It therefore gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of issue 17, our first release of the new calendar. To view it, please go to www.1000wordsmag.com
We bring you a new project from Christian Patterson, entitled Bottom of the Lake, made over two days when he was home for the holidays at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a small city perched on the southern end of Lake Winnebago in the US. Accompanied here by an essay from Milwaukee Art Museum’s Curator of Photography, Lisa Sutcliffe, the series maintains the emotional distance of his critically acclaimed Redheaded Peckerwood, and is not so much a story about returning home, instead it speaks to transformations in vision and point of view as one evolves as a person.
Elsewhere, the renowned photography critic and former recipient of ICP’s Infinity Award for Writing, Gerry Badger reviews Doug Rickard’s eagerly anticipated new book N.A (National Anthem), which continues the current tradition of American documentary photography, essentially telling stories about the country. But, as Badger notes, is ‘documentary’ the most apt way to describe a publication largely compiled from blurred screen grabs from You Tube videos?
Academic and independent curator, Duncan Wooldridge brings us an essay on EJ Major’s Love is…. ahead of her major solo show at Forum für Fotografie in Cologne, Germany later this year. For this work, Major methodically selected an image from each frame from Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, printing 7000 postcards. On the verso, she included the prompt ‘love is…’ so that recipients of her cards - strangers, living across the UK - were invited to return them, with or without response, to a freepost address, printed on the right hand side of the card’s reverse.
In a different feature, Michael Grieve takes a look at the recently released title from Max Strom, a survey of the forty-year career of preeminent Swedish photographer, Anders Petersen. Instinctive, unconscious and shot from the gut, Grieves describes Petersen’s photographs as “fragments of a strangeness of reality, the contorted and juxtaposition of expressions, clothes, bodies, objects, stuff, feelings, skin, indeed all that is out there.”
Brad Feuerhelm catches up with Cristina De Middel in London to discuss Party, the follow up to her meteorically successful photobook, The Afronauts. A subversive reworking of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, commonly known as the Little Red Book, De Middel combines photographs from a recent trip to China with negations of the original text to devastating and often satirical effect.
And last but by no means least, we are extremely proud to reveal the first of four pieces of newly commissioned photographic work from the 1000 Words Award winners. Here, our Editor-in-Chief, Tim Clark, has penned an essay on Virgílio Ferreira’s Being and Becoming. Couched in a symbolic, literary mode of photography, the series is a subjective and dreamy meditation on the lives and environments of several migrant workers from Portugal, who left their country of birth to start a new life in new lands, principally due to economic reasons. The series will be shown as part of a group exhibition curated by 1000 Words at Flowers Gallery in London during June 2014.
Over in our dedicated Books column, Tom Claxton pulls back the veil on Linda Fregni Nagler’s Hidden Mother published with MACK, an extraordinary collection of predominantly late-nineteenth century portraits of mothers who have modestly sacrificed their own depiction in order to exhibit their precious infants as the centrepieces of the photographic ritual; David Moore considers the limits of allegory in Robert Hutinki’s elegic ATAVISM by Akina Books, which ostensibly shows family archives from Celje in Slovenia, prior to the Nazi holocaust, that are then redacted and excavated; and finally Federica Chiocchetti sits down with José Pedro Cortes’ Costa, a hypnotic new title from the exciting Portuguese imprint Pierre Von Kleist Editions, that drags us on a journey to the pocket of natural and suburban wilderness that lies 14km south of Lisbon.
Thanks to the writers and photographers, as well as their studios, galleries and publishers, who have provided assistance in making this issue of the magazine project possible. Extended thanks to our newly appointed Editorial Assistant, Dominic Bell, for his outstanding work on production and a special mention to Leica who have graciously supported this edition of 1000 Words.
