Alisa Resnik‘s On the Night That We Leave was the Charcoal Photobook of the Month for January 2022. It’s a little bit bittersweet for me. I cancelled my subscription auto-renewal, and so this is the penultimate book from my multi-year subscription. Admittedly, this probably colors my thoughts some. Anyway. It’s an interesting and very Charcoal-y book, beautifully printed, with imagery and pacing that invites narrative. The images are almost never in sharp focus and feature muted colors that shift into the green/brown spectrum; Resin’s subjects appear alternately dejected and ecstatic, depressed and wondering. I would make some quip like “no wonder they want to leave,” but that’s too obvious.

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I’ve written before about not really needing another Saul Leiter book. I mean, I have Early Color and Early Black & White and, thanks to Charcoal, All about Saul Leiter. But something about Forever Saul Leiter tickled my fancy and at $25, shipped from the UK—at time of purchase it was unavailable in the US—I couldn’t pass it up.

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If you don’t follow Andrew Molitor’s blog and Twitter, do yourself a favor and rectify that right now. If not for him, for better or worse, I probably wouldn’t have learned of Victor D’Allant’s Tulsa, OK, and if not for a sort of joking comment I left on his initial review of it, in which I offered to trade my copy of Stuart Jeffries’ Everything, Everywhere, all the Time for it, I wouldn’t have a copy…

In fact, if you’re interested in a competent review of Tulsa, OK, go and read Molitor’s first and second reviews of it. In what follows, I’m unlikely to add much.

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Larry Clark’s Tulsa is one of those photography sets/books/exhibitions that everyone pretty much knows about and so I won’t go on an on about it. It launched Clark’s career and influenced a ton of movies and other photo projects. In it, Clark pretty much just photographed his friends, which wouldn’t be particularly remarkable, but for the fact that his friends were a bunch of speed freaks, happily shooting up in front of the camera in 1963, in front of a movie camera in 1968, and, somewhat more desperately and disastrously, once again in front of the camera in 1971.

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Silver Meadows was the first B-Sides Boxed Set to appear. It was long out of print when I first discovered B-Sides and I scored this signed Artist’s Proof (#AP/500) only last year, around the same time that I dropped a nearly equivalent, rather embarrassingly large amount of money on Excerpts from Silver Meadows, when B-Sides offered a few of them during an Xmas sale. With it, I now have what is, so far, a complete set of B-Sides Boxed Sets, which fills me with a sense of excitement similar to the excitement I still feel about about the double handful of complete Tops and Fleer baseball card sets I acquired over a year or two back in the late 1980s. Not the excitement 10 year old me had back then, but the distant, wildly diminished feeling of excitement the 40+-year-old me still has about those card sets, card sets that were stolen from me in 1995 or 6. Some excitement, that is, for sure, but not much, really…

Continue reading “Todd Hido – ‘Silver Meadows’”