Mi’raj has been selected as the 2024 Lucie Foundation Photobook Prize Winner.
The book will be exhibited at the Los Angeles Center of Photography during their annual book awards exhibition, opening November 21, 6-8 PM and running until December 5.
Check out the Lucie Foundation to read more about the award and this year’s shortlisted works.
My deepest gratitude goes to the award jury and the Lucie Foundation for their recognition and support of this work.
Pleased to have been selected for the Polycopies & Co. 2024 publishing support grant for my forthcoming book Adraba (in spite of…) or, InCircles (TIS Books). Following the recent publication of Mi’raj (TIS Books, 2024) and 2012’s Elementary Calculus (Mack, 2012), InCircles is my third book of work from Palestine and Israel.
In its third year, the grant provides financial assistance to support a photographer to produce a book or to contribute financially to a photography project that will result in the publication of a book.
Created in 2014, Polycopies is a non-profit for the distribution and promotion of independent photographic publishing (books, multiples, paper objects and experimental publishing practices). Every year, to coincide with Paris-Photo, Polycopies organizes its festival and transforms the Concorde-Atlantique boat and the quays of the Seine in front of it, into a large ephemeral bookshop fully dedicated to photography books. Visitors are welcomed by over eighty French and international publishers and booksellers.
A host of events, round tables, signings, professional meetings, portfolio readings..., Polycopies has become a meeting place for many amateurs, collectors, authors and publishers who like to share and confront their ideas on photography practices, understand the stakes of publishing, exchange their discoveries and favorite books, or submit dummies and see new projects being initiated.
In 2022, a second association was created. Backed by Polycopies, Polycopies &Co brings together collectors to promote the work of photographers and photography book publishing, by providing financial support for projects. Polycopies &Co is supported by the French Ministry of Culture.
The Photobookstore UK asked me to write about my favorite books of 2023.
My first ever best-of list. These are the books that circled my mental radar over the past year.
Dandelion by Seth Lower, self-published
The shoes make the man, so the saying goes. “Gotta be the shoes” Spike Lee said of Jordan. And I believe it was no less than Winogrand (the M.J. of street photography), when asked what it takes to be a great photographer, replied “a good pair of shoes.” In my experience this last adage is undeniably true; photography, as most of us engage with it, is an ambulatory art like few others.
A dense spiral bound book, Dandelion records, through color photographs and snippets of journal entries, Lower’s life together with his wife Jo-hsin during the last two years of her life as she battled cancer, and the emergence of the Covid pandemic. In it we indeed feel ourselves moving through the world on two feet, and yet, I sense not only the uncertain pace of lives moving towards an unknown destination, but the shoegaze – the downward stare of the solitary walker seeking grace, amidst the world’s wash of distorted full-volume feedback.
Cucumbers on a curb, a pile of shingles on a sidewalk, construction pits, fences, cones, dirty dishes, occasionally, pictures of Jo-hsin herself; at 580 pages, Dandelion is epic and tireless. The pictures seem as if something just happened or is about to happen – absurd hands are dealt, life is here, and waiting just around the corner – and in that pause, we’re repeatedly left to stare, to discern, to ascertain, to wonder.
By all accounts Los Angeles, where the pictures were made, is not a walking city, but it is one bathed in light, perhaps too much so. High key illumination that seems intent on exposing all the refuse, waste, decay, debris, and disintegration that forms the actual core of the American fantasy – it’s What We Bought for the 21st century and what we’ve thrown away. And thus, the shoegaze is also reflexive – a self-protective measure against the glare. But in this reflex, whether forced by sun or by sorrow, we find in Lower’s vision not a bleak perspective – but instead someone engaging with the world as it is. Someone trying to extend time, to feel real, searching for some sort of order, attempting to cobble a response to irrationality, to make it make sense, and despite seeing proof everywhere of how little rationality there is, and enduring that reality, someone who continues to look, regardless, finding instead a type of beauty, which I take as inspiration to do the same.
Go to the Land and I Will Show You by Alana Perino, Valley Books
Things as they are, and things are not what they seem – they’re certainly not what we’ve been told. Go to the Land and I Will Show You is an important book that joins the long conversation on the idea of America and the freighted landscape of a post-colonial world and provides a welcome counterpoint to the crop of books that trade in cowboys and cobwebs. Go to the Land and I Will Show You near its end finds the artist “satisfied with my dissatisfaction of failing to image the unseeable” Looking at the photographs Perino has made we too can be satisfied with this failure and can also understand it more broadly as necessary – a rejection of any manifest claim photography might make on clarity, or the photographer on omnipotence. With so much that is unseeable, and unspeakable this book’s unsettling uncertainty is our nearest truth.
The Nest by Lynn Alleva Lilley, The Eriskay Connection
In the next Parr & Badger History of the Photobook there will certainly be a chapter dedicated to “the pandemic photobook” and The Nest, a lyrical book of splendor, will be among the best. The fact that it’s a pandemic book however is beside the point, in that Lilley took the restrictions of lockdown, made good use of them, and managed to transcend the limits of that raison d’etre by reveling in the subtle movements of color and light, and through them, revealing the silence and life that was always there, waiting, listening.
Men Untitled by Carolyn Drake, TBW Books
The simplicity of this book’s title, Men Untitled, and its premise, the male body scrutinized the “way we do women’s”, belies its complexity and power – the fact that Drake took up this demanding interrogation of men (so rarely done, so rarely honest) is striking and brave. Drake’s photographs - open and inscrutable, revolting and endearing - attract and repel at the same time; we find empathy and anger bound within the same image, and volleying between the images, as we stumble from page to page, viscerally feeling the artist and her antagonist engaged in a charged dialectic. Vulnerable and damning, Men Untitled is a book of striking clarity and significant vision.
Family Tree Removal by Jordan Baumgarten, Smog Press
Young photographer’s often start with dreams of working in far flung locations and are told repeatedly by their wizened elders that they should be able to find stories “in their own backyard” – Family Tree Removal provides proof that these can indeed be words of wisdom and it does so through a deft economy of means. While photobooks often attempt to bolster narrative with complicated artifice or photographers attempt to adhere narrative to their images with complicated statements, winding up with little more than cliched, obvious and empty vessels, Baumgarten, in a written essay recounting the overdose death of his neighbor and 27 photographs documenting a feral Mulberry tree being chopped down - the majority taken from the fixed vantage of his bathroom window, depicting the space of just a few feet and made in the span of an hour - has created a complicated allegory of loss and grief, and how precariously close we ultimately all are to being cut away; how proximate the knife to life.
Excited to announce that after 13+ years in the making Mi’raj will be published by TIS Books in January 2024.
Pre-sales have launched and orders will ship in late January or early February.
The first 100 orders come with an offset printed leporello titled the gate was opened featuring 8 images not included in the book.
Also available are two special print editions each in an edition of 20 which include both the leporello and a gravure print hand-pressed in my studio.
Visit TIS Books for more information.
Getting a lot of mileage out of that easter sunday walk…
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Hand bound pamphlet stitch tri-fold single sheet book, printed on Awagami Bamboo (110 gsm) with Cone Editions Piezography Pro ink, finished with Moab Varnish.
13.2cm x 34cm (5.2” x 13.3”)
Edition of 40 (+ 10 a.p)
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check out poppy-jem press for more info.
Made a little single sheet zine last summer for my installation Easter Sunday. Riso printed at Direct Angle Press
happy to announce that i have been accepted as a new member of the artist run cooperative gallery the front in montpelier, vt.
i’ll be exhibiting easter sunday a new grid installation in show 43, the annual summer art walk group show alongside a host of vermont based visual artists.
* Easter Sunday, 2021
* 9 image grid, 7” x 8.5'“ each
I’ll be leading a penumbra foundation image threads collective workshop from may - july on the photobook.
more information can be found at penumbra foundation/sacred texts
Announcing The Folly, my third book with Brooklyn based publisher TIS Books. The Folly is one in a twelve book series of works made by an incredible group of artists during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“For TIS03 - the third installment of the TIS multi-artist series - we’ve taken advantage of this eventful time in history to expand beyond the TIS collective and include new friends and fresh outlooks.
Social and political upheaval, a tumultuous election, and a crippling pandemic that’s forced the majority of the world to shelter in place: all of this has left many artists in various states of making. After months of self-isolation some photographers began to slowly venture out again, ready to see and feel this new world of ours photographically. Others took advantage of the extra hours spent at home to photograph family or to travel in time via sifting through archives; many explored new ways to work without regular access to their studio or darkroom.
Taken together, the books in TIS03 exhibit an irrepressible artistic ingenuity born of necessity. Individually, they are cohesive worlds created as provisional response to chaos and confusion.
TIS03 is twelve books by twelve artists, sold both as a box set and as individual titles.”
i’ve got a few pictures from my upcoming book the folly (published by TIS) in an exhibition curated by Jeff Dietz at peepspace in tarrytown, ny.
“Family photographs are, for many, one of our first introductions to photography. They are ubiquitous, and at the same time precious. There is a long history in photography of artists documenting their loved ones as an act of art and love.
The definition and visual representation of American families is constantly changing. It has been a patchwork that is hard to categorize and define. The nuclear family has never fully represented the nation, nor should it be the sole beacon of aspiration. Individual family stories can help to unify and breed empathy. The challenge of being bound in name can lead to strong growth and bonding. And for some, family can be lost in blood and found in community.
Jeff Dietz is a photographer based in Tarrytown, New York. He is a graduate of the Hartford Art School and currently works as a studio manager and in-house photographer and videographer for Mamiya America Corporation. His personal practice focuses primarily on photographic artist books and zines.
The Family Of includes the work of: Jonathan Bagby, Trent Bozeman, Frances Bukovsky, J. Carrier, Nelson Chan, Jeremiah Dine, Sydney Ellison, Christian Gallo, Taylor Galloway, Juan Giraldo, Joe Johnson, Sydney Krantz, Anthoula Lelekidis, Joe Librandi-Cowan, Karl Frederick Mattson, Elizabeth McGrady, Vann Powell, Zachary P. Stephens, Christopher Stoltz, Erika Nina Suarez, Megan Tepper, Andy Vernon-Jones, Kevin Williamson, Fernando Zelaya”
works from my series potomac were selected for auction during Washington Project for the Arts Hickok-Cole art month.
untitled (drywall, 2012-2018) an image from my project mi’raj is currently on display as a part of stable arts inaugural exhibition titled ‘dialogues’ curated by Jordan Amirkhani.
back in Israel & palestine for the spring & summer
vermont. the second installment.
again one of a four volume set featuring work by tim carpenter, nelson chan and carl wooley.
available from TIS Books.
mi'raj to be published by mack books.... TBA.
TIS books, a brand new imprint out of brooklyn, NY, recently published the first installment of my ongoing work in vermont.
a series of images from the book can be seen in the gallery at left.
the book is part of a four volume set featuring work by tim carpenter, nelson chan and carl wooley.
to find out more about TIS, or to purchase books, check out tisbooks.pub.
Happy to have been invited to contribute to The Photographer's Playbook – 307 Assignments and Ideas by the best and the brightest, a ridiculous list really, edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern.
