There is no doubt that the re-release of Charlie Parker self-titled album is marvelous - if you stick with the tracks that were on the original release, that is. Just like many jazz albums, “re-mastered” and re-packaged to appeal to those who might already possess an earlier incarnation (or even more than one, since a true fan might own a vinyl version and the first CD release, for example), it comes with a whole bunch of “bonus” tracks, including - but not limited to - aborted tracks. Does anybody really need to listen to 13 seconds of “Confirmation” (and those 13 seconds include studio chatter)? Actually, you can decide for yourself if you go to Amazon’s page for the album and click the little “play” button next to track 23: Since Amazon allows you to listen to 30 second excerpts, you can experience the whole thing.
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Oxbow Archive by Joel Sternfeld is a book that I had been looking forward to. It contains photographs taken in a small patch of land - the East Meadows - right outside the city of Northampton in Western Massachusetts. I live not ten minutes away from the East Meadows, and ever since moving here I have been thinking about landscape photography.
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There is a lot of talk about digital photography making photography more democratic. However, if you’re really interested in a moment when photography became more democratic (and not just more convenient) you have to go back to just after the middle of the 19th Century, when the tintype process was invented. A cheap alternative to the daguerreotype and the albumen print, tintypes made photography very affordable and accessible, as a consequence of which especially in the United States photography literally entered the homes of huge numbers of people. As Steven Kasher writes in America and the Tintype, getting your own photograph taken cost you no more than what we pay today for a movie ticket (plus a small popcorn). And not only that - tintypes were/are images on a thin sheet of metal (not tin actually) and as such they were/are very durable.
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These are exciting times for contemporary photography, with vast amounts of new work to be seen, vast numbers of books published, vast numbers of young photographers emerging. Looking back over the past few years, one thing appears to be unchanged, though: Only every so often, one encounters photography that has the ability to stop one in its tracks, that makes everything else disappear for a moment. Those moments are to be cherished, especially since they’re so rare, so unpredictable.
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A great photography book is more than just a collection of photographs, regardless of how compelling those might be. It might ask questions, or it might present insight into a world unknown, or it might show the presence of a passionate vision - and it makes you want to come back to the images, so that you can re-immerse yourself. There is no doubt that Joakim Eskildsen and Cia Rinne’s The Roma Journeys easily satisfies all of these criteria.
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