Rafael Goldchain’s extraordinary photographic self-portraits, collected together in I AM MY FAMILY, continue to turn heads!
A couple of weeks ago, playwright Emil Sher admired the work in a review for The Globe and Mail book review section:
“I Am My Family is an invitation to reconstruct who we were to better understand who we are, and to consider the price paid when we forget."
And then, at the weekend, The Vancouver Sun reviewed the book as well:
“From a sociological and political point of view, this project is a profound statement about genocide, lost history, the importance to the psyche of knowing one’s roots and the vital place that art and story hold in the human imagination and the healing process.
Goldchain’s family was from a specific ethnic background and lived through a particular moment in history, yet its story has been repeated within other cultural communities and at other times in our collective history.
I Am My Family is an extraordinary work of art, and publishing it in book form makes it accessible to many.”
Rafael has also just been interviewed by the Jewcy website, and you can hear a Rafael talk about the project at The Book of Life who put together this slideshow of Rafael’s work:
Amazing!
Here are some of our previous links about I AM MY FAMILY:
Click here to watch CBC Sunday’s feature on Rafael Goldchain
Click here to listen to Rafael on CBC Radio One’s ‘Q’ with Jian Ghomeshi
Click here for an interview with Rafael in The National Post
Click here for a review of I AM MY FAMILY in the Toronto Star
Rafael Goldchain’s remarkable collection of photographs, I AM MY FAMILY: Photographic Memories and Fictions, has been causing quite stir!
The book has received a glowing review from the Toronto Star, and the Toronto photographer was recently interviewed by the National Post.
Local CBC Toronto radio shows Fresh Air and Metro Morning have both interviewed Rafael, and he appeared on the CBC’s national arts and culture show ‘Q’ in September.
And last weekend, CBC Newsworld Sunday ran a fascinating documentary-short about Rafael, including an interview with the artist, and video footage of his labour-intensive working process.
If you haven’t had chance to look at the book yet, it is ostensibly a family album of traditional portrait photographs. But, on closer examination, you notice an unconventional twist : the only subject is the photographer himself.
For each photograph Rafael has transformed himself using makeup, wigs, costume, and props (hello stuffed chicken!) into his ancestors, magically capturing a curious likeness with the camera.
I AM MY FAMILY is truly a strange, poignant, and remarkable book!
Click here to watch CBC Sunday’s feature on Rafael Goldchain
Click here to listen to Rafael on CBC Radio One’s ‘Q’ with Jian Ghomeshi
Click here for an interview with Rafael in The National Post
Click here for a review of I AM MY FAMILY in the Toronto Star
Click here for the Raincoast Blog Q & A with Rafael
(Pictured: Andy Barry, host of CBC Radio One’s Metro Morning, holding a copy of I AM MY FAMILY)
Rafael Goldchain is launching his wonderful new photography book I AM MY FAMILY at David Mirvish Books this Sunday, September 21st, between 2pm and 4pm.
Rafael is charming and I AM MY FAMILY has to be seen to be believed (Mirvish are also exhibiting prints from the book in their wonderful space) so, if you are in Toronto this weekend, come along!
David Mirvish Books
596 Markham Street
Toronto, Ontario, M6G 2L8
Tel: 416-531-9975
Martha Stewart is all about the blogging!
Not only have Martha and her team been blogging for more than a year now (for those of us who need more-Martha-more-of-the-time), she dedicated yesterday’s entire TV show to blogs and bloggers.
Recording the show in front of a comically laptop-crowded live audience (all presumably live-blogging the experience), Martha highlighted a few her favourite bookmarks. Amongst her guests were Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes, photo-bloggers and authors of the lovely A YEAR OF MORNINGS. You can see a snippet of the show, including Maria and Stephanie talking about their blog and the new book (towards to the end of the video), in this YouTube clip:
Click here for Martha Stewarts blog
Click here for ‘A Year of Mornings’ website
Click here to see Maria and Stephanie’s new project ‘A Year of Evenings’
I don’t know about you, but some mornings it is just about all I can do to get out of bed, get dressed, down 3 cups of coffee, remember to pick up my keys, and get myself to work. Needless to say, I am not what you would call ‘creative’ before 10am. No. If, however, A YEAR OF MORNINGS: 3191 MILES APART, published by Princeton Architectural Press (October 2008), is anything to go by, Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes are exactly that.
One morning in December 2006, Maria and Stephanie each took a picture of everyday objects randomly arranged on their kitchen tables and, without the other’s knowledge, uploaded them to Flickr. Noticing a remarkable similarity between their images, the two agreed to document their mornings by posting one photo a day to a shared blog. The beautiful and serene images they posted to their site, 3191 (named after the distance in miles between their homes in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon), were always taken before 10am without discussion between the two women.
Two hundred and thirty six annotated photographs from the year-long project, which is no longer available online, are collected in the book A YEAR OF MORNINGS. The ‘photo conversation’ recorded in the book displays the magical coincidences that occurred throughout the project. Arranged by season, the quietly intimate images of the mundane—discarded clothing, a view of a snowy day from the window, a tablecloth—are full of unexpected echoes and striking similarities that defy the long-distance reality of the collaboration. It’s a beautiful testament to the serenity, solitude, and peacefulness that is sorely lacking from my caffeine-fueled morning commute.
Umm… Can I work from home from now on?
(For the record, I would like to point out that I’m usually up at 5:30am, so it is perfectly acceptable for me to have drunk a gallon of coffee before lunch).
Click here for The Year of Mornings Website
Click here for Maria and Stephanie’s new collaborative project ‘A Year of Evenings’
Canadian cartoonist Seth, author of CLYDE FANS, WIMBLEDON GREEN, and IT’S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON’T WEAKEN, discusses “The Quiet Art of Cartooning" in the September issue of The Walrus:
There is something very lovely about the stillness of a comic book page. That austere stacked grid of boxes. The little people trapped in time. Its frozen and silent nature acting almost as a counterpoint to the raucous vulgarity of the modern aesthetic. Of course, the drawings aren’t really frozen. When we look at them, we immediately invest them with life. That little ink world pops into life as our eyes move across the drawings. I actually find it very difficult to look at a cartoon and hold on to the stillness. The essence of the cartoon language carries a kind of animation with it. This is true even with a single drawing, but it is especially evident when one panel is placed next to another. That juxtaposition creates a tension that implies motion and time. This illusion is one of the medium’s primary charms.
Seth’s article is also accompanied by “Down the Stairs,” an exclusive comic from one of Seth’s sketchbooks:
Click here for ‘The Quiet Art of Cartooning’ by Seth for The Walrus.
Self-professed “outsider designer, quasi artist, conceptual maker of material things” Daniel Eatock visited the Princeton Architectural Press warehouse in Indiana and put his thumb-print on the spine of each and every copy of his amazing new monograph DANIEL EATOCK: IMPRINT (available next month). They told us this was going to happen, we didn’t believed them, so they made this video of the disarmingly lunatic exercise just to prove how wrong we were:
Daniel Eatock also has a great website here
Having finally seen The Dark Knight over the weekend - surely the darkest, bleakest, most relentlessly grim superhero movie EVER - it was something of a relief to see the charming and less-than-ruthless looking superheroes such as the awesome Dynamic Pete, pictured here, on Danny Zabbal’s Flickr page (via the excellent Drawn.ca of course). No knives, car bombs, snipers, or broken shins, anywhere to be seen thankfully…
Zabbal’s wistful superheroes reminded me of Moisture Man, the somewhat ineffectual protagonist in the title story of Charles Yu’s collection THIRD CLASS SUPERHERO. A records clerk for a midtown law firm, Moisture Man is tired of watching his former classmates kick ass and desperately wants to fly… Perhaps a little too desperately…
Click here for an excerpt from THIRD CLASS SUPERHERO
In 2006, filmmaker, author, independent curator and all-round creative person Faythe Levine travelled 19,000 miles across North America to document the burgeoning contemporary craft movement.
Embracing emerging artists, crafters, and designers working in traditional and nontraditional media, contemporary craft mashes up historical technique, punk culture, and the D.I.Y. attitude. The participants share ideas and support each other through websites, blogs, boutiques, galleries, and craft fairs. Together they have forged a new economy and lifestyle based on creativity, determination, and networking.
For HANDMADE NATION Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl have selected 24 makers and 5 essayists who work within different media and have different methodologies to provide a microcosm of the crafting community. The book features photographs of the makers and their work, as well as discussions of how they got their start and what motivates them.
A documentary film directed by Levine about contemporary craft (also called HANDMADE NATION) is currently in pre-production and will be released in 2009. Here’s a sneak peak:
You can also read Faythe Levine’s blog about the movie here!
Here are some of the most creative and visually interesting books of the year—perfect the “right brain” thinkers on your list.
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HAND JOB: A Catalog of Type by Michael Perry (Princeton Architectural Press).
Easily one of my personal favourite books of the year, HAND JOB is a collection of hand-drawn type. It’s becoming more and more popular, used in design work, advertising, album covers, clothing design and more. Michael Perry, who is himself a creator of fantastic hand-drawn type, has compiled top hand-drawn typographers from all over the world in one visually stunning package.
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TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes (Princeton Architectural Press).
Everybody has one of these: an seemingly ordinary object that you treat like the crown jewels. TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY features 75 of these items--from a soda bottle to a rubber pig, from a death mask to a shrivelled artichoke--that people have collected and kept. If you’re looking for quirky, original and compelling book, TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY is it.
Many of us invest ordinary objects with other sorts of extraordinary significance, too. My friend Tony crams a U.S. Navy 100-pound practice bomb into his tiny workspace for much the same reason that Greg, a colleague of mine at the Boston Globe, displays a wobbly wooden Santa in his kitchen year-round. These doohickeys are actually fossils, petrified evidence of a vanished epoch (young adulthood). Other writers, thinkers, designers and artists of my acquaintance cherish things—sunglasses found at a yard sale, a colored-sand-filled glass clown, a one-eyed ceramic frog—for equally irrational reasons.
--Joshua Glenn on DesignObserver
Here’s a short excerpt from the book on DesignObserver.
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TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios (Chronicle Books).
Every movie I see from Pixar just amazes me. Did you see how REAL the rats’ hair in Ratatouille looked? (Yeah, I know, a little TOO real for rats in the kitchen...) TO INFINITY AND BEYOND is the definitive book on Pixar, chronicling it’s 20 year-history. The book is (of course!) gorgeous to look at, full of concept art, storyboards, and snapshots, plus interviews with the people who made it all happen.
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WHITE RAPIDS by Pascal Blanchet (Drawn & Quarterly).
For another visual treat, open up WHITE RAPIDS. Written and illustrated by award-winning Québécois cartoonist Pascal Blanchet, WHITE RAPIDS is graphic novel that blends fact and fiction to tell the story of a Canadian town is forced to shut down after the local water and power company closes. WHITE RAPIDS is retro artwork at its best.
Click here to read some reviews and here for a sneak peak.
UPDATE: Pascal Blanchet was interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio One’s ‘Q’ on Monday Dec 5th. Click here to listen to the interview (it’s towards the end of the podcast).
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Still designing the perfect gift? Maybe some of our other Gift Guides will help.
TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes is a collection of photos and stories about objects with unexpected personal significance. Inspired by the book, Maisonneuve Magazine have been running a contest to find the ‘thingamajig’ of special significance to their readers. The five winning entries are being posted daily on their website this week.
Personally, I love the story about the Savory industrial toaster:
I picture a bustling but cozy café where espresso is always brewing, and where piece after piece of fresh, perfectly toasted bread shoots out the bottom of the industrial antique, to the delight of all.
“Moonlight transforms the ordinary into things of beauty; The garden at night. Lush flowers emerge from darkness in book of Linda Rutenberg’s photos"-Montreal Gazette
In 2005 while on an assignment for Landscape Architect Magazine she was taking photographs at the Reford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Quebec, it was suggested early in the morning would be the optimum time to get the best light. She took up an offer at the garden’s to stay the night and click away. To her amazement her film produced the most beautiful images. And beautiful images they are!!
“The photographs I took using basic ambient light and long exposures were spellbinding, and I knew at once I had discovered an original and exciting project."-Linda Rutenberg
“I intended my images to transcend the literal and unveil the extraordinary poetic, lyrical, and sensory richness of the nocturnal garden.” She then went on from that garden to visit twenty other public gardens across the United States and Canada to produce her book THE GARDEN AT NIGHT, published by Chronicle Books
Reviews of The Garden at Night
Please check out Linda’s website for upcoming events or any information on her photographic journey.
The Uppercase Gallery and Bookstore in Calgary has posted a great review of TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY on their website:
Is it possible to be in love with a book?
Yes.
Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance is the object of my affections. First of all, the cover photograph is stunning. The book’s modest dimensions make the act of reading a very intimate affair. The perfect binding and crisp, precise page trim lend this little block of book importance and heft. The page design is simple and elegant and lets the personality of the objects be fully appreciated, elevating the most mundane to that of a museum artifact.
I’ve never visited Uppercase but it sounds like a really cool place. I’ll just have to find a compelling reason to stop by in Calgary sometime. If you live in the city, please help me out and tell me how I can persuade my boss to pay the air fare!
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