A Way With Words – Part One

Book Reviews / Featured / February 23, 2021

By Elin Spring

Photography has come a long way since its inception in the early 1800’s, developing into a field that has altered every other art form in the process. The current fusion of photography with other media echoes the trajectory of global interconnectedness, challenging preconceived notions and expanding our viewpoints. Coupling pictures with words is perhaps the most traditional of combinations, and when paired effectively, remains one of the most powerful. Five recently published volumes employ a blend of images and text in ways that are unique and indelible. Here, we review two completely different books whose prodigious use of descriptive prose guides our visual interpretations: Karen Davis’ Still Stepping: A Family Portrait and Mark Alice Durant’s compendium of images and essays, Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

In Still Stepping, Karen Davis presents a superbly edited chronological sequence of intimate photographs she made of a nuclear family over the course of twenty-five years. The Morgan-Orton family is related to her by marriage, which provides a key underpinning of mutual faith in one another. Still Stepping is centered around the volcanic effect of the diagnosis of Childhood Onset Schizophrenia (COS) on the couple’s son Parker, the older of their two children.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

Davis’ grainy B&W photographs engage on many levels: they are both timeless and immediate, sharing mundane and rarified moments that invoke the vivacity of a growing family, the frenetic energy that foreshadows Parker’s mental illness, the creeping mask of psychoactive therapies, the oppression of exhaustion, and always, steadfast hope. Intimate portraits describe each family member’s moments of reflection, struggle and triumph with judicious choices in angle, motion and telling selective focus. Davis makes us feel absolutely present to each instant she captures.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

As omniscient bystanders, we are ultimately saved from an overwhelming sense of foreboding by the nimble way that Davis interweaves insightful text with her images. Her variety of sources provides both depth and perspective, beginning with Davis’ own illuminating introduction, an essay by independent curator Alison Nordström, who furnishes photographic context, and a piece by Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, who offers a medical viewpoint of COS.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

Undoubtedly, however, it is the well-positioned, diaristic contributions from each family member that are the most poignant and gripping. Davis’ images reveal an ordinary family pushed to heroic efforts by the extraordinary circumstances thrust upon them. Her photographs are the essential, expressive yang to the tempered textual yin. Together, they create a profoundly humane story of the redemptive power of a family’s love.

From Still Stepping, © Karen Davis, courtesy of the artist.

Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling, edited by Mark Alice Durant, was initially conceived as an exhibition but expanded and morphed into this volume of related images by a raft of artists including André Kertész, Aaron Siskind, Larry Sultan, Anna and Bernhard Blume, and Julia Borissova, whose “J.B. about men floating in the air” (2015) commands the book’s cover. The book features a veritable hit parade of other photographers that make this gathering by turns intriguing, amusing, and terrifying.

From J.B. about men floating in the air, 2015, by Julia Borissova, courtesy of the artist and Saint Lucy Books.

But it is the variety of invited writers, another host of photography’s luminaries, that foist this book into the Big Questions arena to which Mark Alice Durant unfailingly gravitates. Susan Bright reflects on images that are performative versus uncontrolled, declaring them “visual palindromes” wherein we cannot know whether we’re viewing jumping or falling. In fact, many of the essays veer toward a consideration of intention, acknowledging that it is the viewer who weighs whether they are witnessing a glorious sense of abandonment or a desperate loss of control.

Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, No.474, 1961, by Aaron Siskind, Collection of Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, ©Aaron Siskind Foundation, courtesy of Saint Lucy Books.

Like both nightmares and dreams (in which many of us take flight), ambiguous states affirm the human condition. This is not lost on anyone. Jean Dykstra’s fluent contextualization of how “a single, ephemeral moment in time…describes that specifically photographic magic (that make them) all suspenseful and a little enigmatic” is joined by Susan Bright’s fabulous “21 Thoughts on Falling with Gabby Laurent” that alights on an impressive array of falls, including the irresistible “When models fall on the catwalk, I can’t watch. It seems so brutal – they are like gazelles being attacked by invisible lions.”

From the series Falling by Gabby Laurent, courtesy of the artist and Saint Lucy Books.

In “Fake News: Running Scared,” Marvin Heiferman delves into to how photographic re-enactments such as Tabitha Soren’s Running series can unleash associations that wreak psychological havoc and “touch cultural nerves.” He shares a sullen sensibility with Tamara Suarez Porras’ “Notes on Grain” that proffers the deflating conclusion that “the photograph is a wall, not a window.”

Feature Image: “Dave 000329, 2011” from the series Running by Tabitha Soren, courtesy of the artist and Saint Lucy Books.

Other essays, like Odette England’s visual-spatial memories of learning to swim in reference to Larry Sultan’s Swimmer series and Cig Harvey’s sensorial recollections of “crawling” and “floating” that accompany her own images, savor the vividly corporeal. Flights of fancy like Carol Mavor’s stream of consciousness “conversation” with Francesca Woodman skip like a stone across water.

Durant has chosen with aplomb, not only in remarkable imagery but in inviting those who, in writing about specific photographs, more often than not expound on photography itself. Overwhelmingly, these writers have cracked the nut of finding eternity in a grain of sand, expanding the seminal purpose of photography to question, provoke and take flight with our imaginations.

Küchenkoller (Kitchen Frenzy), 1985, by Anna and Bernhard Blume, courtesy of the artist, Peter Freeman, Inc. and Saint Lucy Books.

Coming next in Part Two of A Way With Words, we examine three photo books that feature allusive lyricism or shrewd journalistic text: Rebecca Norris Webb’s Night Calls, Amani Willett’s A Parallel Road and Sandi Haber Fifield’s The Certainty of Nothing.

FOR INFORMATION AND/OR TO PURCHASE THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE: