Bill Jacobson (born 1955) is widely known for his blurry black-and-white portrait photographs of the 1980s, which referenced the AIDS epidemic in their implications of fleeting presence and human fragility. Whether shooting figures, street scenes or landscapes, Jacobson has consistently projected a sensation of both personal and collective memories fading into oblivion. A Series of Human Decisions presents a new body of work as sharp as his previous work was immaterial, and signals a whole new approach to similarly melancholic imagery. Here, crystal-clear renderings of vacated, somewhat lonesome spaces, both private and industrial, inside and outside, intimate and alienating, convey the extreme constructedness of what surrounds us. As Jacobson explains, the title "refers to the idea that we live in a highly constructed world. The world is just that, a series of human decisions, one layered upon another over time. We move constantly from one fabricated arena to another." This monograph includes an in-depth interview between the artist and Ian Berry.

Bill Jacobson: A Series of Human Decisions

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Decode Books

Since early childhood, Seattle photographer Nealy Blau (born 1968) has wandered the halls of natural history museums, finding escape and reverie in the mysterious and sometimes eerie dioramas of constructed nature scenes. In Elsewhere, Blau photographs these dioramas as though they were actual vistas, conspiring with the interactions between their three-dimensional components and the painted backdrops to compel her images to the brink of reality. “I found that if I employed techniques that blurred the perceptions of what is real and what is not I could focus on something more abstract and essential and mysterious,” she says, in an interview with Clint Willour at the end of this volume. Photographers have explored the museum diorama before, but usually in order to trade on their kitsch appeal; Blau instead explores their enchanting melancholia, and titles each picture to indicate the location, at natural history museums in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Santa Barbara and Tacoma. Brimming with gift appeal, Elsewhere was featured as one of Oprah Winfrey's favorite books in the December 2010 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

Nealy Blau: Elsewhere

Individual Artists

The portraits of Kelli Connell (born 1974) appear to document a relationship between two women. Their idiom looks familiar: a young couple caught up in everyday moments of pleasure and reflection--a picnic in the park, playing pool in a bar, taking a bubble bath together. The first flicker of unease comes as soon as the viewer registers the similarity of the two subjects, who seem to be twins--and incestuous twins at that. In fact, Connell has photographed the same model portraying both of the women and then digitally combined the two images so seamlessly that not a trace remains of their construction. Connell has been at the forefront of artists using digital technologies for the past decade, but her art is not about Photoshop, and the photographs in Double Life extend far beyond their duplicity into larger and more complex issues of identity and visual rhetoric. Connell has a canny eye for the documentary look, as she tells an interviewer: “I tried to infuse my images with the sorts of subtle portrait techniques that made for powerful documentary photos, hoping to figure out how to make my work look more like true documentation of two women in a scene, even though they have never been together at the same time.”

Kelli Connell: Double Life

Bright, Susan

In the two series collected in this volume, Soldierand Many Wars, photographer Suzanne Opton (born 1954) photographs a range of American soldiers close up, with their heads resting on tabletops, and American veterans draped in cloth blankets. The subjects of the Soldier series are all young, active-duty soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the photographs were presented as billboards in nine American cities from 2008 through 2010. Reviewing them for The New York Times, photography critic Vince Aletti wrote: “The posture is vulnerable and startlingly intimate, as if these young men and women were facing someone in bed or on a stretcher... Opton catches soldiers both on guard and off, looking out and inward simultaneously, and we can only imagine what they're thinking, what they've done, and what they dread.” The project received extensive press coverage and even sparked a heated debate about America's image of the military. The Many Wars series presents portraits of veterans from American wars over the past 70 years. Through interviews by the photographer, we learn how the wars have affected their lives. Both bodies of work were selected by Martin Paar for the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010.

Suzanne Opton: Soldier, Many Wars

Jones, Ann

Prodger, Phillip

For his third monograph, American photographer Brian Finke (born 1976) turns his attention to building sites. “I have always been attracted to photographing within groups,” Finke has stated, “immersing myself in the scene, almost becoming one of the members.” Here, as with his previous series, which focused upon such subjects as flight attendants, high school cheerleaders and football players, Construction examines a profession or vocation that tends to be represented in stereotypical terms. Photographing at construction sites throughout Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, Finke zeroes in upon postures, expressions and gestures, revealing diversity in apparent uniformity and examining the ritual establishment of individual identities within the image of the larger group or industry. In contrast with the photographer’s previous series, the photographs in Construction incorporate much more of the surrounding environments: Finke shoots the workers in relation to the machines they operate, and then contrasts the scale of these seemingly small men, women and machines to the mammoth structures they erect. The result is a thoughtful and unusually intimate view of the construction industry that seamlessly blends the heroic with the mundane.

Brian Finke: Construction

Johnson, Whitney

In 2010, American photographers Amy Stein (born 1970) and Stacy Arezou Mehrfar (born 1977) embarked on a monthlong road trip throughout New South Wales. They were interested in investigating the Australian social phenomenon of the “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” in which successful people, or “tall poppies,” are “cut down to size,” resented or ridiculed because their talents or achievements distinguish them from their peers. Is the syndrome real? Can it be documented or observed? Stein and Mehrfar spent their days meeting and photographing everyday Australians--from schoolchildren in their plaid uniforms to young surfers playing at the beach to grandmothers meeting at their social clubs--all the while learning about the relationship between the group and the individual within Australian society. The resulting photographs offer a visual portrait of quintessential Australian life and society.

Amy Stein & Stacy Arezou Mehrfar: Tall Poppy Syndrome

Over the past eight years, Lori Nix (born 1969) has created meticulously detailed model environments and then photographed them--locations within a fictional city that celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation. But her monuments of civilization are abandoned, in a state of ruin where nature has begun to repopulate the spaces. “I am fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse. In addition to my childhood experiences growing up with natural disasters in Kansas, I also watched disaster flicks in the 1970s. Each of these experiences has greatly influenced my photographic work.” Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer” and spends months building the complex spaces before photographing them. As critic Sidney Lawrence wrote in Art in America: “Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, [Nix’s tableaux] prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain.”

Lori Nix: The City

Pollack, Barbara

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