Tag: Museum of Modern Art

Paul Graham show/interview

A shimmer of possiblity, which is the title of Paul Graham’s newest book project—it’s actually a set of 12 thin volumes boxed together—is now on view as an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, until May 18th. I’ve just arrived in town for the 2009 AIPAD show and I’m looking forward to seeing the work at MoMA in the next week.

PDN magazine recently published an interview with the photographer which you can read here, and in which he discusses, among other things, the influence of literature and literary theory on his photography. When I was editor of the photo-eye Booklist, I commissioned an interview between Graham and esteemed critic Richard Woodward, when the book first came out, and it ran in the Fall 2007 issue, which you can view here.

Tags: Museum of Modern Art, Paul Graham, Steidl
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Aperture 194, Spring 2009

Traditional chemical photography is an extraordinarily flexible field, which, even as it disappears, has hardly been touched.—Richard Benson

The Spring 2009 issue of Aperture (194) arrived today with my review of Richard Benson’s recently published book, The Printed Picture. The book, which stands on its own, also accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, and which, thankfully, is still open for viewing (through July 13, 2009). For ANYONE interested in the history of image-making, reproduction techniques, and the history of photography and photographic practices, this show (and book) is an absolute MUST.

Here’s an excerpt from my review of the book:

Benson, a photographer and master printer, has a methodical mind and approaches his subject systematically; The Printed Picture is thus, at its most basic level, a textbook—though the writing is never pedantic or stuffy. Benson developed the material presented here over the course of thirty years of teaching at Yale University, and reading his words is not unlike the experience of being in a lecture hall. Each chapter presents a class of printing processes (such as “relief printing” or “non-silver processes”), and each derivative process within that chapter is limited to a double-page spread complete with illustration and detail enlargement. Entire processes are distilled to three or four paragraphs at most—digestible, succinct, and engaging.

In the first 100 pages of this 338-page book Benson takes great pains to cover all the known processes, and offers a sturdy and admirably comprehensible outline of the fundamental approaches to reproduction prior to photography. In the book’s first four chapters he discusses relief, intaglio, and planographic printing—the triumvirate of ink-on-paper printing techniques—along with early multiple-impression color processes and such elementary printing methods as stencils, rubbings, silhouettes, and the typewriter. All these early techniques, some of which have been around for centuries (in certain cases millennia), seem to have played an important role on the inexorable passage toward the invention of photography. …

The Printed Picture will speak most clearly to those readers who have spent years in the halls of art schools and love the smell of ink and turpentine, who wax poetic at the sight of fixer-stained trays, or geek out over a mammoth-plate albumen print. By the end of the book, it is clear that materiality and man’s incessant curiosity are the central themes of The Printed Picture. The love of objects and of evidence of the artist’s hand—as un-digital as that may sound—are still both relevant and worthy of celebrating. —Darius Himes.

Enjoy!

Tags: Aperture, Museum of Modern Art, Richard Benson
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