Max Pinckers

All images © Max Pinckers

As part of our call out for portfolios for issue 17 of 1000 Words, we recently received the work of Max Pinckers into our submission inbox, for which he has deservedly received a great deal of critical acclaim, in particular his series Fourth Wall.

The project, released as a self-published book (now sold-out), explores the impact of the Bollywood industry on the broader society in India and incorporates a curious blend of documentary photography with elements of fantasy and fiction, perfectly suited to his subject matter. Originally scouted on the streets of India as an extra in Bollywood, Pinckers returned to India during the final year of his MFA at the School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium, assuming the role of director by intervening in his surroundings, with the passers-by on the street responding to the camera and its operative, as Pinkers writes:

“A photograph of two men in uniform climbing over a fence, escaping. A re-enactment of a moment that just passed. They do it over again with great pride and pleasure. Later I read an article in the newspaper. Two men use sleep-inducing gas to rob a struggling actress in her home; the same gas used in a 1972 super hit film in which a cook robs his landlord. An image that I’ve been planning to make for some time comes to mind - a thick cloud of smoke in a bedroom film set. Two men in uniform sitting in a park. I photograph them. They pretend to have just woken up. On a Bombay rooftop I make a portrait of a Salman Khan look-alike. Another article tells me how a young girl loses herself in this big city in search of her idol, Salman Khan.”

Max Pinckers was born in 1988 and lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. His work has been published, amongst others, in Dear Dave Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, Monthly Photography Magazine, IMA Magazine, De Morgen Magazine as well as part of FOAM’s most recent Talent issue. He was announced as the winner of the 2013 Winner City of Levallois Photography Award, France and the book Fourth Wall was nominated for the Best Photo Book of the Year at the 6th International Fotobookfestival, Germany and a nominated as a finalist in the Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2013. In short, a hugely promising young talent, and a definite name to remember. We look forward to seeing where he takes his practice next.

Dominic Bell

Top photobooks of 2013

It’s that time of year to reflect, and with it comes a customary list of favourite photobooks selected by members of our Advisory Board here at 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

Lieko Shiga: SPIRAL COAST/album
AKAAKA

There is a logic to Lieko Shiga’s photobook marvel SPIRAL COAST/album, but for now I want to remain as blissfully ignorant as possible. At this point in my relationship to this book I simply just want to look and become delirious for as long as possible. My favourite French surrealist writer, Georges Bataille, who I quote perhaps too often, once said something to the effect that it is the manner of expression that is more important than the content, that it the sensibility more than the intelligence in all its sensitive character that counts the most. Indeed. This book contains a bizarre yet respectable spirituality born from the disaster of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in an area of Japan that Shiga is from. But rather than pity, this book radiates an energy of reincarnation tainted with the sorrow of loss. It is a book that is at once beautiful by virtue of its wrongness.

Michael Grieve, photographer and Deputy Editor, 1000 Words

Zhao Renhui: A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World
The Institute of Critical Zoologists 


What evolves when bees become dependent on caffeine, seeking drops of nectar from factory waste? The Institute of Critical Zoologists' recent publication, A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World, maps this subject and more with an impressive set of plates collated from considerable research, documents and field notes. Charting the curious flora and fauna that have changed as a result of human habitation or scientific manipulation, the pseudo-scientific study offers an encyclopedic visual lexicon, from fish tomatoes, venomous cabbage and bioluminescent squirrels to square apples. Beautiful images of specimens in the field or still lives at the lab, together with a narrative history, make every page a pleasure to explore.

Louise Clements, curator and Artistic Director, FORMAT International Photography Festival/QUAD

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson: FAR
ADAD books

FAR is a stunning first book from a new independent publisher, ADAD books, which debuts a deeply enigmatic series of photographs of life in the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. Dubuisson’s pictures were taken in the early 90s, but then damaged, lost and refound, so the published images offer an account not only of the incredibly bleak remoteness of the place depicted, but also the effects of the passage of time, evident in the scratches and scuffs on the surfaces of each image. The book is beautifully designed and sequenced, with a text (in both Russian and English) by Boris Mikhailov, reflecting on a series of photographs frozen in the eternal present.

Simon Baker, Curator of Photography, Tate 

Rinko Kawauchi: Ametsuchi
Aperture

Ametsuchi - meaning heaven and hell in Japanese - arrived in 2013 courtesy of a near perfect photo trinity: Aperture, Rinko Kawauchi and Dutch designer Hans Gremmen, the result of which might be described as a work of photographic mysticism. It began fittingly with a dream. Seven years later Kawauchi was watching TV and, amazingly, spotted an identical image from that dream. This led her to southern Japan and, in turn, the annual and ancient practice of field burning. Ametsuchi is a remarkable meditation on transience, life cycles, and the human need for ritual. As I ploughed through 500 photo books at this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles, the book stood out as a work of exceptional depth and ambition.

The term ‘mysticism’ comes from the Greek word ‘to conceal’. In a masterstroke of photobook design, each double page fittingly conceals hidden images, folded origami-style into the book’s spine.

Nicholas Barker, film maker and collector 

Todd Hido: Excerpts from Silver Meadows

Nazraeli Press

Fascinated by the idea that photography can be a vehicle for exploring the ‘architecture of his childhood’, Todd Hido once again sets out down the street that runs through his neighbourhood in Kent, Ohio where the artist grew up. Cinematic and highly-charged with a bitter-sweet intensity, Excerpts from Silver Meadows continues Hido’s trip from the innocence of childhood to the darker side of what prevails in his own adult universe.

Effortlessly blending portraits, interiors and brooding landscapes as well as appropriated images, it’s an intricate and complex tapestry that tells Hido’s own story while employing the power of suggestion to impressive effect. With lavish production values (the book is printed on matt Japanese paper with tipped-in images on the case binding), this oversized but elegant book marks Hido’s sixth monograph to date with the esteemed publisher, Nazraeli Press.

Tim Clark, Editor in Chief, 1000 Words

Special offer from Bitcasa!

Our friends at Bitcasa are offering 1000 Words readers a special discounted offer for those planning to keep on top of their digital storage needs going into 2014.

Apart from the die-hard masters of traditional SLR photography, many of us professionals now hold vast digital libraries of photographs on our desktops, laptops, external hard drives and basically any free space we can find. Not only is storage space an issue, but despite the best cataloguing and archiving efforts, keeping track of our work and having access to it when we need it is a major challenge.

That’s where Bitcasa comes in. Bitcasa is an easy to use, private and secure cloud storage platform that allows you to protect your digital belongings and make them more useful to you. You can access, share and stream any of your photography from any device, such as your laptop, tablet, Web or phone. You can also view your digital belongings offline by marking files as a “Favourite.”

It is even possible to view RAW images on the Bitcasa Web portal at my.bitcasa.com – the format of choice for many professional photographers. Supported RAW image types include 3fr, arw, cr2, crw, dcr, dng, erf, kdc, mef, mrw, nef, orf, pef, raf, sr2 and x3f. Porfolios of any size can be shared with clients via a Web link. This makes it easy for downloading and streaming of content if you are a Bitcasa user or not.

Bitcasa knows that as photographers we are responsible for protecting our client’s digital assets. This is why it offers unmatched privacy and security with its client-side encryption. Even if someone did enter Bitcasa’s system, they could never reconstruct the files to see what was stored inside — thus ensuring your privacy at all times. This means only YOU can have access to YOUR data – the way it should be. It is the Fort Knox for your digital belongings and definitely a lot safer than the collection of external hard drives that is typical for photographers.

In terms of pricing, the service is free for users storing up to 20GB worth of content and is £10 per month for one terabyte, enough space to store 200,000 photos. For the really storage hungry, five terabytes is available for £49 per month, or you can get infinite storage for £99 per month.

However, the great news is that Bitcasa is offering all 1000 Words Photography Magazine readers a discount of 20% for its monthly or annual Premium plan if you use discount voucher PHOTO20. The code expires on the 31 January 2014.

Alberto Feijoo

All images © Alberto Feijoo

1000 Words Associate editor Brad Feuerhelm is gripped by Alberto Feijoo's self-published photo book, Something we used to know, a mash up of lost moments from music concerts running parallel to an examination of the photographer's own roots in Spain.

Alberto Feijoo’s Something we used to know is a quiet gem of a book, bent on the precipice of solitude wherein the divide of screen-based memory and empire of collated events from late 90’s to the early noughties collide.

Comprising pixellated, stepped, and glitched images of youth culture in wild throes, music concerts are revisited via DVD rips and images made from grabbing reconciled YouTube clips of the crowds at these events. All are awash in a sombre palette of colour hinting at the coppery smell of blood or an air of violence when wires get crossed at uncomfortable intervals. There’s a palpable sense of nostalgia too, but one slightly askew, as if forced into a colander and the remnants from the sieve are mashed into one idea of a memory of the time and place where scores of people shared a perception of an experience. Orphaned images, orphaned lives are appropriated for our collective familiarisation, and within this disequilibrium we conjure meta-memories fecund with what photography had previously presented us in material form.

Thinking ‘Was I there? I remember being there, but this face here in the crowd…its distortion…its dragged features…Could this have been me? It looks like me…I had that Nailbomb shirt’ and yet with a shaky hand I fondle the same shirt and I can attach no transference to it and the monster on the screen. This is the meme of self-given birth to the next meme of self, desperate for a “real” genetic disposition for the flesh that fingers its image from the console of the computer. Concrete matters dissolve into utopian super memory which collapses upon itself when applied to the representation we desperately seek through the locus of photographic image.

That said, the Spanish photographer's book is not all fodder for woe in terms of its content. There are very soft interludes of images that we can only presume are taken by Feijoo himself. Delicate still lifes in abject surroundings, such as oranges left to rot on discarded and soiled mattresses found in alleyways are interspersed with portraits - more lyrical fragments of friends, people collected, impressions even. They stand as sentimental bastions of memory for the author, his culture, the good life and currently his life under the economic collapse of his country. They represent the boom, the bust, and the lust for looking back to the golden days of untroubled youth.

There is almost a passive sublime in the work although it is achieved through the depiction of people as opposed to landscape - not a Friedrich-type sublime, but rather oracles of the personal divine found in the slow burn of change through descent. As such, this is a book full of disquiet. Yet the disquiet that is found here is asking more questions of our recent past, its interpretations and the way in which we will navigate our troubled futures.

Brad Feuerhelm

Something we used to know is self-published. To order a copy for €30.00 click here.

Osvaldo Sanviti

All images © Osvaldo Sanviti  

Italian photographer Osvaldo Sanvati, discusses the work presented here from Le Soleil moribund, a project that sets forth debate on a whole host of issues from the ethics of representing women who ply a certain trade to the consequences of online anonymity as well as matters pertaining to the frontiers of authorship and appropriating images from the Internet. The lo-fi images form part of a looking game, one of seeing without being seen, and are obviously very subjective and personal, driven by his aesthetic goals and approach.

"In 2009 I was trying to start again with my long-term project of female portraits began in 1996 and stopped for about 3 years. One day I came across on the internet on one of these live sex chats: they are public live videos where girls try to bring in private registered visitors (members) to earn money. The first thing that struck me was, from a formal and pictorial point of view, the soft palette of colors of the video (even at the expense of quality). I was also intrigued by the loneliness of the subjects, in their rooms among neon lights and closed windows, when they are in a state of intimacy with themselves, almost as if they had forgotten to be visible to an audience. (...) What I like is the live dimension, of the life flowing, the strength of unplanned and unscripted situations; I love this feeling of waiting to meet the right subject in the right situation with the right light."

After completing photography studies at Fondazione Studio Marangoni in Florence, Italy, Sanviti started focusing his research on personal projects, "trying to establish a partial and personal world, in a more lyrical than documentary way". He has contributed commissioned works for several magazines and has exhibited in Italy and abroad in shows such as Tempi in scena: mo­ments de la photographie contemporaine italien­ne (curated by Paul di Felice) in Galerie Nei Liicht, Dudelange, Luxembourg in 2001; Passaggio di testimone (curated by Filippo Maggia) in Venice, Italy in 2002; Backlight 02 in the 6th International Photographic Triennial, Tampere, Finland in 2002; and his 2007 solo exhibition at Galleria Nicola Ricci, Pietrasanta, Italy.

Special book giveaway! Paul Salveson, Between The Shell

To celebrate a milestone in our social media following (1000 Words now has 20,000+ followers on Twitter and just shy of 5,000 people who have joined the Facebook page) we are delighted to offer you the exclusive opportunity to take part in a special book giveaway.

One copy of Paul Salveson's Between the Shell, recipient of the First Book Award 2013, is up for grabs as part of the competition - courtesy of MACK.

To enter the prize draw, simply hit 'Like' on our Facebook post or use the RT function on the 1000 Words Twitter account. The winner will be selected at random and notified on 25 November.

Its retail price is £40.00, and the publication has only just this November gone on sale. Below is the blurb for the book:

Paul Salveson’s photographs were born in New York and Virginia between 2006 and 2011. Constructing images in domestic environments from items found in arm’s reach, the results are absurdist constructions in which commonplace objects are jocosely rendered in polychromatic puzzles.

Salveson describes his photographic process as "unfolding like a private performance in an empty house, or after everyone falls asleep... my engagement emerges from a perspective that precedes familiarity, disregarding the functions and cultural associations that objects are assigned. I try to process my surroundings with an alien mind."

Paul Salveson was educated at Bard College, New York (BFA Photography) and the University of Southern California (MFA thesis on toothbrush design). His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Swiss Institute, New York, and Actual Size, LA.

All images © Paul Salveson

Daniel W. Coburn

All images © Daniel W. Coburn

"In Next of Kin I explore the concept of home by recording my perceptions of family members in parables of love, reverie, respect and quiet tragedy," writes photographer Daniel W. Coburn by way of introduction to the intriguing series of photographs, which were recently submitted to the magazine for our consideration.

"After a yearlong hiatus from my hometown, I returned to re-examine my relationship with loved ones. I use the camera to describe the powerful personalities of my parents, and the complexities of their relationship. I photograph the children in my family to revisit my own childhood, which exists only as a set of fleeting, enigmatic images in my aging memory. By studying the hierarchy of control and power within the clan, I have begun to comprehend the successes and failures of my own relationships outside the family unit. My artistic process has become cathartic as I use the camera to explore my own impressions and memories of these influential characters that continue to shape my existence. Instances of domestic violence, psychological abuse, alcoholism and suicide litter my family history. These images serve as a supplement to my own broken family photo album that was assembled by my parents."

Daniel W. Coburn lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas, US. Selections from his body of work have been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York and the International Festival of Photography in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Coburn's prints are held in many public and private collections including the University of New Mexico Art Museum, The Mulvane Museum of Art, The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, The Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art and the Moraine Park Museum. Coburn received his BFA with an emphasis in photography from Washburn University where he was the recipient of numerous honours including the Charles and Margaret Pollak Award. He received his MFA with distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Photo Media at the University of Kansas.