Hollywood “The Krazy Edition” by Bumdog Torres

This is not a review. I am not qualified to speak about homelessness and homeless people, which is the main subject matter of this book. Bumdog Torres (the author) is, however, because he speaks as one of them.

Bumdog Torres is “a career homeless bum who sells photo prints, DVDs, Photobooks, T-shirts”, according to his Instagram profile, which is a somewhat modest description given his photobooks have been reviewed by Robin Titchener and he counts the great and the good (photobgraphers and photobook enthusiasts) among his followers.

This book is nearly an inch thick (about 2.5cm). It has photos and text in roughly equal measure. At times, the whole page is text. It is part story-telling and part diary/journal and 100% gripping (to me anyway. I pretty much read through it in one sitting).

Jim Goldberg’s Raised By Wolves is an early inspiration.

In a similar vein to Jim Goldberg’s “Raised by Wolves”, to whom the book is jointly dedicated, this is a raw, unflinching, at times tender and compassionate, glimpse into the homeless community in Hollywood (his family, as Torres calls them) with a special focus on one character called Krazy, a teenage homeless girl, which takes up about a third of the book. Though not explicit after the first few pages where he talks about himself, Torres’s presence and his relationships with the people he photographs comes through.

Of his photography, Torres writes “ If met someone who I thought could genuine comprehend what I was saying, Id tell them the real deeper truth. "I do this to keep from going crazy. When youre out here on the streets and if you dont have a project to keep your mind busy you'll go insane." To that they would say "I hear you. That's the truth. Yeah you can take my picture bro."“

“Im taking photos of my family. My photo books aren’t Books of Photography, they’re my family albums, for my family to be remembered.”

Of his photogrpahing the homeless people, he says “... he was taking photos of his subject. Im taking photos of my family. My photo books aren't Books of Photography, they're my family albums, for my family to be remembered.”

Of Krazy, “Despite how innocent and sweet she was there was a dark doom around her aura. you could feel it”. The story of Krazy would get darker and darker as it unfolded. This is real life but it would not be amiss as a movie plot. Torres posted a 60-part series on his Instagram account and it is worth a read.

*Typos in the quotations are as per the book.

Mike Brodie of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (APOJP) fame, makes an appearance. Torres talks about his encounter with Brodie and demystifies the man, the myth and the legend. Warts and all.

Self-published. 1st Draft of 50 copies.

Venice by Giacomo Brunelli (June 2022)

Giacomo Brunelli's latest offering sees him turning his eye and camera to Venice. He says that "Venice is a project I decided to start in response to the fragility of the city after the exceptional November 2019 'Acqua Alta' …" It is his first self-published book and in his unique style, Giacomo gives us an expressionistic and atmospheric interpretation of Venice.

For those not familiar with Giacomo’s work, it can be loosely summed up as film noir street photography. However, he has published books on subjects as diverse as animals (The Animals, his first book) and Self Portraits (published 2017). He has also published New York, Eternal London, and Hamburg.

I first came across Giacomo's work through his book Eternal London (2016), which followed an exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in 2014. I remember being struck by his style and it left a strong impression on me.

Eternal London Exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery 2014

---

I made a modest contribution to Venice: I was fortunate to work with Giacomo in the very early stages of Venice, mocking up ideas for the cover, and then helping with the digital book layout.

The first 250 copies of Venice are numbered and signed. There are also two limited special editions of with prints (these are not in the book). Venice and other books are available from his website here . Venice is also available at The Photographers' Gallery bookshop here.

I have also made a photobook flip-through of Venice. You can view it on YouTube here.

The Troubles by Chris Steele-Perkins

This work is made up of images from when Chris Steele-Perkins first went to Belfast in 1978 as part of a project looking at inner city poverty in the UK. He stayed at a Catholic West Belfast housing development and covered that community, and also made more familiar images of the Troubles.

In 2008, 10 years after the Good Friday Agreement, he went back to Northern Ireland on assignment for The Times, tracked down people he had met 30 years ago, and photographed and interviewed them.

This is what makes the book very interesting for me: the passage of time, what has happened to the people since then and what they thought looking back over 30 years. The interviews were quite eye-opening: many just wanted peace and to get on with their lives. One of the interviewees said "We were always taught by my mother that it was someone else's son - not to hate, and not to judge." It wasn’t a sentiment I had expected.

Northern Ireland had always been like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle for me, of which I had only 30 mostly unconnected pieces. Pieces that had pushed themselves onto my consciousness as news headlines of yet another violent action. This book didn’t give me the connecting pieces but it led me to read more about Northern Ireland and now I am at least more familiar with its history.

Since 2008, Brexit happened and has caused a rise in tension over, among other things, the sea border. I would not have known this had it not been for the Instagram account of @andrewj.98 , who provides an on the ground and current view of these tensions.

This book does not give you the big picture of Northern Ireland, and it does not claim to: it is a personal view and experience of Belfast during and after the Troubles. As Steele-Perkins himself writes in the Introduction, he was "not there to illustrate a thesis, but to enter into the unknown, interacting and responding, and attempting to remain honest."

Look at it as one or two more pieces of the jigsaw.

PS:

After I posted this to my Instagram account, Chris Steele-Perkins made a comment to the post, reproduced below verbatim.

“Thanks Kyun for your thoughts. It is worth mentioning that I commissioned a text for the book about growing up in West (republican) more or less, Belfast, by Paul McCorry, a friend of mine. The text is atmospheric and anecdotal, rather than Analytical. Also, I was not in Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday, but by a strange coincidence I was witness to the Milltown Cemetery Attack.”

Book details

Titel: The Troubles
Photographer: Chris Steele-Perkins
Publisher: Bluecoat Press
ISBN 9781908457653
Hardback
B/W and colour 270 x 290mm landscape + 144pp

You can purchase the book at Bluecoat Press.

Non-fiction Novel on Northern Ireland

If you are interested in reading more about Northern Ireland, I can recommend this non-fiction novel by Ian Cobain called Anatomy Of A Killing. It is the story of the killing of an off duty policeman by the IRA but it also weaves in the key events of Northern Ireland and the Troubles around that story.

You can find the book on Amazon here. Or at any of your favourite bookstores.

Anywhere but here by Alison McCauley

“In Anywhere but here, Alison McCauley expresses the restless feeling that has haunted her throughout her life: that the place she is in isn’t where she should be, and a conviction that the next place will be better … Devoid of geographical and temporal reference points, the images are figuratively and literally blurred to emphasise that this is not about location or time, but rather a state of mind.”

My favourite photobook of 2021 and one that has inspired me most, being so close to what I’m trying to do myself. When my images grow up, these are what they want to be. Alison’s blurry, ephemeral, dreamlike, with a sense of transience, are truly visual expressions of a state of mind.

Every page is a delight, and with every page I turn, I go “Yes! I get that!”, followed by huge admiration for the technique.

The image of the dazzling light and bokeh (slide 5) is one that I would love to capture myself. And (slide 8) the one with the man looking out of the window from the darkness of a room, with its slivers of soft, diffused, smeared light coming in through gaps in the curtains is one that resonates powerfully with me.

Released late in 2021 (December), it nevertheless was the number 2 bestselling book of 2021 at Photobookstore (@photobookstore on Instagram) or click here to be taken straight to the book page. This book made the 2021 photobook lists of Matt Stuart, Robin Titchener and Vanessa Winship (all at the photobookstore website).

 Book Details

Title: Anywhere but here

Author: Alison McCauley

Publisher: Photo Editions 2021. Softcover, 1st edition, 108pp, 17cm x 24cm.

Traces Within by Eva Voutsaki

I’ve not had the chance in the past few months to write or post about photobooks, though I have acquired a few. I have been more selective this year about getting photobooks, mainly due to space constraints.

One of my recent acquisitions that I have enjoyed very much is Traces Within by Eva Voutsaki. It’s a beautiful book with lush, evocative, dream-like images. Indeed, the photographs are to “enable the viewer to travel smoothly and secretly into his own memories.”

It has an innovative design (see info about book below), which fits into the intention of creating a book with no obvious beginning or end and allowing the viewer to drift through the photos.

Info about the book (from her website)

“A trifold book of three booklets stitched on a concertina cover which allows for the book to be opened out in to one long strip.

The format for Traces Within was based on the idea of drifting through memories, the intention was to create a book with no obvious beginning or end and allow the viewer to drift through the photos.”

The book also includes text by Vanessa Winship (whose photobooks include “she dances on Jackson” and “Sweet Nothings”). The text forms part of story and is not an introduction for example. An excerpt of the text is below.

“She told me she was the daughter of a farmer from an Island I visited a long time ago. 

Sometimes meetings are short, intense, sometimes they last a lifetime.

What is it to be invited into a diary, to be offered a key to unlock what lies within? Long memories triggered by each lived moment, if shared, to know and understand that we are not alone. Sometimes we know where and when.”

For more images and info about the book, visit Eva Voutsaki’s website. Or visit her Instagram account @eva_voutsaki where you can also find a link to her website to order the book.

Buy the book at her website here or at Photobookstore.

I very much appreciated the personalised touches when I received my own copy. It came wrapped in white wrapping paper and a handwritten “Thank you” on it. The back cover of the book is personalised with my name and the edition number. All this gives it a nice artisanal air.

Ravens by Masahisa Fukase

“Consistently proclaimed as one of the most important photobooks in the history of the medium, Ravens by Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase was first published in 1986. Interpreted as a personal and political allegory for post-war Japan, it is a brutal yet beautiful story of love and loss.”

“Masahisa Fukase (1934-2012) is renowned for his obsessive, intense and deeply introspective photography through which he articulated his passionate and occasionally violent life. Fukase’s body of work is remarkable for the extraordinary range of visual perspectives that it encompasses.” (Michael Hoppen Gallery)

Fukase’s work has been exhibited widely at institutions such as MoMA, New York, the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, the Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

My own takeaway from what I have learnt about Masahisa Fukase is that he was a troubled artist who had difficulty relating to the world and to others and his photography became a search for self, at the expense of others including his wife and his marriage. He suffered from “existential angst and anhedonia” which “manifested in artistic self-identification with the raven and ultimately spiralled into a solitary existence and artistic practice on the edge of madness”. (Tomo Kosuga, Essay in Ravens, MACK 2017)

Born in 1934 in Hokkaido, Masahisa Fukase was the eldest child of a family who ran a family photography studio, which he was expected to take over. However, after he went to Tokyo to study photography, he became fascinated with the city and settled there.

Prior to Ravens, he had published two major books: Homo Ludence (1971), comprised of pictures of his troubled life over a ten-year period, and Yohko (1978) a book of his wife, made with painful perseverance through conflict and self-imposed separation. It was in the last period of his marriage with Yohko that be began work on Ravens.

“The start of the series was a home journey to Hokkaido in 1976. He was forty-two years old at the time. His life was in tatters due to issues with alcohol and the imminent collapse of his decade-long marriage. Unable to handle the situation, Fukase left Tokyo in the hope of escaping his problems.” (Tomo Kosuga, Essay in Ravens MACK 2017)

Ravens was published in 1986. In 1992, only six years after its publication, Fukase fell down the stairs of his favourite bar and remained in a coma for the next 20 years until his death.

Brutal? Yes. Lonely? Unbearably. Especially when you know about the internal and external struggles of the artist. But in this work, there is also a kind of beauty. A beautiful exposition of isolation and intense pain. It is perhaps best summed up by Akira Hasegawa in the Afterword to the book:

“The world that Fukase occasionally captured was a form of hell. And, the artistry to form works of art out of hell is Fukase’s alone.”