Susan Meiselas joined the famed photo agency Magnum in 1976; the women already on board were Eve Arnold, Mary Ellen Mark, Inge Morath, Abigail Heyman, and Jill Freedman. Three black-and-white photobooks that took up second-wave feminist themes quickly emerged from this diverse crew: Arnold’s The Unretouched Woman (1976), Heyman’s Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal (1974), and Meiselas’s Carnival Strippers (1976). Arnold’s volume gathered her revelatory images of women and celebrities—Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich—that were not retouched or staged. Meiselas’s book stemmed from her four-year look at fairground striptease sideshows around the eastern US. And Heyman’s united the personal and the political through handwritten diaristic writings paired with frank portraits of women, including a self-portrait taken in 1972 while she was getting an abortion. “Nothing ever made me feel more like a sex object than going through an abortion alone,” she writes. These volumes were brought together for an admirable exhibition curated by Clara Bouveresse for the 2019 Rencontres photography festival in Arles. UNRETOUCHED WOMEN: FEMMES À L’OEUVRE, FEMMES À L’ÉPREUVE DE L’IMAGE (Actes Sud, $39), a companion book to the show, is smartly broken up into two parts: “Women Behind the Lens,” which features contact sheets, maquettes, and other production documentation, and “Women Before the Lens,” which looks at connections in the images covering makeup and presentation, intimacy and the body, and women at work. “Behind” and “before”: These photographers were always bearing witness. Yet it’s Heyman’s work that stands out as testimony. Perhaps that’s because, as Meiselas asserts, “her work expressed a personal subjective voice, right from the beginning, she placed herself as a woman, as a young mother, as a partner, and wrote from that specific place.” —LAUREN O’NEILL-BUTLER
2019 was a banner year for the American feminist artist Kiki Smith. She had multiple solo exhibitions across Europe, including one at a slaughterhouse in Hydra, Greece, which I was lucky enough to catch. “Memory” was jaw-droppingly good as a small, site-specific project. It demonstrated how so much of Smith’s work is based on the symbolism she gleaned from her childhood—the fairy tales and folklore of the Grimm brothers—and from the models she made as a kid for her father, the sculptor Tony Smith. Installed around the abattoir were bronze talismans of stray cats, a donkey, an owl, and a mer-goat. It left me hungry to see her survey at the Monnaie de Paris later that fall, featuring a hundred works Smith produced between 1983 and 2019. I didn’t make it, but thankfully there’s KIKI SMITH (Silvana Editoriale, $40), the illustrated exhibition catalogue, which showcases her bronzes and plasters, tapestries and porcelains, waxes and works on paper. The book includes a detailed chronology and a glossary of keywords relating to her work. Through its color illustrations, it highlights her long-running penchant for female figures, witches, and animal iconography. Best of all, each work is paired with a short statement by the artist. It turns out this show was perfectly suited to the building it was held in, the old Paris mint. Regarding 1995’s Body, Smith notes, “As I was a collector of coins with holes in them, and liked working in gold, I made the nipples of the figure by repoussé (hammering the metal) and the pubic hair out of coins.” —L. O-B.
TO EXALT THE EPHEMERAL: ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW, 1962–1972 (Hauser & Wirth, $50) brims with gorgeous photographs of the Polish sculptor’s protean forms, which sometimes seduce, sometimes repel, and always beguile: glowing lamps cast from the artist’s lips, rolling bellies molded out of pitchy foam, sallow tumorous lumps, a crumpled portrait of her son, his face splayed out like a pressed flower. These all date from the last decade of Szapocznikow’s life, her most rabidly inventive period, when she was pioneering the use of new industrial materials, especially synthetic polyester resin and polyurethane foam, liquids she had to manipulate in a matter of minutes before they solidified.
That Szapocznikow based many of her delirious sculptures on her own body has often been interpreted as a symptom of her traumas: her childhood in Poland’s concentration camps; the experimental treatment for tuberculosis that left her infertile; the fight with breast cancer, which claimed her life in 1973. The book’s two thin prefatory essays, by New Museum curator Margot Norton and Walker Art Center curator Pavel S. Pyś, emphasize those traumas, but Norton also notes that Szapocznikow’s biography has overdetermined readings of her works. Indeed, the artist’s reliance on her own body also had to do with economy and convenience and lighthearted erotic performance. Most of all, grasping at her changing self, much like experimenting with volatile materials, was part of her ecstatic hunt to capture mercuriality—and, as the reproductions in this book reveal, that ecstasy shines through the darkness eddying around her. —ANIA SZREMSKI
“History writes itself in figures and diagrams,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1897. He demonstrated this claim’s truth three years later at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The fair, which was intended to celebrate the accomplishments of the nineteenth century and usher in the twentieth, included “The Exhibition of American Negroes,” for which Du Bois contributed a portfolio of photographs, maps, charts, and infographics. (The project was a collaboration with a team of black sociology students at Atlanta University. Other contributors to the exhibition included Booker T. Washington and bibliographer Daniel A. P. Murray.) Over the past few years, interest in these graphs has grown. I first saw them exhibited at an ethnographic museum in Paris in 2016. The Princeton Architectural Press reprinted them, for the first time in color, two years later. Now, in BLACK LIVES 1900: W. E. B. DU BOIS AT THE PARIS EXPOSITION (Redstone Press, $35), they’ve been enlarged to coffee-table-book proportions and are joined by a selection of photos from the exposition.
The book presents the charts and photographs in thematic and at times poetic pairings. On the left side of a two-page spread there’s a graph, “The Rise of the Negroes from Slavery to Freedom in One Generation,” that shows two sets of red, black, and green bars representing the transformation of slaves into landless sharecroppers and of free black workers into peasant proprietors. On the right, there’s an unsettling photograph of two smiling girls on a sparse country porch, with a large dog standing in front of them. Owing to the length of the exposure, the animal seems like an apparition, its legs appearing to be bound to one another by a length of vanishing chain. Juxtapositions like this unite two sides of Du Bois’s practice: a speculative account of the philosophical meaning of history, as characterized by works such as The Souls of Black Folk, and an empirical recording of events. Together, they come close to Du Bois’s ideal for sociology: “a philosophy of history with modest and mundane ends.” By recovering his mode of presentation—illustrating impersonal forces beside portraits of individuals, their homes and their workplaces—this volume gives further evidence, if such is still needed, of Du Bois’s rich dialectical method. —CIARÁN FINLAYSON
In his 2017 photobook Blind Spot, Teju Cole writes: “I like to visit Switzerland. When I’m not there, I long for it, but what I long for is . . . the feeling of leaving again so I can continue to long for it.” That feeling—and locale—is the focus of FERNWEH (Mack, $45), a photo-travelogue compiled during six trips to Switzerland between 2014 and 2018 (the title is a German word meaning, roughly, “a longing to be far away”). While Blind Spot was about motion, Cole’s new volume is about a return to stillness.
Since his 2011 novel Open City, Cole has joined the I and the eye, crafting forlorn works of wandering and exile—like an American W. G. Sebald—through text, image, or a combination of the two. Here, then, are empty restaurants overlooking Alpine lakes, shadowy hotels, and ghostly reflections of storefronts. Gravel and uncut grass, which, even in their chaos, are judiciously lighted and thus seem orderly. There is a near-total lack of people: Cole’s Switzerland isn’t just off-season, it’s off-limits. The writing seems to sway between recollection and afterthought—a quick line dashed off on a postcard on the way out the door. In reality, it is a sparse collage of lines lifted from a nineteenth-century guidebook. This is Cole not as the writer or the photographer but rather as the poet of erasure. —HUNTER BRAITHWAITE
For the past fifty-plus years, Stephen Shore has been asking a simple question: Can photography be stripped of photographic convention? Previously black-and-white, serious, and mannered, the medium was dragged into the gaudy present in the 1970s by the likes of Shore and William Eggleston. To create a living vision of the American scene, Shore rode past Pop art, straight documentary, Conceptualism, and vernacular photography, passing Andy Warhol (an old pal), Walker Evans, and Ed Ruscha on the way. Shore’s style was funnier, more personal, and warmer than almost anything that had come before. Crucially, he never strains to find the everyday profound—he just acknowledges how great the world already is. Two of his most influential series, “American Surfaces” (1972–73) and “Uncommon Places” (1982), approach his animating query from opposing directions. The first was a succession of color snapshots: quick, seemingly unstudied takes on ’70s eyesore wallpaper, glinting water fountains, and diner meals of milk, melon, and pancakes. For the second, Shore switched to large-format film and made highly structured, flawlessly composed photos of parking lots, gas stations, and the main drags of Anywhere, USA, mimicking the stoned realization that everything is perfectly poised in relation to everything else. TRANSPARENCIES: SMALL CAMERA WORKS 1971–1979 (Mack, $65) is a coupling of these two Shores. Taken as he crisscrossed the country for “Uncommon Places,” the photos were shot with a pocket-size Leica. The landscape looks familiar—liquor stores and soul-food joints, advertisements and paved paradises—but Shore frames it slantwise, calling to mind a canny spy from a better, stranger land, à la Vivian Maier and, unavoidably, Eggleston. Shore often said he wanted his images to be more like talking than writing. The pictures here hold the room with frank, sly, and spellbinding conversation. —DAVID O’NEILL
