Alejandro Chaskielberg - Claxton Projects

Alejandro Chaskielberg | Claxton Projects 10/12/16, 12:10 AM
La Creciente
Alejandro Chaskielberg
(Nazraeli Press, 2011 )
Intrigued by memories of a childhood vacation, Argentinean-born photographer Alejandro

Chaskielbergfelt felt compelled to explore the enigmatic and isolated lives of the inhabitants of the
Paraná River Delta, near Buenos Aires. Chaskielberg describes this mystical and remote watery
landscape as “an estuary of water and silence; at dawn, one sinks into its fog and its unrelenting
vegetation.”
Living amongst the islands of this Argentinean estuary for three years (2007-10), Alejandro
Chaskielberg would observe the community’s daily rituals, and then, only under the dramatic
illumination of a full-moon, would reconstruct, rehearse and restage these scenarios, using an
indigenous cast of hunters, fisherman, farmers and lumberjacks. “I think of my pictures as slides of
unfinished stories, having a script on my head. The images are carefully planned after days of
observation, and they only have a body when the large-format camera initiates the slow
subordination of the capture. It will take from five to ten minutes until this thick darkness sprouts
what was secret.”
These elaborate nocturnal set pieces are by no means a traditional documentary approach.
Chaskielberg relies heavily on the technique of his craft, creatively weaving available and artificial
lighting sources in the frames of his extended exposures. In the accompanying essay, Martin Parr
notes Chaskielberg’s ability to “combine subject and methodology so convincingly that you hardly
notice the thin line between subject and style. It is a brilliant resolution.”
The surreal and striking cinematic quality of Chaskielberg’s images not only reveals the delicate
culture of the Paraná River Delta, but also intelligently blurs the boundaries between fact and
fiction. La Creciente is a provocative body of work from a wonderfully innovative storyteller.
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Forest
Jitka Hanzlová
(Steidl, 2006)
Czech-born Jitka Hanzlová left her native Rokytník in Eastern Bohemia, and claimed asylum in
Germany at the age of 24. She settled and later studied photography in Essen, however much of
her early work is preoccupied with the memory and recollections of her early childhood home.
In Forest (2000-2005), Hanzlová engages in the place of childhood memory, the wooded realm of
the looming Carpatarian Mountain forest. Jitka Hanzlová played amongst these ancient trees as a
child, but in revisiting them she offers no safe place of refuge or mythical charm; this forest is an
untamed sanctuary, an excursion far within the bowels of the unknown. As John Berger describes
in the accompanying essay, “In Jitka’s pictures there is no welcome. They have been taken from
the inside. The deep inside of a forest, perceived like the inside of a glove by a hand within it.”
Jitka Hanzlová’s portrait of the forest is void of civilization; the seasons are muted and offer nothing
more dramatic than a dusting of snow or the occasional summer bloom. A flower teetering over a
menacing woodland pool appears like a warning from an enchanted fairytale, and in the
background there’s the lurking omnipresence of darkness, of the unknown. Berger writes, “In a
space without gravity there is no weight, and these pictures of hers are, as it were, weightless in
terms of time. It is if they have been taken between times, where there is none.”
While shooting Forest, Hanzlová noted in her sketchbook, “In the forest there was nobody looking
at me, communicating with me directly, so I had to look more and more into myself.” It is the
intangible quality of these intriguing images that give them their affecting power, and like Jitka
Hanzlová, the more we look into the Forest, the deeper we look at ourselves.
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Living Room
http://www.claxtonprojects.com/books/alejandro-chaskielberg/ Page 1 of 4
Nick Waplington
(Aperture, 1991)
By the late 1980s England had experienced ten years of Conservative government, the collapse of
industry, the rise in poverty and unemployment, and centralized government’s abandonment of
people and place.
It is in this context that British photographer Nick Waplington spent four years documenting the
daily lives of two working-class families on a council estate in Nottingham, England. Rather than
embracing the contemporary photographic conventions of social realism, Waplington chronicled
the lives of these families in saturated color, capturing an intimate narrative with poignancy and an
unexpected humour.
We are thrust into the raw mechanisms of the family unit, exposing the viewer to every intimate
moment of domesticity and laying bare the private sanctity of home. Although chaotic visits to local
stores and expectant encounters with ice cream vans are all documented, it is in the living room of
the title that provides the theatrical backdrop to most of the daily disorder.
“What is remarkable about the photographs is the special way in which they make the intimate
something public; something that we, who do not know personally the two families photographed,
can look at without any sense (or thrill) of intrusion,” writes John Berger in the accompanying
essay.
Nick Waplington makes no dramatic social statements, but rather a quite touching (matter-of-fact)
chronicle of the daily struggle of the working-class. In many ways, this makes the work a far more
affecting critique of poverty. Living Room is a tender and poignant debut title, wonderfully
documenting the physical and physiological dysfunctionality of families enduring the plight of
economic deficiency.
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The Solitude of Ravens

Masahisa Fukase
(Rat Hole Gallery, 2008)
Originally released in 1986 under the title Karasu (Ravens) by Japanese publisher Sokyusha, this
Rat Hole edition of this seminal body of work is a beautifully conceived reprint of a Japanese
photobook masterpiece.
After divorcing his wife of twelve years, Masahisa Fukase journeyed back to his birthplace of
Hokkaido, a small island in the north of Japan. It was then that Fukase would make the connection
between his lonely and depressing state and the image of ravens as symbols of dark, omens of
misfortune. Over the next ten years, through a darkening spiral of melancholy, Fukase obsessively
chronicled his perpetuating avian hell.
Fukase documents a largely uninhabitable wasteland—dark, hopeless and often observed

fleetingly through a train window. The characters of this apocalyptic hell are largely anonymous
and appear alienated. The birds are a relentless metaphor to Fukase’s psychological purgatory and
the lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Ravens resonates from each plate, “And his eyes have all the
seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.”
Five years after the publication of the book, he stumbled drunkenly down a flight of stairs and has
been in a coma ever since. The mythology surrounding this tragic body of work has elevated these
images to the status of photographic legend. As Akira Hasegawa notes in her afterword, “In
Ravens Fukase’s work can be deemed to have reached its utmost height and to have also fallen to
its greatest depth.”
In The Solitude of Ravens, Masahisa Fukase leaves behind an expressionistic epitaph, a potent
and agonizing physical and emotional pilgrimage through personal depression. Each exquisitely
sequenced plate permeates with impending doom, and this tragically haunting narrative is
overwhelming in its somber and deeply affecting power.
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Chromes
William Eggleston
(Steidl, 2011)
Arguably one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, William Eggleston has
come to define photography’s early color aesthetic. His lyrical style and apparent visual simplicity
forces us to reinterpret our perception of beauty and seduces us with the magical wonder extant in
the inconsequential and commonplace.
Eggleston’s work is laced with an evocative elegance, and his oversaturated images seem to
consume the viewer with a vision inhabited by an underlying isolation and brooding melancholy.
Curator Thomas Weski describes Eggleston’s work: “The images don’t explain the world in an
analytical, matter-of-fact, and distanced way to the viewer, but we find ourselves exposed to the
suggestive lure of the photographs that we cannot resist.”
Chromes is a collection of 364 plates edited from an archive of 5,000 Ektachrome and
Kodachrome frames taken between 1969 and 1974. Housed at the Eggleston Artistic Trust in
Memphis, this archive has remained largely unseen, excluding a small selection of images that
John Szarkowski made for Eggleston’s definitive 1976 MoMA show. It was this exhibition that
challenged the contemporary notions of what was accepted as photographic art, and finally gave
color photography the art-establishment validation that it so desperately desired.
Chromes is a wonderfully ambitious and beautifully sequenced project, which allows Eggleston’s
early-career Memphis images the chance to breathe, within a wider and more comprehensive
context. The more subtle frames (not included in Szarkowski’s signature 1976 edit) help to form a
broader narrative of an artist pushing the boundaries of his creative process and the photographic
medium. This title is a masterful product of photobook publishing and an evocative testament to
Eggleston’s vivid and democratic vision of the American dream.
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Series
Enrique Metinides
(Kominek, 2011)
The son of a Mexico City restaurant owner, twelve-year-old Enrique Metinides (fueled by a love of
cowboy and gangster films) photographed his first corpse; and with that, what would become the
celebrated career of a Master of the Morbid had begun. Over the next fifty years (1943-1993)
Metinides, also known as the “Mexican Weegee”, provided an endlessly grisly catalogue of death,
misery and violence for various Mexican tabloids.
The memories of his early cinematic experiences would continue to influence the composition and
technique of Metinides’ work throughout his career: “I’m a photographer by accident, who took
photos by chance thanks to movies that I saw and tried to imitate, like a director of a scene.” The
streets of Mexico City were Metinides’ theatrical movie set; obsessively scanning the emergency
radio channels, he also volunteered to work with the ambulance teams, giving him instant access
to the next macabre spectacle.
Unlike American photojournalist Weegee, Metinides’ camera does not confront his subjects with
aggressive perversity. Although gruesome and always uncompromising, Metinides captures
moments of fatal misfortune with a discreet, humanist empathy. Whether it is images of a mother
cradling the empty coffin of her dead child or a distraught woman sitting in a park next to the
lifeless body of her fiancé, these intimate and often poignant images rarely venture into tabloid
sensationalism.
Series places Metinides’ signature frames within the wider context of the narrative. It not only
highlights the sequential and cinematic qualities of his images, but also emphasizes the ambiguity
between the representation of fact and fiction, which lies at the heart of Metinides’ work. The
compelling qualities of these images is beautifully presented in this provocative and creatively
designed title, and wonderfully illustrates the absurd and random unpredictability of life.
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Design: BERG (http://www.bergstudio.co.uk) / intraspin.com (http://www.intraspin.com)

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Alejandro Chaskielberg | Claxton Projects 10/12/16, 12:10 AM

Intrigued by memories of a childhood vacation, Argentinean-born photographer Alejandro

The Solitude of Ravens

Fukase documents a largely uninhabitable wasteland—dark, hopeless and often observed

Design: BERG (http://www.bergstudio.co.uk) / intraspin.com (http://www.intraspin.com)

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