questions? Isn't it time to try to understand what we have learned - assuming, of course, that we have learned something? To be honest I do think that the lack of an essay in Destroy This Memory that puts what we see into perspective is very fortunate (especially in the light of, for example, the essay in Trevor Paglen's Invisible). Without an essay, the photography in Destroy This Memory puts us back into the state we were in a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina, as these kinds of images emerged.

Now, five years later, isn't it finally time to ask some questions? To demand answers? Isn't it time to put things into perspective? The displays of anger, frustration, and often violent helplessness in Destroy This Memory are perfectly understandable. But they don't serve us very well if we want to make sure that something like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina won't happen again. Hurricanes are unpreventable, but the country's inability to come to its citizens help immediately - that is something we need to prevent from happening again. We also have to make sure that those who still are in need in New Orleans, five years after the disaster, finally get help.

Hopefully, Destroy This Memory will stir a debate and make people ask questions. Anger, frustration, and feelings of helplessness are not the tools we need to fix whatever needs to be fixed. But they might at least serve as catalysts for us to get out of the slumber we're finding ourselves in again, five years after almost 2,000 people died when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

Destroy This Memory, photographs by Richard Misrach, 140 pages, Aperture, 2010