From Prism Series Book #3 Jack Spencer, 2011, by Steven Brown

“When we look at photographs which privilege documentation over imagination, we are seeing seeing. Little room is left us, the viewers, for insight or interpretation. What we’re shown is what we cannot help noticing if our eyes are open. Anyone, for example, can understand a picture of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The problem with this kind of seeing is that what we observe may have nothing to do with the truth of the matter represented. That’s not to say it has nothing to do with fact. But fact, as we know, is more often the sales pitch of the powerful than a hallmark of the universal. In Spencer’s work, however, truth manifests itself by negation of fact. We see what history can never regain, what the news can never define, what advertisements can never sell.

Seeing, for instance, has very little to do with what we experience in a photograph like Cloud/Tree, where air, water, and land invade the horizon so entirely that one can hardly think of any other word for it than sublime—that sense of the monstrous in the elemental, in the presence of which all human intent withers into triviality. “

Another excerpt from Prism Book #2 Mitch Dobrowner, 2011 by Dafydd Wood

“Dobrowner’s Trees-Clouds gives an excellent summative vision of his photography, even though it possesses none of his beautiful geological formations. We find the extreme ratios—the horizon line is squeezed against the bottom of the photograph dwarfing the land beneath a vast expanse of sky and cloud. A series of telephone poles almost unnoticeably inch across the land. However the beauty of all of this is nothing without the two minute trees in the left-hand corner. These trees are the making of the entire photograph, providing some golden ratio, some graspable even personable concreteness, however insignificant the trees may be, dwarfed by the immensity of sky, the unending sliver of land that stretches everywhere beneath inhospitable storms.”

From Prism Book #2 Mitch Dobrowner, 2011, by Dafydd Wood

“The fictive vision behind these sublime landscapes pivots around two seemingly contradictory artistic impulses: the classical and the modernist, particularly the technique of defamiliarization. While both of these styles seem mutually exclusive, there has been in fact a great deal of 20th century classicizing art. Though it often only united a Modernist style with a Classical subject, it was the most dominant style of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Furthermore, it might seem odd to label photographs of plateaus, storms, or mountain ranges “classical” or “modern,” but Dobrowner’s work quite clearly shrugs off the Romanticism of most landscape or nature artists and hones a neoclassical formalism that in turn transforms his subjects into something alien.”

From Prism Series Book #3 “Jack Spencer,” 2011, by Steven Brown

“To think of photography as captured fact is, in some ways, to think of it as the invention of coincidence rather than the intention of the artist. Journalism and documentary rely on serendipitous opportunities. And not surprisingly, many photographers claim the element of luck as a blessing on their process. But Spencer doesn’t buy into the idea of luck-as-process. In a statement linked to his website, he says:

‘I am forced to abandon serendipity to create an altogether new mood that did not exist before. These are constructions that are in gestation. I am moving in a direction where I believe that it is exciting to create something into existence, where before, there was nothing. I no longer have any interest in relying on circumstance to present itself at its convenience (emphasis Spencer’s).’”

21st Editions : The Art of Charles Grogg

Reblogged from Hiromi Paper:

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Last week for Photo L.A. at the Santa Monica Civic auditorium, 21st Editions flew out from Massachusetts to share some fine and unique hand bound books. Among those showcased was a particular book we were most pleased to be able to have been a part of.  Cracked: The Art of Charles Grogg, with only 18 copies existing, includes 10 signed platinum printed prints on our Gampi Torinoko and 3 loose prints. Charles Grogg also incorporated hand-stitches in three of his ten platinum prints. To complete the art …

From Prism Series Book #1 “Yamamoto Masao,” 2010, by John Wood

“On suiseki: The appreciation of stones that suggested mountains, landscapes, animals, and other forms developed in China where they had been collected and revered by the literati since at least the T’ang dynasty. They were classified by varieties: elegant rocks, fantastic rocks, admirable rocks, and stubborn rocks. However, with the arrival in Japan of Zen, a new stone aesthetic developed. What came to be admired were simpler, less ostentatious, more austere, and quieter stones, stones that reflected inner awareness and spiritual refinement.”

Refuting History: An Interview with John Wood by Daniel Westover

The following interview was conducted by email in late January and early February, 2011 and was published by The Asheville Poetry Review (www.ashevillepoetryreview.com).

DW: In literary circles, you are best known as a Southern poet, an Arkansas native who founded the first M.F.A. program in Louisiana. The Southern Review called you “The most engaging and lucid of the postmodern southern poets,” and when you were profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lawrence Biemiller wrote that you were “as well rooted [in Lake Charles, Louisiana] as one of the city’s live oaks.” And yet, in 2007 you left Louisiana and the South altogether, retiring to Saxton’s River, Vermont. I am wondering, first, if you still (or ever did) consider yourself to be a “Southern” poet and, second, how your move to New England has affected you as an artist. I am struck, for example, by how deeply some of the poems in your new book, The Fictions of History, engage with Puritan figures like Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor.

JW: No, I never thought of myself as a “Southern” poet, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell The Southern Review I didn’t appreciate the nice compliment. I appreciated it very much. I don’t think of myself as “postmodern” either, but again who could complain in the same sentence with “most engaging and lucid”? Of course, there are some Southern characters in my work because I lived in the midst of them—nutty, dancing preachers and hysterical women and so forth. There was a church on the end of the block I grew up on. They got very loud there. We lived at the other end of the block but on Sundays and Prayer Meeting nights you could hear them clearly, and I would sometimes go peek in one of the windows and watch the show. My mother was friends with Pastor Jimmy and Frank, the man who lived with him, a fact my mother found wonderfully amusing. She would take them extra tomatoes, okra, and so forth from the garden, as she did other neighbors. I would go with her sometimes, and though I didn’t know the word at the time, their house was a masterpiece of “camp.” Pierre and Gilles would love to have photographed it.

A new film on Mitch Dobrowner produced by Google

In recent news, Google has produced a short video on Mitch Dobrowner:

Our Prism Series books Mitch Dobrowner is currently shipping. Order now to receive your book(s) for the holidays (limited quantities may be available).

As always we look forward to hearing from you, and have a happy holiday season!

21st Editions in Boston November 18-20

We hope you will join us for the Fifteenth Annual Boston International Fine Art Show, located at the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, in the South End of Boston.

The show runs from Friday, November 18, through Sunday, November 20. If you would like complimentary tickets please contact us by Wednesday, November 16, and we will add your name to will call. Please note that we will not be able to accommodate any ticket requests after the 16th.

21st Editions Exhibiting This Weekend at the Editions | Artists’ Book Fair

We hope you will join us in New York this weekend for the Editions|Artists’ Book Fair. We will be exhibiting The Prophecies of William Blake featuring the photographs of Mitch Dobrowner and Cracked: The Art of Charles Grogg(both books shown below).The Editions|Artists’ Book Fair opens Thursday, November 3 and runs through Sunday, November 6. There is no charge to attend on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Thursday night tickets are $25. However, if you would like a complimentary ticket, please email us at 21st@21stEditions.com.

We hope to see you this weekend in New York at:
548 West 22nd Street, between 10th & 11th Avenues

Thursday: 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Friday and Saturday: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
Sunday: 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM