Try To Praise The Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Darker Diamond, the work of John Opera

© John Opera, All Rights Reserved

I discovered John Opera's work the other day when looking at the forthcoming MP3 book by Aperture this spring. Combining Romantic landscape and modernist abstractions, Opera's photographs toy with the historicized themes of the sublime landscape and modernist abstract photography. While mixing these two disparate modes of photographic representation may seem odd, or jarring, at first, together the different images highlight the messy convergence and construct of both the exterior, natural world, and the interior, personal abstracted world.

Like artists such as Walead Beshty or Florian Maier-Aichen, the work cleverly draws on and critiques historical modes of photographic representation to explore and challenge the medium. As Opera states in an interview,

There is the photo ghetto: the photo world that folds in on itself that is only really serving itself. It’s associated with the grand failures of photography in the twentieth-century, and it includes the whole feminist critique of photography being a machismo mode of representation, or the myth of the “decisive moment,” or staging. There’s part of photography that’s still closely connected to failures in late Modernism that most other art forms have recognized and moved on from.

Find out more about his work here and here.


© John Opera, All Rights Reserved


© John Opera, All Rights Reserved

spring book spring

© Doug DuBois, All Rights Reserved

Being an unrepentant bibliophile, I can't resist being excited about the latest crop of Aperture books. They've just released their Spring Catalog, and they've got a number of cool books coming out. Among the books are Thomas Ruff's book JPGS, The Edge of Vision (Lyle Rexer's exploration of contemporary photographic abstraction), Vol. 2 of the MP3 Project (Curtis Mann, John Opera and Stacia Yeapanis), a Magnum compilation on the effect of AIDS wordlwide, and a book called Photography After Frank, an essay compilation which explores Robert Frank's neverending influence.

However, there are a couple of books I'm most excited to see. The first is entitled Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s, and is edited by Ryuichi Kaneko, the curator of the Tokyo's Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Riding on the success of Parr and Badger's books, as well as Roth's book, 101 Photography Books, this is another in a growing list of photobooks on photobooks. Hopefully, along with more recent re-publications of important Provoke and other seminal Japanese photobooks, this book will help fill the gap in the West's knowledge about Japanese photography and books, and their profound significance for the medium. Although I'm admittedly often perplexed by the faint trickle of tomes that make their way to the US, the wealth, volume and variety of work in Japanese photobooks is exciting. Given the often narrow range of creative influence for young photographers in the US, the variety and radically different nature of the work is welcome.

I'm also excited to see books by both Eirik Johnson and Doug Dubois. Eirik Johnson won the Santa Fe Prize a couple of years ago for his project Borderlands, which was subsequently published as a book by Twin Palms. His new body of work, entitled Sawdust Mountain, explores the fragile relationship between man, industry and nature in the Pacific Northwest. Although travelling well-worn paths, Johnson manages to offer fresh and interesting images that further probe our conflicted relationship with nature. Likewise, Doug Dubois' book All The Nights And Days, is another exciting publication by a well-deserving and excellent photographer on a familiar subject. The culmination of over twenty-years, DuBois' tender and smart pictures of his family manage to avoid the ready clichés of photographing the family while remaining evocative and touching. Began after his father suffered an on a commuter train, the work explores the subtle frailties and daily emotion struggles of a family. Sadly, we have to wait all winter to see these treasures.

© Eirik Johnson, All Rights Reserved

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