From the Bottom of a Well
Shawn Records’ beautifully complex photographs are woven together here in From
the Bottom of a Well, a poetic and tragically humorous account of a
Chinese government-sponsored trip for a select group of American fine-art
photographers. For two weeks, they traveled by bus with a government
escort to pre-determined locations, including wetlands, oil fields,
coal museums, and re-enactments of Mongolian village life. Wrapped
up in a web of politics, propaganda, environmental whitewashing, and
good-old romanticism, this work plucks at the tension between the photographer’s
passive role as recorder of sanitized “facts,” and the impulse to subvert
that role. Taking his title from the Chinese saying, zuijing guantian (like looking at the sky from the bottom of a well), Records recognizes
his own limited capacity to know his subjects in a meaningful way.
Instead, he accepts the veneer of his own understanding while demonstrating
a keen ability to scrape wit, beauty, and empathy from the surface
of things.
The Amnesia Pavillions
The Amnesia Pavilions, Nicholas Muellner’s stunning new book of textual and visual
autobiography, takes as its central narrative his return
trip to a small city in Eastern Siberia after a seventeen-year
absence. Traveling back to Ulan-Ude in the fall of 2009,
Muellner set out to find a close friend whose trail had
run cold. Guided (and haunted) by the extensive photographic
and written material produced on his earlier journeys,
as well as reflective chronicling of his futile retracings,
this book considers the impossibility of tracking down
and understanding one’s former self. Along the way, this
autobiographical safari also serves as a framework for
viewing the massive cultural and socio-economic change
that has transformed provincial Russia.
The Amnesia Pavilions argues for the incommensurability of the past and the present, and examines photography’s personal, vernacular and historical role in both bridging and broadening the temporal chasm of understanding.
Nicholas Muellner is an artist, writer and curator whose work considers the poetics of representation as a conduit between political understanding and personal experience. His most recent book projects focus on autobiographical narrative and the place of photography within that practice. His previous book, The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009), was a philosophical and emotional inquiry into the relationship between photographs and monuments.
The Amnesia Pavilions argues for the incommensurability of the past and the present, and examines photography’s personal, vernacular and historical role in both bridging and broadening the temporal chasm of understanding.
Nicholas Muellner is an artist, writer and curator whose work considers the poetics of representation as a conduit between political understanding and personal experience. His most recent book projects focus on autobiographical narrative and the place of photography within that practice. His previous book, The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009), was a philosophical and emotional inquiry into the relationship between photographs and monuments.
From the Bottom of a Well
By Shawn Records
64 pages, 35 color illustrations
Perfect-bound soft cover, 8 x 7.25 inches
ISBN 978-0-9777655-7-7
Edition of 500, retail $20
Release date October 1, 2011
The Amnesia Pavillions
Photographs and text by Nicholas Muellner
220 pages, 81 color illustrations, 31 black & white
Perfect-bound soft cover, 8 x 7.5 inches
ISBN 978-0-9777655-8-4
Edition of 500, retail $30
Release date October 1, 2011