Hasta La Ideas

Tina Barney’s new photo book beautifully blurs the line between art and reality

At 98 pages, Tina Barney’s newly-published collection of photographs is comparably miniscule to the increasingly mammoth tomes featuring artist’s work—but it’s no less powerful for it. “Players,” with its diversity of images, far from lacking in range, is a surprising compendium of mostly-never-before-seen photographs of Barney’s subjects.

The New York-born photographer is best-known for casting her lens on both the intimacy and distance coexisting within family dynamics, which can be seen in her 1997 book “Theatre of Manners,” and later in “The Europeans” (2005). As a deliberate departure from this particular subject focus, Players expands to include images of actors on stage, fashion models, circus and carnival performers, as well as Barney’s own friends.

“I’ve become tired of the typical photo book that fits into a very obvious category. I hope this book might seem like you were given a deck of cards that had been thrown up into the air, and images had fallen into place randomly without any controlled rhyme or reason,” writes Barney, who bestowed graphic designer Chip Kidd with the task of organizing her work, albeit arbitrarily.

The planned disorder is effective. Images of fashionable sylphs are arranged next to close-ups of painted actors’ faces, alongside frozen moments of seemingly quotidian family rituals, such as dinnertime and birthday parties. And yet for all these different settings and individuals, there remains a visual cadence throughout the collection. With the exception of the occasional recognizable face like Michal Stipe (who also penned the foreward, written in verse) and Willem Dafoe, it becomes difficult to discern the real family members from the actors and models, and those actors from the more elaborately-decorated circus performers, proving Barney’s point that we are all “players,” on some stage or another.

Players is currently available on the Steidl website or from
Amazon.

Novelist Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts on Harlem, gentrification and the power of unconscious style

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ debut novel “Harlem is Nowhere” finds the young author discovering herself in a foreign place that seems all too familiar. Pitts moved to Harlem after completing a Fulbright Scholarship in England, and lived in the upper Manhattan neighborhood for seven years. In that time she saw a neighborhood separated from the city within which it exists become bombarded by the outside and witnessed a community under siege. Taking her title from a Ralph Ellison essay, Pitts recounts her interactions with local historical and literary figures both real and imagined, creating a rich portrait of one of the most interesting and important cultural landmarks New York City has to offer. Cool Hunting sat down with the author to discuss her work and the neighborhood that inspired her novel.

As the first book in a trilogy, how does this lay a foundation for the series?

The book is imagined as the first part in a trilogy on African Americans in utopia, and the three parts are Harlem, Haiti and the Black Belt of the South. It’s interesting that you should ask whether it’s the foundation of that series, because you could argue that one of the other places that has a longer historical reach, which is the beginning of that idea is Haiti. Haiti was the first black republic, which is why it enters the list as the place it was first imagined where enslaved Africans could throw off their chains and create and imagine the republic. The whole history of Haiti flows from this original act, for which the people of Haiti were punished by the entire world.

Yet, in the book you talk about not going to Harlem to seek out history.

It’s hard to say yes or no. All of that history, all of those myths that I talk about were so much a part of my mind from having read all those books that I read about Harlem and the poets, the photographers—studying all of those pictures. Of course all of those stories and history were part of why I ended up there, but once I arrived there I was conscious not to be caught in some daze of nostalgia or uncritical celebration of, “Oh ,the Harlem Renaissance wasn’t it fabulous!” If I wasn’t in this rhapsody of celebration it was because I was conscious of balancing out the myth and the reality.

Is the culture of Harlem still rich in the way that you expected it?

I think it’s rich in ways I didn’t expect it. In simple everyday ways, just the way that people greet each other and look out for each other and a certain way of being a neighbor. I imagine in some neighborhood that’s the norm, but in Harlem it’s exemplified, that feeling of community in an urban setting. I think there’s a reason they call it the village of Harlem. For me there was an attempt to become a part of the place, not just to live there and sleep there, and in my attempt to become a part of the place I began to care about its future and what is going to happened to it.

What are your thoughts on the legacy of gentrification in the area?

It’s interesting, because what’s happening in Harlem is happening in a lot of other neighborhoods in New York. I remember reading—and it made me furious—a high-powered broker in the New York Times said, “they think they’re special up there why should they be different than any other neighborhood that will have retail shops and boxy condominiums?” To her obviously that’s a great thing. Why is it so different? Why is it so special? Not to discount what’s happening in other places, or to say it is not destructive in other places, because Harlem is alike other neighborhoods in New York in that way. Harlem is going through a rash of re-zonings under Mayor Bloomberg, more so than any other time period in its history, which is changing the landscape, and will change the face of the city for generations to come, period. Even if the current economic situation means you can’t see development in some places, the laws have been changed so that when the money comes back into Harlem and in other places, the band will play on.

What informs your part diary, part essay, part magical realism style?

Style is unconscious in many ways it is informed by everything I’ve ever read. I’ve certainly read a lot of Borges. One that comes to mind is W.G. Sebald, a German writer who died in 2001. He had that sense of is it fiction, is it non-fiction? Is it a diary, is it history? And of all of those things being able to co-exist on the page. When I first read his work when I was just out of college it was a huge relief and a door opening into all of those possibilities, to work across genres and to follow one’s own nose. I always say if it’s a first person narrative, it’s my eyes and my brain shifting through what I see and what I read and what I’ve heard about. What happened and what’s about to happen, and those things come through my eyes. But its not a first-person narrative in the way a memoir is. It’s more impressionistic where my personal experiences show up when they can throw light on a bigger question. In terms of storytelling, that’s the way my style is inspired.

“Harlem is Nowhere” sells online from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

It’s a temptation that has proved beyond the resistance of many ad creatives: trawling through old awards annuals for ideas to steal. This year’s One Show Annual makes the process a whole lot easier

Titled in reference to the famous TS Eliot quote To Steal Is Genius, the 2010 One Show Annual, the awards publication for the One Club, features elements from some of the winning work reproduced as stickers. Readers can take these elements – headlines, images, products, interfaces and client logos – and re-arrange them into their own layouts using the spaces provided.

The books were created by ad agency Anomaly and come in a set of three volumes (one each for the advertising, design and interactive categories) housed in a slipcase.

And before anyone jumps in, yes, we are aware this was published last month but we haven’t seen it covered anywhere else yet and we thought it was kind of fun.

Credits

For Anomaly:
ECD: Mike Byrne
CD: Ian Toombs
Designer: Nikolay Saveliev

For the One Club:
Editor: Yash Egami
Production: Jennah Synnestvedt, Ashley Thomas, Tishon Woolcock
Editorial Assistants: Emily Isovitsch, Michael McLafferty, Tiffany Edwards

RELATED CONTENT

D&AD’s Annual this year was also an elaborate affair, this time designed by the artists Bob & Roberta Smith, as we reported here
But are these big annuals still the best way to present work? Mike Dempsey suggests an alternative here

CR in print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog, but if you’re not reading us in print too, you’re missing out on a richer, deeper view of your world. Our Type Annual issue has 100 pages of great content, featuring the best typefaces of the year and great writing from Rick Poynor, Jeremy Leslie, Eliza Williams and Gavin Lucas. It’s printed on four different, beautiful heavyweight paper stocks and offers a totally different experience to the Blog. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)207 292 3703 or go here to buy online. Better yet, subscribe to CR, save yourself almost a third and get Monograph for free plus a host of special deals from the CR Shop. Go on, treat yourself.

Two books on the art and people behind Australian and New Zealand tattoo culture

In an effort to cast light on the often unrecognized talents of tattooists in Australia and New Zealand, a small group of Melbourne artists recently banded together to publish two hardcover art books celebrating and highlighting some of area’s best ink.

John Entwistle, Tattooist: Melbourne, Australia honors one of Australia’s finest artists. With a career spanning more than four decades, Entwistle has become synonymous in the ink world for bridging the gap between older and newer generations of tattooists. With full-bleed images of his creations in color and text discussing Entwistle’s ability to thrive despite social pressure to conform and being largely unaccepted by mainstream Australia, the book presents a comprehensive overview of its subject.

The second title, Done with Electricity, by Bugsy and Adam Lockman, focuses on the top 64 tattooists working in Australia and New Zealand. According to Lockman, the book fills “a necessary gap in quality representation of the tattoos being done in this part of the world. For too long Australia has not been recognized as harboring such talent, and with books like this, it puts us squarely on the map.” The co-author goes on to validate both books, “The strength in both publications is that they skirt the fashionable side of tattooing to show the true validity and integrity of this profession. These two books demonstrate the legitimate history of this profession and that the legacy of the older generation of tattooers has been successfully and respectfully passed on to those who have followed.”

Done with Electricity and John Entwistle are available now through Books Mistress or directly through Inkship Books.