Gordon Stettinius is Publishing Photo Books.

Cover of “Salt & Truth: Shelby Lee Adams” from Candela Books

Dave Anderson: So Gordon you’ve started an imprint. Is this another one of your get-rich-quick schemes?

Gordon Stettinius: Yes definitely. It is amazing the financial rewards available to anyone who can slap a few photographs and an essay or two into a book! I cannot, for the life of me, tell you what took me so long to get into this dynamic and growing field.

Actually, and I say this with fingers crossed, my first project (Gita Lenz: Photographs) has worked out pretty well. The second (Salt & Truth by Shelby Lee Adams) is generating a lot of interest and is definitely something I am proud to be a part of as publisher. So, right now I intend to keep working onone project at a time, and if I can keep my titles high in quality, I expect that I can keep this going and still lead a bit of the photographer’s life around the edges.

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Marking Papa Hemingway (and Stalking Batman)

(the typewriter in Hemingway’s room)

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s passing. I must admit I was never especially enamored with his work. Its staccato, almost brutal style didn’t appeal. I also didn’t know much about his life other then what the iconic photo seemed to imply: an adventurer with a raw macho certitude. Nonetheless I was intrigued to hear from Stern Magazine’s Sue Lapsien regarding an assignment about Hemingway to run on the 50th anniversary of his passing. Sue is awesome and has supported my work ever since I began. This one sounded like a doozy: I was to join their reporter Stephan Maus in Ketchum, Idaho and spend the week exploring the place where Hemingway spent his final days.

(a scene from the Purdy farm, where Hemingway would hunt with owner Bud Purdy)

Needless to say some of my literary pals like Jaman Matthews and Joe Ghormley were a bit jealous. Joe actually related a tale of a friend who had been in Idaho when Hemingway passed and had ended up with a key bit of Hemingway memorabilia. Further details would make Joe’s lawyerly alter-ego twitchy and nervous so I’ll spare him that. 

(Bud Purdy looks thru his signed books as writer Stephan Maus flips through another book that pictures Hemingway and Purdy together.)

There are so many details from this trip that I could spend all day typing this and I don’t think I should do that. Other things to do. So here are some highlights:

(the Hemingway memorial in Sun Valley bathed in evening light)

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Tripping Across Extraordinary Stuff…

I was doing some research on artist books and came across a UK-based, German-born artist named Alexander Korzer-Robinson who deconstructs antique books to create unique art pieces. They’re really extraordinary.  If you enjoy the example above, you can see plenty of additional work at his site. I see that some sell for less than $1000, which I find shocking for something so unique and wonderful. If there’s any justice he’ll be making far more then that in the near future. 

Here’s his artist statement:

I am an artist from Berlin now living in Bristol. Drawing from a background in psychology, my art practice focuses on the notion of the “inner landscape”. Using generally discarded materials, I make objects as an invitation to the viewer to engage her/his own inner life in order to assign meaning to the artwork.

The cut book art has been made by working through the books, page by page, cutting around some of the illustrations while removing others. The images seen in the finished work, are left standing in the place where they would appear in the complete book. As a final step the book is sealed around the cut, and can no longer be opened.

As we remember the books from our own past, certain fragments remain with us while others fade away over time – phrases and passages, mental images we created, the way the stories made us feel and the thoughts they inspired. In our memory we create a new narrative out of those fragments, sometimes moving far away from the original content. This is, in fact, the same way we remember our life – an ever changing narrative formed out of fragments. This mostly subconscious process of value judgements and coincidence is what interests me as an artist and as a psychologist.

Through the artistic work, these books, having been stripped of their utilitarian value by the passage of time, regain new purpose. They are no longer tools to learn about the world, but rather a means to gain insight about oneself.

There you have it. Bravo Alexander Korzer-Robinson.

Gordon Stettinius: Mangini Studio Series

© Gordon Stettinius http://www.eyecaramba.com/

My old friend Gordon Stettinius is always up to something. Lately, the Richmond, VA bad boy has gotten up to some pretty big stuff. Like starting a publishing house. I’ve got a blog item about that coming in the next day or two. But in the meantime, I wanted to tease it with something completely different: for the last couple of years Gordon has been working on something called the “Mangini Studio Series.” It’s epic and hilarious. Kind of like this letter…

The full skinny on Mangini now follows but don’t forget to tune back in to learn about his publishing house…

(Oh — and I should also note that if you’re like me and habitually forget to check the blogs you like, we now have what we’re calling “THE NAPLAN SOLUTION,” which is to say you can sign up to be emailed when I actually get around to posting something. Nifty, right? You can do it here.) 

Now, without further ado, is Gordon on the Mangini Studio Series….

Dave Anderson: Can you talk a little bit about your Mangini Studio Series?

Gordon Stettinius: The Mangini Studio series is a collection of images I have been working on with photographer Terry Brown for four years or so now.  Basically, I have been getting my hair done and heading down to a commercial photo studio for a portrait session.

For the first image I got a perm and headed out to “get my picture did” as we say around here. Then I made a bunch of copies and signed them as though I was someone special and gave them to my students and sent them as thank you notes. I suspect I was a little bit pleased with myself.

© Gordon Stettinius http://www.eyecaramba.com/

Not wanting to live with the perm forever, I went and got a beehive a few weeks later and started to plot out a few different hairstyles I could put together over the next some months… and then came the skullet, and then the combover. I needed to start from scratch really and start growing it out again… so then came the Wrestler, the Governor, and the High & Tight, etc.

© Gordon Stettinius http://www.eyecaramba.com/

We are up to about 25 or so with very distinct looks and I have at least another 6 or 7 planned.  Mostly, I just want to explore different hair archetypes and then try to make a photo that has a certain degree of sincerity. I would like to think that any of these would be found out of context one day and accepted for what they are.

A studio portrait of a guy that used to look like…that.  But then some of them are a bit over the top. What the1 hell though. There is enough earnest work out there that I enjoy having a little fun. Coming soon, Bangs, Bowl Cut, Peroxide, the Chinstrap and many more.

DA: Okay! Thanks Gordon. Great stuff.

Now, dear readers, do tune back in soon to learn about Gordon’s publishing house. Great things afoot… Better yet, forget trusting your memory to tune back in and just sign up to be emailed when I get around to posting it and other future blog postings. I am here to add enlightenment and ease to your hectic life. Why are you here? To read whimsical blog items and send me chocolate chip cookies of gratitude. I’d call that a hint, but really it’s just an overt request. You know how to be my hero now….

My new SoLost video (and yes, perhaps it was a bit nuts to go canoe the Mississippi as it was cresting…)

(but as usual I couldn’t help myself) Here’s what I wrote about it… 2011 has been a year of epic weather in the American South. First came days of monstrous tornadoes. Then came the slow burn of a gargantuan Mississippi River flood. As we turned from the tornadoes to consider that flood, the name John Ruskey kept floating to mind. A renowned riverman based in Helena, Arkansas and Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ruskey has become something of a living legend on America’s largest and most powerful river. After years guiding daring canoers down this much-feared and much-reflected-upon waterway, his name has become almost synonymous with the river. Outside Magazine, in fact, made him a central focus of their 2007 30th anniversary issue. Spend two minutes on the river with him and you’ll know why. What then, we wondered, does a man who loves the Mississippi in the way John Ruskey does think of “her” at her most savage? Would he even get in the river as it was cresting and threatening communities all across the land? And, if he would, then, um, could we come too??? We needn’t have asked. Of course he would. And of course we could. And, while we can’t hand you one of the fabulous mulberries snapped from the top of a tree in the midst of that raging river, you can still take that ride with us… Links: Outside article: http://budurl.com/qx4a Quapaw Canoe Company: http://budurl.com/4ds9 Producer / Director: Dave Anderson Photography Editing and Postproduction: Jonathan Childs Motion Graphics: TJ McCoy Executive Producer: Warwick Sabin SoLost is an Oxford American production. (c) 2011 The Oxford American Literary Project

Coming Soon: Flood Zen

Here’s a teaser pic from a shoot I did on canoeing the cresting Mississippi with legendary riverman John Ruskey. Excited about this one. It’s the upcoming SoLost video for the Oxford American magazine. Keep an eye on the magazine’s website, Facebook page and Twitter feed for updates…

For more on Ruskey, check out this 2007 article from Outside Magazine.

And stay tuned…

Intriguing book from Maria Miesenberger

I got one of my periodic emails from the great German photo book publisher Steidl this AM. Its newest offerings weren’t too up my alley (just typed — then deleted — a catty remark about one of them…) but in sifting through some of their recent publications I noticed a book by a woman I’d never heard of named Maria Miesenberger and I was weirdly and immediately fascinated. It’s called Sverige/Schweden. Here’s an excerpt from the publishers description:

By re-presenting her father’s images of her childhood in Austria and Sweden, Maria Miesenberger transforms these images to another order of speech. The photographed persons are no longer recognized as individuals. They are set afloat as dark hollow shapes in the image.

Looks great. Check the book out here. It reminded a little of a great series by my former teacher Marina Berio in which she photographed passengers on the Long Island Ferry through the scratched plexiglass interior windows of the boats to create these haunting, dreamlike images.

The project is called “Untold Stories.” Really wonderful work. More on it here. And a short blog about it here.

Great new tracks from Washed Out & Solar Bears available for free download

I keep hearing Washed Out and the tracks are always pretty wonderful. They’re even better when they’re free. See link below…

Better yet, download this instantly addictive track from Solar Bears that’s remixed by Keep Shelly in Athens. Yum! YUM!

Hat tip: Gorilla vs. Bear.

Road trip catchup: Days 2.5 - 3.5 (authors, bugs, and dogs)

(the road to william gay’s house)

Well I had wanted to post nightly. For various reasons that’s not easy. Mainly because it’s the final thing on the agenda and I often can’t keep my eyes open after a long day of driving, shooting, driving and then finding a hotel, getting settled, downloading the day’s work, looking at some of it, backing it up etc. etc. It’s only after all that — on a day when I theoretically would have shot from sunrise to sunset — that I actually get to writing something. But enough whining. Let’s talk about bugs…

Okay, now the update…

The afternoon of Day 2 and most of Day 3 were spent in Hohendal, Tennessee at and around the home of author William Gay. This was for an upcoming SoLost episode for the Oxford American magazine about the reclusive author, who is often compared with William Faulkner. I have to confess that a bad Faulkner experience in grade school has prevented me from picking his work back up so, after reading some of Gay, I’d have to compare him more to Flannery O’Connor, who I know better. Although Gay is a bit more humorous and light-hearted then O’Connor.

Anyway, I arrived late because I’d been working on time lapses on the way there. He seemed a little annoyed but we bonded quickly enough. Gay has a big pit bull that belonged to his son Chris. Chris had been living with his father for 12 years but had recently gotten married and moved out, leaving a pit bull named Jude behind. Jude seemed nice enough.

(jude with something in his mouth….)

Gay was very talkative. He has a long relationship with the magazine and with editor Marc Smirnoff. Marc had given me the idea for this piece and had told me that Gay had a very interesting history. He only emerged as a writer in his 50’s after a youth in the Navy, a few years in New York City and most of his adult life back in tiny Hohendal, Tennessee, where he was born. At this point Hohendal seems known mostly for Gay himself and for an elephant sanctuary that is located there (if anyone saw the CBS Sunday Morning piece on the elephant and the dog that became friends, that was from this town). Gay had gotten married and supported the family by doing construction work: drywall hanging, carpentry and painting, among other things. But all the while he wrote and wrote and wrote and eventually he was discovered and published and is now hailed as one of the modern greats of Southern literature.

Gay and I talked less about literature then about music and film. We discovered a shared love of Terence Malick and discussed Bob Dylan at great length. Much of this will make its way into my SoLost piece so I don’t want to give too much away just yet. Look for it in the next couple of weeks.

Gay preferred to be interviewed in his (very dark) log cabin home. Both inside and outside the house, there seemed to be alot of bugs. I mean ALOT. Weird spiders I hadn’t seen before, tons of gnats and, unfortunately, ticks. Wearing flip flops to an interview in a rural setting with animals around is probably not the brightest move. In the middle of the interview my foot started to itch pretty bad. I think I had been bitten by a spider. Then I saw a tick crawling up my arm. Ick!!!! Ticks are determined little things and pulling one off and then trying to kill it in the midst of a subject answering a question is no easy thing. Especially if you don’t want to distract them or mess up the audio. Somehow I managed but over the following 2 days I kept finding more ticks on me. I counted 7 in all. I think I got ‘em all but man, that was nasty.

Things went late that night and the next morning I returned to shoot some b-roll around the property. I was accompanied mainly by Jude the dog and a somewhat paranoid black cat that had done a particularly acrobatic leap off Gay’s back porch after first seeing me. Jude, being a dog and all, wanted to play catch. He’d come up with a stick in his mouth and an expectant look on his face. When I kept shooting he’d wander off. At one point he returned to play just as I was switching lenses. I lost hold of a cap and it fell to the ground. Jude pounced on it, worked it over in his mouth happily for a minute and then wanted me to grab it out. Needless to say that was the end of the lens cap.

(post dog cap)

Jude also somehow showed up with my prized Texas Lawnmower Racing Association cap clenched in his jaw. This was very concerning because I love the hat and it would be very hard to replace. Gay came out to help and eventually the prospect of a large stick to play catch with convinced the dog to give up the now-drooly hat.

That about finished things at the Gay place. I went into town and shot some additional b-roll, did a time lapse of some teenagers whiling the afternoon away on a bridge and drove out of Hohendal.

I’ll post more tonight (hopefully)….

Celebrating the Publication of Susan Burnstine’s “Within Shadows”

Susan Burnstine and I met somewhat randomly at PhotoLA about 5 years ago*. She was not a known quantity in the art world at that point. After a friendly discussion about my work I asked if she had brought any examples of her own photography. She went to get a box of prints from her car and we agreed to meet outside the building. As we sat on the manicured lawn in front of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Susan opened a box of about 30 miraculous images.  Dreamy and beautiful, dark and yet hopeful, her photographs were instantly unforgettable. It seemed clear that she was destined for success (not that Susan expected it — she spent half the time second-guessing the work…). But of course the imagery was remarkable. And not only were her prints interesting, but her process was as well: she photographs on film with homemade medium format cameras and homemade lenses that are primarily made out of plastic, vintage camera parts and random household objects. Effects are created entirely in-camera without any Photoshop work. She has a bunch of these cameras and names them all after her favorite musicians (James Brown was one, Johnny Cash another & John Lee Hooker is shown below).

Within the year things were well underway for Susan. The Susan Spiritus Gallery was representing her work and her prints were an instant hit with collectors. Now, a few short years later, there is a book. “Within Shadows” is her first monograph and it’s being published by the Italian imprint Charta. We have remained close friends and I’m thrilled for her success. Susan and I spoke a fair amount as the book deal came together and design got underway. She emailed me the day her first advance copy arrived and, having gone through that process myself, I thought it might be interesting to blog about the process of publishing the book. Interestingly, her reference to a kind of brief ambivalence upon the arrival of the first advance copy mirrored my own experience. I thought I would start with that moment and move backwards to the process and experience of bookmaking…

Susan, we’ve been friends for quite awhile now. You know I love your work and I know you’re proud of it. So today the first copy of your first book arrived on a plane from Italy. How did that make you feel?

When the box arrived from fed ex with my advance copies, I tried tearing it open as fast as I could—like an excited kid on Christmas morning.  Looking at the books for the first time, I felt unexplainably numb. It was as if I had just received the best present ever, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it next. Here was five years of my life sitting in front of me all bound together perfectly… but still I felt numb. I suspect it had a lot to do with exhaustion from a month of a-half of meeting impossible design and text designs for the publisher. After I started talking to a few photographers about their experiences right after receiving their advance copies, it became clear that this post-partum photo book publishing effect was a widespread phenomena amongst photographers.

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