“Before coming to Shanghai I had heard that at one point 50% of the world’s construction cranes were employed here. This had a certain fascination.” – Peter Dixie

Peter Dixie‘s Hinterland series is a photographic exploration of the changing landscape at the outer limits of Shanghai’s Metro network. Dixie studies the outskirts, or Hinterland, of Shanghai. In his statement, he describes his methodical way of working, “in which each image there is some centrally placed object, a space being constructed around this, and by drawing an ordinary object out of the landscape, and elevating its status compositionally, it is given a significance that in passing perhaps it would not have. As an identified and preserved object, it is enshrined, withdrawn from its mundane original context, and recreated as an object of contemplation.  Hence each image presents a site of contemplation.

The series deals with one city, Shanghai, but has relevance to the idea of the city in general, as event, as a complete historical entity with a finite life, a bounded space. As with any event, its existence is discreet. This does not mean that limits exist in a clear sense. The boundaries of an event shift and break upon examination. This series looks beyond the city at what will be city, the becoming-city, the future-city.” Dixie is working on this extended project while also shooting full-time as an architectural photographer in Shanghai.

I have just finished this short series entitled Early Memories for Unless You Will Magazine: Back in the days of analog photography the term “instant” meant to get a photo within a few minutes. That waiting time got way shortened by digital photography and gadgets like mobile phones and digital cameras. Nowadays digital photography is instant photography. Even if the digital photo can be saved, uploaded and published within a glance, does a real picture truly exist? Picture in a sense of “always in mind” for the case this photo gets lost for some reason. Today pictures are deleted without much thought or vanish in the depths of a hard drive; as a result they get squeezed out of focus and slowly but surely erased from our memory. Without having left any permanent impression on the cortex of our brain they’re witnesses of a digital amnesia.

It’s completely different with analog photo albums from our parents’ generation before 1980, where every missing picture is forever saved in mind as chronological and topical memory. Even if some moments haven’t been witnessed personally, the associated pictures are still completely familiar through recurrent examination and tons of vivid stories. “I want to revive mentally exactly those experienced and narrated events.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s an exciting situation that a missing picture from a photo album is shown and specified on a Polaroid, in order to restore the memories that are connected with the missing photo. The result is a photo without a photo with a story. “Some person on those missing photos is not with us anymore and will only live on through the memories that we’re still keeping in our minds. Under these circumstances the beholder might create its very own picture in mind that is also connected to his personal memories, but might differ from my own conception.”  This phenomenon of the personal conception and interpretation of a non-experienced situation can be stimulated by the fact that the bigger picture is shown on some Polaroid. This link allows a conclusion on the missing picture and helps to store it in mind without ever having experienced the situation.

The inventor of the Polaroid Edwin H. Land explained 1948 in the book “Polaroid, Images of America”, “The aesthetic purpose of the new camera is to make available a new medium of expression to those who have an artistic interest in the world around them …” and continued “Ideally – all that should be necessary to get a good picture, is to take a good picture.” All shot Polaroid of remembrance have been digitalized and destroyed afterwards in order that all that remains from the memory is only the memory.

The soundtrack comes with friendly support by GLOBO. Acoustic electronic music by Brombaer & Phole (Three Sixty Records – Thanks Graham!)
threesixtyrecords.net/WP/brombaer-and-phole

Get the EP on Amazon here: bit.ly/globoep or on iTunes here: bit.ly/globoepitunes

Flight Attendants in front of Swissair, 1972.

Alfred Hitchcock (left) at the Zurich-Kloten Airport, in the background a Sud-Aviation SE-210 Caravelle, 1966.

Head pilot Ernst Nyffenegger in the cockpit of a DC-3 at the airfield Dubendorf, ca. 1938.

Swissair Souvenirs (Scheidegger & Spiess, ISBN 978-3-85881-359-6, $65) is a wonderful book for airplane enthusiasts and design lovers showcasing pictorial worlds from the Image Archive of the ETH-Bibliothek. Edited and compiled by Ruedi Weidmann, Michael Gasser and Nicole Graf this book about Switzerland’s former national airline is both a nostalgic overview of a bygone era of air travel and a unique lens through which to view the history of photography.

For many years, Swissair, Switzerland’s former national airline, was an icon of luxurious international air travel. Loved by passengers from all over the world and recommended by travel agencies for its outstanding service, Swissair was an object of national pride. Yet the company came to a sad end after the disaster of flight SR111 off Canada’s Atlantic coast in 1998, followed by the grounding of the entire fleet due to cash flow problems in 2001.

What remains of Swissair, besides the countless memories of its employees and passengers, is the vast photographic archive of the company, now held at ETH-Bibliothek in Zurich. This beautifully illustrated book collects 270 of the archive’s best images, arranged by formal and thematic aspects, and supplemented with an informative introductory essay and concise captions. Photographs document every aspect of flight, from the lives of pilots, flight attendants, and other staffers, to airfields both in Switzerland and abroad. The images range from stunning stills of aircraft in operation to carefully styled photographs of in-flight meals.

Photographs from the Image archive, ETH-Bibliothek, volume 2.

American artist Roe Ethridge’s latest book Le Luxe (Mack Books, ISBN 978-1-907946-08-0, $55) comes in a second printing of the now out-of-print first-edition with improved reprographics, new linen and end papers. It takes its title from the French “C’est pas du luxe”, an ironic phrase which alludes to the superfluous nature of luxury whilst proclaiming how essential it is to existence. Such paradoxes are fluently woven through Ethridge’s oeuvre and Le Luxe encompasses his practice from the past decade, without ever slipping into the moribund gravitas of a retrospective.

Plumbing his diverse image inventories, from personal images and magazine commissions to an archive of online screen shots, the book continues his exploration of picture-making that disavows the potential for creating a finished work. Ethridge para-phrases Eggleston when he states that he is “at war with the finished” in an era of digital photography straining towards idealisation. The pristine conditions of photography are undermined in the book’s design and riff on Henri Matisse’s apposite aphorism “exactitude is not truth” (Matisse titled two of his paintings Le Luxe).

Composed in three parts, Le Luxe contains an unusual backdrop, the everyday of the artist, who worked from November 2005 to January 2010 on one commission documenting a building in downtown Manhattan on a site adjacent to the World Trade Centre. This narrative offers an uneasy balance to the fissures between analogue and digital and Ethridge’s consistent undermining of his own certainties.

The White Rabbit Gallery’s  new exhibition, Double Take, is in part a birthday celebration. As the Sydney art museum turns three, it is taking a look back as well as forward, mixing new pieces with some of the most popular works from earlier shows. Gallery manager Paris Neilson says the double-­‐take theme works on two levels. “Where people have seen an artwork before, they’ll see it in a new context this time, and that will add a whole new dimension. And with all the works we’ve chosen, there’s a sense of ‘This isn’t what it seems to be.’ You think, ‘Hang on, what did I just see?’ And you look again.”

There are double–takes in store for peckish visitors who are drawn to Taiwanese artist Tu Wei–Cheng’s lavish chocolate shop, only to find that the “chocolates” are lethal weapons, from machine–guns to missiles.

Catching sight of Shi Jindian’s Jeep chassis, you might take it for some kind of hologram. In fact, it’s a sculpture, but one that consists almost entirely of empty space. Even the surfaces of this astonishingly detailed replica are largely empty, because the artist has crocheted every last part in wire.

Walking past Ai Weiwei’s 500–kilogram pile of sunflower seeds, you might be impressed by its size. Still, you’d think, where’s the art? They sell those at the supermarket. Take a second look and it dawns on you: every last seed—more than 100,000 in all—has been hand-­‐formed from clay, painted, and fired into porcelain. For Chinese people, sunflower seeds are both a cheap snack and a reminder of the famines of Mao’s day. These seeds are not only inedible but hugely valuable. The monochrome mass resembles an ash heap, but every individual in it is unique.

Photo from the Chloew Dewe Matthews interview.

The British Journal of Photography, in print since 1854, comes to the iPhone in a unique edition rethought and redesigned for the small screen. Each page has been made to be read on the phone, with no zooming or other compromises, and retaining the BJP’s unique typographic design.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Each issue is small enough to download without a WiFi connection, but includes complete, in-depth articles, stunning photography and video.

Issue One is completely free to download.

This large-format monograph WALD – Landscapes of Memory (Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775733557, $70) follows the tracks of German photographer Michael Lange as he wanders over a period of three years in the pathless underbrush of Germany’s vast deciduous and coniferous forests, taking pictures with a sure sense of the places where childhood memories and sober documentations of nature blur, still and quiet.

Lange says, “What was decisive for the cycle was the question of how the nature of stillness can be depicted in an image. The finest of nuances, shadows, and color gradients create thickly atmospheric compositions of concentrated clarity, conveying an experience characterized by the German Romantic word Waldeinsamkeit (woodland solitude).” This publication traces the artist’s photographic tracks.

For over 25 years Lange he mainly worked for magazines, such as STERN, GEO, ART, FORTUNE among others. Besides his commercial photography for corporate clients, his focus today is on personal landscape projects, like the WALD project.

My printed book Bangkok Urban Identites has been sold out for a long time. Now those documentary is available as iPhone and iPad app with additional unpublished photographs. Download the digital version of Bangkok Uban Identities here.

Bangkok is loud. And quiet. Bangkok is dirty. And clean. Bangkok can be experienced for 30 Euros a day. And for 3.000 Euro. In cheap guesthouse. And in the posh ‘Oriental’. Bangkok is a Moloch. And still, each alley is a village unto itself. Bangkok is perhaps not exactly beautiful, but a pleasure and an experience for the senses.

“He doesn’t try to aestheticise, … but he also doesn’t focus on the strikingly inadequate. Neither does he try to create any kind of phony effects, as it were. And that’s what makes his work so unique,” says Roman Rahmacher, GEO Epoche.

Jenny Wicks is an artist in residence at Glasgow University, Scotland, UK in the Criminology department (The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research – SCCJR). One of her research project is called ‘Punishing Spaces, Working Spaces’. This collaboration between artist and researchers is about exploring and unsettling key boundaries – between innocent and guilty, researcher and researched, Us And Them.

Talking to Wicks, she said: “I’m currently finishing off a large 4×5 portrait project; the portraits are of criminologists, prisoners and prison officers and the eyes closed motif is a leveler. I didn’t want to accept the objectification of the traditional mugshot, the concept was to challenge it. Nor did I want to deliberately ‘humanize’ the subject as they would tend to become too meretricious. I did want to present sensitive portraits.” The mugshot origins are in a nineteenth century scientific determinism, the faith that the methods of science allow us to measure precisely and to ‘see’ guilt and innocence. Wicks explains further, “I’m interested in exploring the mug shot, its history and meaning today in a society where a surveillance culture, relying on ever more refined technologies of the body (facial recognition, retinal scanning, iris prints, DNA codes), dominates.” You can find the detailed explanation and concept of this series here.

Pictures From Italy (Park Books, ISBN 978-3906027005, $55) is the initial volume in a new series of books edited by Swiss architects Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein in which they explore issues and topics arising from their architectural work. The pictures in this illustrated book originate from a six week journey throughout Italy in 1999, which proved to be a trip with profound influence on both architects’ aesthetics and careers. Images from the Italian sojourn are combined with photographs of Christ & Gantenbein’s built projects, tracing the influence of the trip on their realized buildings in Switzerland and around the world. Pictures from Italy aims not only to specifically illustrate the link between Italian architecture and the editors’ own work, but also their general architectural philosophy.

An illuminating look at the nature of influence in architecture and an exciting start to this important new series, Pictures from Italy is both visually stunning and intellectually invigorating.

Peter Granser set off in search of traces of the town of Gruorn on the Swabian Alb, which was forcibly evacuated between 1937 and 1939. His limited edition Was einem Heimat war – What once was a home (800 copies, german and english, ISBN 978-3-9814530-2-7, roughly $35) documents the eventful history of a landscape that was used for over 100 years as a training ground for the armed forces and is thus closely associated with German military history. In 2005, the terrain, still strongly contaminated with projectiles and unexploded ordnance, was declared a biosphere reserve.

The illustrated book What once was a home is composed of several parts. Black and white photographs of the landscape, showing the scars and relics from the period of military use are confronted with a typology of anti-tank ammunition, bullets and grenades. The book includes a five-part panorama as Leporello. (via)

The Colombian-born photographer and artist Guadalupe Ruiz has undertaken a project to document the social and economic inequity in her native city of Bogotá. In this illustrated book Bogotá (Scheidegger & Spiess, ISBN 978-3858813510, $49) Ruiz explores six houses from the city’s six different taxation classes whose residents range from extremely affluent to impoverished. The book is compiled into six chapters with an accompanying layers map. The layout of the book lets you literally “walk” through and discover the different living conditions.

Jörg Bader, from the Centre de la Photographie Genève writes: “By taking photographs of apartments and streetscapes, whole interiors and single pieces of furniture, Ruiz creates a cohesive and multilayered portrait of the city as a whole. She also examines personal and decorative objects, such as family portraits and Catholic icons found in both slums and luxurious villas, and highlights the differences and some surprising cultural parallels between socioeconomic classes.”

Guadalupe Ruiz— Bogotá D. C. is a subtle, thought-provoking examination of urban life and includes over a hundred stunning images arranged by neighborhood. A map of the neighborhoods and a complementary essay are included to provide context for Ruiz’s impressive photographs. (via)

I recently had the pleasure to talk to Amy Marjoram, Australien-based mastermind behind Excerpt magazine, a free quarterly online publication about photo-based practice. The magazine has an emphasis on original content and creating an accessible platform for thoughtful insights and exchanges. Besides running Excerpt Marjoram enjoys photography – don’t miss her blog postings here – and written language and has exhibited her own work, curated and written catalogue essays for shows in Melbourne’s artist run spaces.

You can read the interview here.

Recently I have finished a short series entitled Function Follows Form. Thanks to Amy Marjoram from Excerpt Magazine for her wonderful write-up and featuring this series in Excerpt’s Issue 3.

Amy Marjoram writes: “I know I am not the only Australian to say when it rains heavily that it’s “pissing down rain” as if the universe is taking a leak. Mounds of snow with their rudimentary formations, also have that thoughtless urgency of creation that mirrors urination. Snow is often so devestatingly, stupidly photogenic that a tiny pile of it can look like an Antarctic iceberg. Pristine snow. In Peter Nitsch’s Function Follows Form snow is sprayed in bright yellow by dogs, yet it remains frigidly beautiful even in the face of this marking. Rather than an attack on the picturesque, these canines are paying homage to the skies, replicating the gorgeous abstraction of expulsion.

The design principal that Form Follows Function, here gets a reversal. Function does follow form and very rarely goes against our expectations of it; the functions of snowing, the functions of peeing, they’ve been worked out some time before us. Might as well go with it; Nitsch ramps up the colour of the warm frothy landmarks till they almost fluoresce. The frivolous photos become the colour of smashed eggs, a crystallised map of urgency, a rendering of techniques of urination as cold paws make haste, an expansion of the photographic documentation of the unmonumental in the tradition of Brassai’s Sculptures Involontaires, 1933. Lastly they are simply piss on snow.”

“Sweet Car” by Spanish photographer Óscar Monzón is a confrontation between photography and privacy, an agression on the values of self-affirmation and separation that are related with the car.

People often ask me what I carry in my daily bag. So, now you know what’s in my daily bag on-the-go.

I recently discovered at the Brooklyn Museum the work of photographer Cass Bird, giving us a insight into the the life of people she meets.

“These photographs show, through portraits, landscapes and documentary scenes, lives that resist and create alternatives to the structures of societal norms. They illustrate the convergence of alternative lifestyles with accepted conceptions of motherhood, nurturing and family. The subjects include people who manipulate gender roles, pushing perceived boundaries of gender specification. The photographs portray the beauty and the positive existence of these individuals, their male or female origins overridden by their own will to define their gender, sexuality, and place in society,” writes the Brooklyn Museum.

Stephen Kelly‘s marvelous documentary about Qi Lihe, a district that sits on the outskirts of Lanzhou in Gansu Province, north western China, which is the most destitute area of this heavily polluted industrial city, makes me want to know more about this Province. Originally in the territory of the Western Qiang peoples, Lanzhou became part of the territory of Qin (state) in the 6th century BC. During the following centuries the Province was ruled–besides some others–by the Han, Sui and Ming Dynasty. During the Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the Guominjun Generals Ma Hongkui and Ma Bufang of Muslim faith protected Lanzhou with their cavalry troops, and put up resistance, the Japanese never captured Lanzhou.

Kelly explains the problems of the Muslim people in detail, “It is home to thousands of Muslim migrant families who have left their homeland within the Linxia Hui autonomous prefecture and arrived into the city, searching for job opportunities and ultimately, a better life. For hundreds of years the Hui and Dongxiang Muslim minorities have farmed the arid land surrounding their ancestral villages. In recent years though, desertification has forced this once workable landscape to begin a dramatic change, impelling many modern day farmers and their families to migrate to the provincial capital in order to survive.

Life for these migrant families in Qi Lihe remains extremely difficult, as they live in abject poverty. Economic and educational marginalization has greatly impacted on the community, as its residents are unable to enjoy the same privileges as the majority Han residents of the city.

As poor rural farmers living on the edge of society, the majority struggle to gain official Lanzhou residency from the local government. This means they cannot visit hospitals for the most basic medical care and they have very little hope of job security and therefore, no regular income. Many of the children of the district are unable to attend local schools, as their parents cannot afford to send them.

As desertification continues to swallow up the countryside of Gansu Province and rural communities continue to disperse to the bigger cities for survival, this pattern of economic and environmental migration will continue. Existing ecological problems will be compounded and the desperate plight of these people will continue.”

‘After Ascension and Descent’ by Charles Grogg is from a phrase by Pierre Joris in ‘A Nomad Poetics’ in which he calls for an approach to writing that accounts for what Gilles Deleuze refers to as ‘rhizomatic’, allowing for varieties of discourse, idioms, syntax, even languages.

Grogg says about this series, “I gave the work this title because I am at a loss when it comes to speaking of knowing one’s roots. My family, with its adopted members, silence about its past, reverence for the absolute at the expense of the profane, has taught me to speak one language only. To be monolingual is to be foreshortened, and like so many Americans I know I speak a provincial, not a global, language. The advent of ‘wireless’ living does nothing to allay this. If anything, we are almost hopelessly tethered—to each other, to the world. It’s when we forget this, when we think we are free beyond complicity, that we encounter trouble looking for meaning.

I watch as our attempt at domestic growth reaches for infinity and then think of growth in terms of what matters to me most, my ancestral family, the roots mostly hidden. I am aware of a subtle desperation in these pictures, as if I were trying to save something, to ground the dearest thing somehow to keep it.”

Thinking in these terms has resulted in these images, an expression of desire for growth at the moment of inhibition, when hesitation is the gap between desiring and having.

“Tree, Line” is an ongoing series of constructed photographs by Zander Olsen rooted in the forest. Olsen explains, “These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales, involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.”

Vancouver and Toronto based photographer Erin Fitzsimmons photographs urban and rural landscapes and also works commercially in the field of architectural photography.

“Shanghai is the epitome of the dichotomy which is China, an ancient place which is thrusting itself into the future while seemingly discarding the past with disregard. Old Shanghai is a shattered version of its former self, a town of wood and brick in a city of steel and concrete. This creates a place which seems to bring about its own death, but whispers of charm and beauty can still be heard at night in narrow streets and alleys,” writes Fitzsimmons.

He also took interesting photographs of the runes of buildings in Kesennuma, and Sendai Bay area Japan, as the clean up continues.

Recently I have been talking to Véronique Sutra, ex Manager of Multimedia at Magnum Photos. Sutra just created Eyes In Progress, which is a program of workshops and masterclasses provided by Masters of photography such as Patrick Zachmann (documentary), Jane Evelyn Atwood (storytelling), Joan Fontcuberta (contemporary) and other great names. Sutra says, “With Eyes in Progress, I wanted to create a program that responded to traditional needs of quality apprenticeship for professional photographers on one hand, but I also wanted to integrate this experience into the contemporary landscape of new modes of social communication on the web; including exchanges with recognized experts in the art and journalism world.”

Sutra explains further her former career at Magnum: “When I worked at Magnum Photos I could see that as soon as one of the agency’s photographer was leading a workshop, people would come from all over the place to attend. Learning from a master is a special and precious experience, indeed you do not learn specific techniques or ‘how to dos’, you learn on inspiration, on how to look at your pictures and pick the one that is ‘right’ for you, you learn what is your own style in photography and that’s what most of the participants are so delighted about. They feel inspired! I love being around the group, making sure all is ok, helping people to edit the pictures they will then show to the master, I get to see great photography, the progress the participants are making, it is just a marvelous experience for me and for my eyes!”

You can read the Véronique Sutra interview in detail here.

Some time ago I have been writing about Excerpt magazine, a free quarterly online photo-based magazine that challenges the archetypal magazine structure by constructing new formats. Now there’s Issue 2 (PDF 8.2 MB) online, in this special issue 30 people have responded to the cover image by Izabela Pluta with an image or moving image of their own. Issue 2 is visual pressed against visual, to get us closer to what others see in an image. This has created an exhibition within a magazine and a discussion written with pictures.

Excerpt Magazine’s first issue garnered critical praise and 4000 readers. Editor Amy Marjoram says, “We approach each issue as a new creative challenge and wanted to start 2012 with this incredible selection of images that resonate together before returning to a mixed format for the rest of the year.” She adds, “With Issue 2, through a wordless premise, the magazine inhabits the very openness that keeps us looking at and taking images.”

Creative Director, Laura Gulbin has again brought her perceptive design skills to Excerpt Magazine, creating an incredible presentation of works by contributors: John Alexander, Anahita Avalos, Stuart Bailey, Thomas Bonfert, Caitlin Burkhart, Kel Glaister, Tatiana Grigorenko, Harrison Haynes, Kotoe Ishii, Thomas Kalak, Charis McKittrick, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, Miriam O’Connor, Flemming Ove Bech, Hasisi Park, Izabela Pluta, Patrick Pound, Kiron Robinson, Laura Rodari, Zoe Scoglio, Ilya Schtutza, George Schwarz, Daniel von Sturmer, Koo Sung Soo, Linda Tegg, Inez de Vega, David Wadelton, Lee Walton, Jennifer Williams, Kit Wise & Keith Wong.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brief Encounters documents Gregory Crewdson’s 10-year quest to create a series of haunting, surreal, and stunningly elaborating portraits of small-town American life. The photographs of Crewdson are shot using a large crew, and are elaborately staged and lit. The epic production of these movie-like images is both intensely personal and highly public: they begin in Crewdson’s deepest desires and memories, but come to life on streets and soundstages in the hills towns of Western Massachusetts.

Filmed over a decade, beginning in 2000, Gregory Crewdson says, “Brief Encounters provides an unparalleled view of the moment of creation of my images. It also reveals the life-story behind the work.” Through frank reflections on his life and career, including the formative influences of his psychologist father and his childhood fascination with the work of Diane Arbus. Childhood fears and ideals, adult anxieties and desires, the influences of pop-culture all combine to form who we are, and for Crewdson, motivate his work.

Yukichi Watabe’s–who died in 1993–book A Criminal Investigation (Éditions Xavier Barrel, ISBN 978-2-915173-82-6, €45) is the backstory on a particularly gruesome and mysterious murder committed in Japan in the late 1950s.

“On January 14th 1958 the disfigured and mutilated body of a man was discovered near Lake Sembako, Japan. Two Tokyo detectives were sent to help the local authorities to quickly wrap up what seemed to be a routine case. The young photojournalist Yukichi Watabe was allowed to shadow the investigators, which turned out to be anything but (routine)”, writes the publishing house.

Watabe’s look and feel is very cineastic with a sequential logic and linearity in the story. Frame by frame the mystery reveals itself …

The clear aesthetic sensibility of Chinese photographer Zhang Kechung on his photographic documentary The Yellow River Surging Northward Rumbingly made me look. We’re all abandoned more or less by the turbulent pleasures of modernized world in China and might have put nature out of our minds. Kechung catches in in his large-format photographs shot around the Yellow River a situation in between this situation, in which people are blended with half-finished structures and sculptures.

Kechun asks himself on this series, “Who is keeping watch on whom? Who is roling and flowing together with whom? While alive, we all go by with time. But we’re still here, and we may have a better consideration on the future after having a look at the past and the present with heart. In such a noisy world, perhaps nothing better than a fresh and simple song (The Yellow River Surging Northward Rumbingly) might match with its original noble color, its past and present, and be well worthy of its drifting from place to place …”

1993, Kansai Electric Power Co. by Taishi Hirokawa

Taishi Hirokawa‘s book “STILL CRAZY,” which has been published back in 1994 and hasn’t been available outside Japan since then, gets a digital reprint as iPad/iPhone version ($7.99). As the full title “STILL CRAZY Nuclear Power Plants As Seen In Japanese Landscapes” suggests, this photographic series presents Japanese landscapes featuring all the nuclear power plants–53 in total–in Japan.

The first impression you get is of time standing still. As you flip the digital pages you will notice that all nuclear power plants look uncannily alike. Their standardized square or cylindrical structures are set against the natural backdrop of the sea with no sign of movement or humanity. Even after shutting the iPad down, this deathlike stillness is somewhere around your mind.

The app itself is nothing sophisticaded, it’s a fairly minimal presentation. Essentially it’s a PDF viewer of the original layout of the book. But the photos are worth buying it.

I agree with Hirokawa who said, “I think the time has come for us to reconsider our future direction and aim for a well-balanced, peaceful and safer world.“

Portrait Of Silence (Bangkok and Ayutthaya Through the Architect’s Eyes of Praditchya Singharaj, Li-Zenn, ISBN : 978-616-7191-36-2, $40) by Architect and Photographer Praditchya Singharaj discovers the hidden beauty in familiar scenes in Bangkok and Ayutthaya. Praditchya studies and understands the soul of nature and the environment his “subjects” are located.

Nithi Sathapitanonda writes about Praditchya: “Praditchya Singharaj is one Thailand’s leading architects and a professional colleague of mine whom I have known for more than 20 years. He is a man of a subtle and delicate nature, and when he thinks or writes it is always with a deep and profound philosophical mind … One day, I happened to see a few black-and-white photographs that had been taken by Praditchya using a “Rolleiflex”, a camera that hardly anyone uses these days. What I saw was an image of scenery with trees, grass, bushes and water. If we look at them casually like any other scenic views, they could go unnoticed. However, looked at closely, from an artistic point of view, these images really capture the attention.”

Praditchya himself explains: “It is no wonder that many architects are fond of photography. Architecture is comprised of four different dimensions, width, length, depth and time, but our thinking process is made up of a picture with just two dimensions. We must learn techniques and various methods, such as laying down the combinations of weight, light and shadow, so that the photograph can relate to, or investigate, our thinking.”

Praditchya Singharaj was born in Bangkok in 1964. Praditchya took up photography while still at secondary school, but only in the past five or six years has he pursued it seriously. In keeping with the current trend, he started taking pictures with a digital camera, but once he had the opportunity to try out the conventional medium-format film camera used in the past, Praditchya was greatly impressed with the results and has favoured a
film camera ever since.

Dale Konstanz, artist and photographer, originally from the US, has been riding around in Bangkok taxis for the past four years documenting the sacred decorations, religious icons, and pop culture paraphernalia inside the cabs. In addition to idolizing gods that resemble humans and animals, many Thais worship trees, plants, and other entities from the natural world. These animist beliefs have their origin in ancient times, so it’s fascinating to see these practices carried on today in the modern day context of taxi cabs. In this particular case, branches from a sacred bodhi tree have been tied together with various strings and cloth that function as blessings.

In his blog, Still Life in Moving Vehicles, he ruminates about his findings in the taxis accompanied by his colourful photographs. His blog has gained a large following and has recently been named by CNN Go as one of six top blogs about Thailand.