David Schulz, The Terrorist’s Handbook

Thanks to David Schulz’s recent self-published book, I discovered that there is actually such a thing as a terrorism handbook. According to Schulz, it is “a document created by an unknown author at an unknown time. It is believed to have been heavily edited over the years, and can be found on several websites and downloaded freely.”

This handy guide gave Schulz the idea to create a self-published book to show “just how easy it is for a terrorist to perform acts of terror”. The book consists of photographs shot in an intentionally amateurish style of sites that could have been shot by an imaginary terrorist: bridges, lots of chainlink fences, apartment blocks, infra-structural details. The images are overlaid with chapter headings from the actual terorrist handbook and excerpts of some tense conversations Schulz had with police and security staff when taking the photographs. In a pretty incredible coincidence, Schulz has the same name as one of the authors of The Counter-Terrorism Handbook which “guides law enforcement as well as industrial and private security personnel through terrorism situations or potential threats such as bomb threats, hostage situations, kidnapping, and negotiations”.

The Terrorist’s Handbook is a provocative idea, one which could have got Schulz into a lot of trouble. However, the execution is problematic at times: I found certain of the images to be overly constructed or simply repetitive, while some of the New York cityscapes chosen seem like pretty unlikely targets. The most fascinating thing about the book are the quotes from his encounters with police and security. In these Schulz is never confrontational, but plays up his naive innocence instead. The responses he gets reveal the extraordinarily suspicious attitude that has developed to photography in New York.

One to display prominently on your bookshelf?

The Books, Take Time. From The Lemon of Pink.

The Books are calling it quits. R.I.P.

Nico Bick, P.I.

Nico Bick’s book P.I. is set in one of Holland’s most famous jails, the Over-Amstel Penitentiary Institution, known locally as the Bijlmerbajes. The book is a typological study of the prison’s internal and external architecture: common areas, individual cells, isolation units, outdoor spaces… Each type of space is photographed several times from the same perspective and the small variations from one image to the next bring out the few features of this intentionally anonymous architecture.

Bick’s approach could not be more detached: his interest seems simply to be to show these spaces, which are generally hidden from the outside world, without any sense of visual drama. Prisoners are only present in the traces they leave on the prison: how they lay out their cell, the graffiti scrawled on an outside wall or in an isolation unit. Although Bick is shedding light on a difficult, hidden subject, his intention does not seem to be to reveal the reality of prison life, but rather to remind us of how little we know of this world. The book is in an edition of 400 copies and is available on Bick’s site.

If you have an interest in this particularly difficult and complex field of prison photography, the best place to go is Pete Brook’s blog, Prison Photography.

Tadashi Kawamata, Under the Water (exhibition at Kamel Mennour until 28 January)

Interesting radio interview by Laure Adler (en français) with Naoya Hatakeyama about his exhibition Natural Stories but mainly about the tsunami of March 11, 2011.

Installation views from Michael Wolf’s exhibition of Cantonese Opera performers for the M+ (the new museum of visual culture in Hong Kong) Bamboo Theatre Project exhibition. Not your average installation.

Great initiative by the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland: the blog Still Searching which has just launched. The blog will be run by a series of 6 guest bloggers, each with a 6-week slot. The German photo historian and theorist Bernd Stiegler will kick off the blog (January 15 to February 29), the Indian writer Aveek Sen, (March 1 to April 14), US artist Walead Beshty (April 15 to May 31), and Dutch photo theorist Hilde van Gelder (June 1 to July 14, 2012) will follow until the summer break. Geoffrey Batchen, the photo historian and theorist currently working in New Zealand, will initiate the autumn season (September 15 to October 31).

Nice new resource which collates a bunch of information (visuals of the books, interviews, individual images, quotes, etc.) on photographers and their publications. So far pages have been created for Rob Hornstra and Viviane Sassen. 

Hennessy Youngman is back with his Art Thoughtz… this time it’s Damien Hirst. Word.

(Source: peculiarvernacular)