Rusting nicely

Having seen several similar books and owning some it seems to me they fall into two formats: those that are just photos with the shortest captions (location and maybe a date the photo was taken) and those where the photographer has taken the trouble to research some background detail about what is shown in their picture.

Fortunately Matthew Christopher is of the latter group and this gives his photo much more credibility because the text here adds to what we see.  Another great feature of the book is the range of ruins, admittedly mostly in the eastern US but you'll see factories, churches, prisons, power stations, hotels, hospitals, schools and more. 

The choice of structures reveals something about societies attitude to abandonment, the Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey (designed by Eero Saarinen in 1959--1962) was an office block and the photos show a deserted, tidy interior.  Basically the contents were easily removed but turn over the page to the next ruin, Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, Pennsylvania and this huge industrial building was just left to rust away in the countryside.  The Bell Labs could be used again, Carrie Furnaces really just needs to be (expensively) scrapped but in fact remains as a visitor attraction with guided tours.

I thought the most fascinating photos are those of factories where everything remains but slowly falling apart.  The Scranton Lace Company just stopped mid-shift in 2002 and the eight photos reveal machinery still in place.  Lebow Brothers Clothing in Baltimore closed in 1985 with hundreds of suits and coats still on the racks, they were still there when Christopher took the photos in 2008.  He makes the point that it's just too much trouble to sell off clothing.

The hundreds of photos nicely fit into the book's landscape format.  Christopher clearly has an eye for composition and doesn't need to resort to any gimmicks like shooting at an angle or extreme close-ups.  The scenes he captures are strong enough to capture any reader's attention.  A couple of minor points: it's a pity the printing didn't use a finer screen than 175 to help bring out all the amazing detail in these photos and the eight pages devoted to the bibliography seems excessive as so many refer to local papers.

Revolution in print

 




My slowly expanding photobook collection, arranged by year of publication.

When I first saw this book and noticed that it only considered titles to 1941 I thought there must be a second volume but having read the introduction it seems that the best Soviet photobooks are in the twenties and thirties. Though it doesn't say so books from the early forties onwards relied on social realism for the photos and the layouts had completely lost the revolutionary and Constructivist design fervour that is on display in so many of these photobooks.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 swept away traditional ways of producing print media and European artists and designers were experimenting with Futurism and Constructivism (and probably other isms, too) especially in the use of photographs. With print this was the ideal medium to put across a message in the new Soviet Union. Chapter three: The lessons of Constructivism shows some amazing spreads from photobooks published in 1929-1932 with photos angled, butted together, overlapping and bold use of headlines and page graphics, especially solid blocks of black and red. These books look so different and exciting compared to the traditional illustrated European titles of the period.

Several designers developed the photomontage as a clever and convincing graphic technique and they appear in so many books here. There are several dramatic montages in The industry of socialism from 1935 and the introduction says that this publication was perhaps the finest example of Stalinist picture propaganda. Designed by El Lissitzky with 312 pages (plus lots of inserts and fold-outs) spread over seven books in a slipcase. Fifty-seven pages from these books are shown so you can see just how impressive it looked. Other publication designers like Valentina Kulagina, Varvara Stepanova, Solomon Telingater and Nikolai Troshin morphed photos from Vladimir Griuntal, Yeleazar Langman, Alexander Rodchenko (the husband of Stepanova) and Georgy Petrusov to great effect (and all before Photoshop).

I mentioned that Soviet photobooks (and publications in general) after 1941were probably rather dull looking compared to those from the previous two decades but by the late thirties the visual lies took ever greater proportions, Stalin's purges and mass starvation clearly were not things the average citizen should know about, agricultural and industrial statistics became state secrets and an official myth of plenty was developed with help of photobooks. Chapter fifteen: Socialism's film set -- The All-Union agricultural exhibition in Moscow 1939-1940 features fourteen books which look at food and farms (which by this time had been a collective failure). The revolutionary photomontages had by now given way to one photo spreads and fold-outs showing vistas of cornfields and livestock tended by smiling females. Books on pig and sheep breeding, grain, cotton, sub-tropical crops, fruit all had titles available at the exhibition. Photographers were instructed to capture the countryside in the best possible light.

The intro makes a relevant point. The writers, photographers and designers threw their creative efforts into producing these extraordinary books in the early years of the Soviet Union believing in the new world order but near the end of the thirties this enthusiasm had evaporated in so many of them.

The book's production is as heroic and monumental as the contents. Designer Mikhail Karasik has created an impressive 636 page publication with 1860 illustrations (all with a slight drop-shadow to make them stand out on the page) and nicely used some design motifs throughout the book from these historical books. One hundred and sixty are considered, each with technical details, a long essay about the book's intentions and how the photos, graphics and printing put it across. This is followed by a very generous helping of spreads from each book which are big enough to appreciate the photos and graphics. Mikhail Karasik also contributes a first class illustrated introduction and the back pages have a twenty-two page biography section of all the writers, designers and artists, followed by a comprehensive index.

I was struck by how much better this book looks when compared to Badger and Parr's three volume History of photobooks published by Phaidon. These have rather small text types and an excessive amount of white page space which really should have been filled with pages from the photobooks.

Black and white in color

As the book is about segregation in the South the title is very apt and in the small town of Mount Vernon, Georgia things hardly seemed to have moved on from life as depicted in the 1967 film In the heat of the night. Gillian Laub got involved in the town because Spin Magazine, in 2002, gave her an assignment to cover the racially segregated school proms. Though the school was integrated in 1971 the prom wasn't, one was tried in 1995 but only one white couple arrived among all the black faces. The Student Council had a referendum in 1996 and the integrated prom idea was completely defeated by blacks and whites. It took until 2010 to finally get this important event in the student life integrated, proms in previous years were private affairs organised and paid for by the students.

As well as Spin the New York Times Magazine picked up the story for a May 21, 2009 edition and Laub again took the photos. There are fifty-eight by her in the book, mostly of the students getting ready, arriving and enjoying their respective proms. Several photos of individuals have their thoughts about the event and segregation as a text block next to their pictures.

Though an interesting subject I though the book was rather spun out to fill the pages. Divided into several chapters with each starting on a spread with a left-hand black page and few lines of text on the right (so filling twenty pages). As well as the photos by Laub there are nineteen other photos and graphics: a spread from the school yearbook; a three page student essay from 1999; various studio portraits of students; a spread from the NY Times Magazine (but no mention of Spin photos) four black pages with white type of a conversation between police 911 operator and a local Mount Vernon man who killed a student one night; a spread of video clips showing a sheriff taking Laub's camera while she was in a car during 2011. Missing were shots of the school and street scenes of the town.

If Laub's photos and the other visual material had been better organized with a tighter graphic presentation it could have pulled everything together for a worthwhile look at these disappearing Southern rites.