PDN - December 2011

NOTABLE PHOTO BOOKS OF 2011

Subway
bruce Davidson
aperture
Introduction by bruce Davidson; essay by Fred
brathwaite; afterword by Henry Geldzahler
144 pages
118 images, $65

as lyrical beauty: a sunset vista, glimpsed between the cars of an elevated train, and two woman waiting on a platform, their dresses rustled by a summer breeze.

This new edition by Aperture features 25 previously unpublished images, a full-bleed cover and a new essay by Fred Brathwaite (better known as Fab Five Freddy) who is nostalgic for the graffiti that form the backdrop for so many of Davidson’s images.

I opened the new edition of Bruce Davidson’s Subway on the downtown 3 train, planning to note how the subway has changed since the Magnum photographer rode miles of track in 1979 and 1980. The graffiti is gone, iPods have replaced boom boxes, fewer men ride shirtless (due either to the reliability of the air conditioning or a change in fashion). I soon realized, however, that the subway has never looked in real life the way it does in Davidson’s images. For his first sustained project shot in color, Davidson carried a strobe. The brilliant flash, combined with fluorescent lighting, intense colors and Davidson’s probing vision, produced images that are dramatic and at times surreal. Unlike Walker Evans, who photographed subway passengers surreptitiously with his camera hidden in his coat, Davidson made his presence known. As a result, he captured more direct eye contact with passengers than most daily commuters feel comfortable with.

In his introductory essay to the book, which was first published in 1986, Davidson notes that at the time he was taking the pictures, the subway was “dangerous day and night” (he was mugged twice during the project). Many of his images capture actual violence and an atmosphere of menace, as well

—Holly Stuart Hughes

Stone by Stone
taj Forer
Kehrer Verlag
Foreword by Kirsten Rian
128 pages
50 images, $60

Fiddlehead ferns neatly piled amid pine boughs. A hand reaching into a tree to pick a peach. A rosy-colored mushroom sprouting from a forest floor. Teepees made of tree limbs and pine boughs.

A bowl made of birch bark. Where are we, and what is the significance of these things? There are no captions or end notes, and the introductory essay by Kirsten Rian offers little guidance, though it alludes to Taj Forer’s interest in the primordial practices of hunter-gatherers, which continue today.

In his previous and equally contemplative book, Threefold Sun (2007), Forer examined places and objects influenced by Rudolf Steiner and the Waldorf School education system he founded, which emphasized harmony with the natural world and the fostering of free and independent thinking. It appears that once again Forer has delved into a community of free thinkers and this time shows us their foraging, hunting and shelter-making. But rather than documenting people or the lives they live, he’s chosen to study carefully what they’ve made and the natural elements their simple, no-impact lives preserve. As Rian notes, hunting and gathering has existed since ancient times, and it persists today. Without captions to root the images in any particular time or place, the book allows us to imagine we are stepping into a world that could exist at any point in human history or back into our own childhoods, when every mushroom we found in the woods suggested a house for elves, and the fun of fashioning a shelter out of tree branches could make us lose all track of time.

Deep Sea DIVeR
Danny Lyon
phaidon
Hardcover in slipcase, 136 pages
85 images, $200

—Holly Stuart Hughes

Danny Lyon didn’t want to go to China, nor did he have much interest in it as a place.

He admits this at the beginning of his text for his book Deep Sea Diver: An American
Photographer’s Journey in Shanxi, China. As a child, Lyon writes, he thought of
China as an upside-down otherworld that existed at the end of a theoretical
tunnel through the center of the earth. He was tempted to go there only after a
representative of a photography festival in Ping Yao, PIP, told him they would fly
him there first class. “I never fly first class,” he writes.

After visiting PIP and making pictures, Lyon decided he wanted to return because nobody cared that he was taking their
photograph. In other places he’d been threatened verbally and physically, “or simply told that I would have my camera
‘shoved up my ass,’” he writes. “China—the place I used to think of as Red China—was wide open.”
Lyon returned to Shanxi several times from 2005 to 2009, immersing himself in the culture as best he could with the
help of professional drivers and a young translator named Lolly, with whom he eventually had a falling out for reasons he
still doesn’t understand. He is matter of fact about the difficulties he faced finding interesting subjects, gaining access and
communicating. His stories are funny and interesting, horrifying and sad. And his black-and-white photographs show us coal
truck drivers, peripatetic opera performers, children flying kites, women playing cards, migrant workers, weddings, food stalls
and abandoned Buddhist temples.

—Conor Risch

The limited edition of 2,200, each hand-numbered by Lyon, is presented in a slipcase and is designed as a replica of Lyon’s handmade album, complete with prints “taped” to pages and notes and captions handwritten by Lyon.

At a time when a number of documentary photographers are pursuing agendas in China that range from environmentalism to human rights, Lyon’s indifference is refreshing and disarming. While Lyon chose to photograph in a province whose rich history has been heavily compromised by coal mining and industrialization, if he is saying anything more here than “I went to Shanxi and this is what I saw,” it will be up to the reader to puzzle it out. “The ‘old’ China I have been looking for has vanished before my eyes,” he writes, but this is as close to a statement of purpose as he comes.