The Fair hosts over 200 international presses, booksellers, antiquarian dealers, and independent artist/publishers presenting a diverse range of the best in contemporary art publications.

I wanted to see what kind of titles were going to be featured and to get a sense of the scope and focus of this book fair. My interest, of course, was books by African Diaspora photographers, though any African Diaspora artists would do. As it turned out, this was a really long journey to discover just a couple of new titles,* though I was hardly surprised that there were so few. I came away with the persistent question that pesters me (and many others)—where are the publications by and about black artists?

To be fair, NYABF does include some really interesting vendors as well as some terrific work by an international group of artists. After a great chat with cartoonist/activist Rebecca Migdal about her collaboration with the Yes Men, I picked up a copy of World War 3, to which she contributed (I’m really interested in the idea of graphic novels and comics), and also Andrew Laties’ Rebel Bookseller: How to Improvise Your Own Indie Store and Beat Back the Chains and had a good chat with him; he told me about Myles C. Pinkney’s photo-illustrated children’s books which I’ll be adding to the list of titles by black photographers. I also fell in love with Lubok Books‘ gorgeous letterpress-printed volumes and it’s probably a good thing for my budget that he didn’t take credit cards or checks, because I wanted them all, athough if they continue to weigh on my mind I have two more days…I also loved virtually all of the small titles from Coracle—I could have bought them all as gifts.

Henry Roy, Spirit, 2009

One photographer whose name I didn’t recognize was Henry Roy, so I wrote down his name to, well, check to see if he is black. It sounds crass but I have a budget and would rather keep my collecting focus narrow to either black artists or black subjects, which aren’t always one and the same. Roy’s new publication is titled Spirit, and now that I see his site I may have to go back and get his book. A glance at Amazon.com reveals another Roy title, Out Of the Blue, which isn’t listed on his site, so Roy was a real discovery for me.

Gregory R. Miller & Co. had Lyle Ashton Harris’ Blow Up from 2008 displayed; I asked about the forthcoming title, Excessive Exposure: The Complete Chocolate Portraits, and Eva, the rep, let me know that although the book won’t be out until spring there is a PDF review copy available now, so I’ll be requesting that to review here. I’m very excited about another Lyle publication; Eva did share with me that Lyle’s eponymous first book with Gregory Miller was also the title that launched Gregory Miller’s press and that he regards Lyle as the reason he’s a publisher. That was great to hear.

Aperture had Hank Willis Thomas’ Pitch Blackness in the inventory at their booth, though not on display; I was so relieved to see it there that I forgot to check for Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures. As I posted here recently, their Zwelethu Mthethwa monograph is delayed until 2010.

Kehinde Wiley, Black Light

powerHouse Books had the one new title I purchased (though on my way back I stopped at Strand Books and it was about $20 cheaper there [patronize Strand at your discretion]): Kehinde Wiley’s Black Light. It’s a sumptuous yet slender full-color folio, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that Wiley is primarily known as a painter and thus an “artist” versus “photographer,” and a bit of an art star at that. I think this kind of work is more saleable—perhaps it’s more striking on the shelf alongside all of the other new titles out there? But it’s a great-looking book and a great addition; I can’t wait to delve further into it. I also picked up powerHouse’s Fall/Winter 2009-2010 catalog but haven’t had a chance to peruse it. Hopefully it will yield some more titles.

*Luckily, I was able to pick up the DAP catalog and while they aren’t strictly photographers, artists-who-use-photography Glenn Ligon and Rashid Johnson both have new monographs:

Glenn Ligon, Some Changes

Glenn Ligon, Some Changes

Glenn Ligon is one of the preeminent members of a generation of American artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s with conceptually-based paintings, photographs and text-oriented works concerning the social, linguistic and political constructions of race, gender and sexuality. Incorporating sources as diverse as photographic scrapbooks and Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy routines–his lush coal-dust paintings of excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village,” for instance–Ligon’s art is a meditation on representation of the self in relation to culture and history. Handsomely designed with a hardcover slipcase, Some Changes is the artist’s first significant monograph. Well-illustrated texts by critics and curators Wayne Baerwaldt, Huey Copeland, Darby English, Wayne Koestenbaum and Mark Nash survey Ligon’s works from 1982 to 2005, and a candid interview with Toronto artist Stephen Andrews delves into Ligon’s personal insights and professional experiences.

Rashid Johnson, Sharpening My Oyster Knife

Rashid Johnson, Sharpening My Oyster Knife

Rashid Johnson belongs to a generation of young African-American artists that takes an extremely critical approach to the search for its cultural roots. His artistic strategies, which include photography, painting and sculpture, performance and beyond, are aesthetically nonconformist and politically provocative.

It was interesting going to this just after having added several new titles to this site in the last week by artists I’d never heard of—that sense of discovery led me to hope that there would be similar revelations at a fair of this size and scope. Let’s say that, on average, each vendor brought 10 books (some had only one while some had dozens)—that would make more than 2,000 titles represented at this fair. To have come away with only two new titles by African Diaspora photographers is beyond under-representation. The fact that among these there are no new titles by black women artists is especially disappointing. I want to think that there are titles about which I don’t know because those artists are just off my radar, or even those who might read these don’t think to send info on their own titles. I think I might have more luck studying the bookshelves of my gracious host this weekend.

Alright, now I’m off to sleep.

Zwelethu Mthethwa. Edited by Isolde Brielmaier, essay by Okwui Enwezor, Spring 2010, 113/4 x 10 in. (29.8 x 25.4 cm), 180 pages, 75 four-color images, Hardcover with jacket
ISBN 978-1-59711-113-3, $65.00; £45.00

Also available
A slipcased limited edition with print.
Please contact Aperture for information.

From the publisher:

Since Apartheid’s fall in 1994, South African photography has exploded from the grip of censorship onto the world stage. A key figure in this movement is Zwelethu Mthethwa, whose stunning portraits powerfully frame black South Africans as dignified and defiant, even under the duress of social and economic hardship. Working in urban and rural industrial landscapes, Mthethwa documents a range of aspects in South Africa—from domestic life and the environment to landscape and labor issues. His work challenges the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography, marking a transition away from the visually exotic and diseased—or “Afro-pessimism,” as curator Okwui Enwezor has referred to it—and employing a fresh approach marked by color and collaboration. Zwelethu Mthethwa is the artist’s long-awaited first comprehensive monograph, providing an overview of his work to-date and featuring the stunning portraits that have brought him international acclaim.
ZWELETHU MTHETHWA (born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 1960) received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, a then white’s only university he entered under special ministerial consent. He received his master’s degree while on a Fulbright Scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mthethwa has had over thirty-five international solo exhibitions and has been featured in numerous group shows, including the 2005 Venice Biennial and Snap Judgments at the International Center of Photography, New York. Mthethwa is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

ISOLDE BRIELMAIER (editor) is visiting assistant professor of art at Vassar College, and guest professor at Barnard College/Columbia University as well as an independent curator and writer. OKWUI ENWEZOR (essay) is dean of academic affairs at San Francisco Art Institute, and the former artistic director of both Documenta XI and the second Johannesburg Biennale. He is a pioneering critic and curator.

On February 2, 2000, Songha Thomas Willis was shot to death outside a Philadelphia nightclub. He was 27 years old. The takeaway? A $400 gold chain. It’s the story that lies at the heart of Pitch Blackness, the first monograph by photographer and inaugural Aperture West Book Prize recipient Hank Willis Thomas, Songha’s cousin. It’s also a story that, sadly, occurs all too frequently across America. What makes Pitch Blackness so affecting is that Thomas explores not only the immediate effect of his cousin’s death on his family and friends but also the skewed perceptions of race, sexuality, gender roles, and economic empowerment that contribute to a cycle of violence.

The book consists of six distinct, yet cohesive parts, giving it a novel-like quality. It also includes two illuminating essays on the historical context of Thomas’ work from René de Guzman and Robin D. G. Kelley.

We start with pages from the Thomas-Willis family photo album, which are some of the most powerful images. They set a nostalgic, wistful tone, as they show Hank and Songha transform from babies to toddlers to handsome young men with easy smiles, constantly surrounded by various aunts, cousins, uncles, brothers and sisters. The wistful tone ends abruptly, replaced first by a newspaper clipping reporting Songha’s murder and then images of coffins, graves, tears, furrowed brows, mouths hardened into grim lines, scans of the autopsy report and the medical examiner’s photo of Songha, post-autopsy. It brought tears to my eyes and made me wonder how Hank was able to compose himself enough to take photos throughout that period. Or perhaps taking photos was the only way he could begin to process where he was and why.

The next segment of the book consists of stills from “Winter in America,” a stop-motion animated film that re-enacts the events leading up to Songha’s murder using GI Joe dolls. It’s a creepy and absurd set of images; it shows us how children are taught to normalize violence before they can count to 20, and asks us “What are we teaching ourselves about the value of life?”

This leads us to the sobering “Bearing Witness: Murder’s Wake,” a set of portraits of the people affected by Songha’s life and untimely death. As Hank points out himself, “the impossibility of this task becomes the point” of this project. The truly diverse group of people–young, old, black, white, etc.–are presented as a pair, then a grid of four, then six, then eight, with black squares standing in for the people he couldn’t find and include.

Branded, Priceless #1, 2004 © Hank Willis Thomas from Pitch Blackness (Aperture, October 2008)

The other sets of images, from “Branded,” “Studio X,” and “Unbranded” puts Songha’s death within a larger context about how Black men have been perceived and portrayed in mass media. In “Branded,” he appropriates images, brands, logos and techniques from popular ads to critique a culture that values material wealth above human beings. He illustrates this through images such as “Timberland and Johnnie Walker,” which shows the Air Jordan symbol as a lynching victim, swinging from the Timberland tree logo while the Johnnie Walker mascot stays true to his motto and keeps walking.

There’s also his take on those ubiquitous “Priceless” MasterCard commercials, using a photo from Songha’s funeral and the following copy: “New socks: $2. 3-Piece Suit: $250. Gold chain: $400. 9mm pistol: $79. bullet: ¢69. Picking the perfect casket for your son: Priceless.”

He also appropriates and manipulates ads from Absolut, American Express, the NBA and Chase, combining modern-day ads with images from 19th-century literature depicting slaves. “Branded” is filled with a potent combination of pathos and gallows humor. (”The Original Slam Dunk” is the Air Jordan logo, Jumpman, diving from a slave ship. See what I mean?)

The same combination appears in “Unbranded,” a collection of ads geared toward Black people dating from 1968, the year of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and symbolic death of the civil rights movement to the present day, 2008.

Hank strips away all logos and copy, leaving the reader with some very disquieting images. The one that stood out to me the most was “OJ Dingo,” depicting O.J. Simpson with a literal third leg, for a boot ad from the 1970s. Incredible. Of course this was created before terms such as “politically correct” entered the lexicon but I also wonder how advertisers were able to get away with the idea that Simpson’s phallus was so huge it needed its own boot.

These images serve to either reinforce ugly stereotypes or undermine the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to sell goods no one really needs. One example is a photo of tires rolling through the desert in the shape of the iconic Black Power fist. It is completely perverse and Thomas highlights that perversion again and again, in an engaging and darkly humorous way.

What makes these series so fascinating is Thomas’ argument that not much has changed from the times of slavery and now regarding the way Black people, Black males in particular, are perceived, which is mostly as commodities instead of complex, sentient human beings. During the centuries-long slave trade, propagating the myth that Black people aren’t, in fact, people, made it easier to buy and sell them and keep the system in place. He argues that Black men in 20th- and 21st-century society are still portrayed as 2-D objects, commodities to be bought and sold. He also argues that this perception, along with equating consumerism as a means of empowerment can have dire consequences, such as young men being killed over Air Jordan tennis shoes or cheap gold chains.

The book also includes the series “Studio X,” portraits of young black men and women wearing t-shirts emblazoned with airbrushed photos of their dead friends and family members. While it’s a way to pay tribute to the fallen, you wish that those kind of t-shirt businesses didn’t have so many sales, that their business wasn’t dependent on so many lives being cut short. While I feel “Branded” and “Unbranded” are stronger collectively, and his portraits for “Bearing Witness” are more emotionally resonant, these portraits still probe a tragic subject manner with sensitivity and straightforwardness.

Pitch Blackness runs the risk of appearing maudlin or polemical but Hank Willis Thomas manages to avoid those pitfalls. What comes through loud, clear and strong is a powerful, intimate tribute to a life lost much too soon and a refusal to fall victim to complacency. – Danielle Scruggs