decayed dog,
not a very pretty, but indeed an unforgettable sight. Heath writes in A Dialogue
with Solitude “perhaps it is about accepting the tragic things in life, not
in honor of bitter frustrations, anger or self-pity, but of love and care for
human existence.” Roy DeCarava came with his small big jewel The Sweet Flypaper
of Life, in which he combined, in a subtle and moving way, photos with the
Langston Hughes text about a grandmother in Harlem. Van Der Elsken made Liefdesgeschiedenis
in St. Germain (Love Story in St. Germain), Van der Keuken Wij zijn 17 (We
are 17), Achter Glas (Behind Glass) and Paris Mortel. In these books their
own world is the center point, where Van der Keuken lets go of the ‘small’ and ‘personal’ in
Paris Mortel and searches for a combination of city, politics and people: Something
that returns in his later work.In the sixties, seventies and eighties many remarkable books followed, that had, in any case, one thing in common: famous or not, they became very influential in the world of photography. The makers of these books cleared the road for photographers who had started to put together their own photo books. They were no longer only responsible for their own photos, but also for the selection, the layout and sometimes even for part of the production. Examples of these books are, among others, Frank’s The Lines of My Hand, Danny Seymour’s A Loud Song, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Gaylord Herron’s Vagabond, and, more recently, Ken Schles’ Invisible City at the end of the eighties. Ken Schles in particular made a kind of ‘New York Mortel’, a beautiful, small and ‘dark’ book with texts by Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. The book closely connects with the work by the aforementioned ‘photographic existentialists’, that Peter Turner wrote about.
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