By Stephen Wolgast
December 2022 - As we look toward another year, I’ll end this one with a quick look at three books. Two books are from this year, and I’ll get to them shortly.
First, a note from Gene Richards about a book that’s a work in progress. He plans to publish “In This Brief Life,” a collection of mostly unseen photographs, in September 2023. The images range from his early work in the Arkansas Delta through recent projects, pictures his social media followers have seen in glimpses in his online sharing, a new medium for Richards.
“Alternately painful and joyful, the process allowed me to revisit the lives of many of the remarkable people I've had the privilege to know.” Richards’ book was well supported through Kickstarter, but you can still contribute, get a book and other pretty cool offerings as a backer.
By Cristina Salvador Klenz
Long Beach, California: Brown Paper Press, 2022
$50
Along with afflicting the comfortable, one way to describe a journalist’s job is comforting the afflicted.
Another way would be holding up society’s prejudices to itself, showing us how our preconceived notions are pretty reliably wrong. Admitting mistakes is never easy, but like an addict admitting dependency, we have to accept that we have discriminated before we can move on.
When it comes to the Romani people, discrimination is as common as misunderstanding. We rarely encounter Romanies, who are often called Gypsies, outside their pop culture caricatures as fortunetellers, petty criminals and oversexualized women.
Overcoming the stereotype makes for quite a challenge, one that Cristina Salvador Klenz takes on in “Hidden: Life With California’s Roma Families.”
Klenz made most of the photographs in the book in the early 1990s when she was a staff photographer at the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles. More than 50,000 Romani families live in the region, but they weren’t as easy to find as they had been when she first encountered them on a trip to visit her relatives in Portugal.
Originally from Punjab, India, the Romani were driven from their home just over a thousand years ago by Turkish invaders. Migrating west over the centuries, they were ostracized everywhere they went, becoming itinerant by necessity.
In the 19th century, when the United States was a beacon for immigrants, the Romani faced special discrimination here. Pennsylvania charged $250 — a huge sum at the time — for a Romani family to live in the state. Georgia prohibited them from mercantile trades. In New Jersey, officials had the authority to segregate businesses that were owned by Roma, a law that was repealed only in 1998.
It was several years before then that a connection Klenz had at a music store led to her finding herself at a Romani wedding. It was her break into the lives of a people living in plain sight but difficult to find.
Gaining the trust of a people who had been taught over a millennium to be distrustful of outsiders, Klenz stepped into their lives to show their humanity. Her photographs are personal and intimate, revealing the joys and anxieties everyone encounters. Birthday parties, meals, neighborly visits, each of them the sort of activity people do everywhere.
That’s the magic of her book: Her method of overcoming our misunderstandings of the Roma shows them as ordinary families, not exotic visitors from another world.
They play and they gossip. They give birth, raise children and bury their dead. They go to school, combating a remarkably low literacy rate. They worship, many of them devout Christians.
Her black and white photographs show us their humanity. By letting the viewer into the Romani world, Klenz demonstrates that they have the same right to enjoy living as anyone else.
She does something equally important too. She shows that by resting comfortably in our prejudice, we risk keeping ourselves from the chance to understand a people with a thousand-year history.
“Hidden” was awarded first place for a Documentary Photography Book by International Photography Award/Lucie Awards. An exhibition is planned at Cal State University Long Beach in February through May 2023. Hidden has been purchased by all of the Long Beach public library branches and will be available in all the high school libraries in Long Beach, Calif.
By Greg Smith
Westcliffe, Colorado: May River Mountain Press, 2022
$33
Countless are the details that photojournalists cannot control. Sunlight, for example, or a subject’s reactions. One way to make up for that loss of control is to choose your perspective.
Greg Smith gave that up too.
An avid skier who discovered the slopes in New Hampshire before moving west, Smith yielded his choice of perspective to an external force: ski lifts.
The photographs in “Altitude Adjustment: A Book of ‘Chairlift’ Pictures” come from his rides up the Colorado Rockies. It may sound as though he was looking down on the trails and skiers below, but as anyone who’s been in towering mountains can tell you, there’s plenty to see when you gaze up even when you’re already at 10,000 feet.
The images are postcard perfect, filled with fresh white snow, cerulean blue skies, flocked pine trees, riotously colored ski gear and, oh, the vistas. These panoramas and peaks call out for a visit. Even for those of us who don’t ski, “Altitude Adjustment” shows off the pristine beauty of the American West and the free spirits who make the most of it.
They make it a winter party, no matter the temperature. Gathering in resort villages founded in the 19th century as mining towns, today’s celebrations of sport and spirits have little to do with the region’s earlier hardscrabble life. You may still see cowboy hats, but they come out at an après ski gathering.
The best skiing snow falls lightly, leaving plenty of room for air between the surface and the mountain. Powering down a powdery trail leaves a wake of white dust, like a frozen foam that echoes a skier’s zigzags.
As astounding as the mountain scenes are, Smith’s most entertaining photos show the denizens of the ski towns where he spends his time. At Monarch Mountain, west of Colorado Springs in Salidas, and farther west in Crested Butte, Smith made friends with carefree lift operators, visited snowy cookouts and watched weekend athletes enjoying beer in a hot tub to relax after a day of schussing. He even happened upon a sea of skiing Santas.
Like a ski trip, the book feels like a vacation. And after the last few years, we could all use one.
Interestingly, until this column’s selection, Gene Richards’ previous book, “The Day I Was Born,” was the last book I reviewed that was published in the U.S. That was in February 2021. The eight reviews I’ve written since were of books published in Canada, the U.K., Italy, France and Germany.
None of this was by design. I’m interested in good photography, no matter where a publisher has its office or where a website is hosted.
But it makes me wonder why there aren’t more books from American photojournalism published in the U.S. A publisher has to make a profit, and journalism is not exactly a revered genre here these days.
Still, buying photojournalism books is one way to support photographers and show publishers that there’s a market for the work we cherish. I hope you have a small library of photojournalism books, one that you add to when someone’s work strikes you or the subject touches a nerve.
If you haven’t bought a photojournalism book yet this year, consider one of these or one reviewed in News Photographer earlier in 2022:
“Shadows and Light” (Canada), by Heather Patterson.
“Communism(s)” (Italy), by Arthur Grace.
"Abandoned Moments: A Love Letter to Photography", (Germany), by Ed Kashi
“The Drake” (England), by Tamara Reynolds.
“Dust” (France), by Patrick Wack.
“A Dream of Europe” (France), by Jacob Ehrbahn.
“Brink” (Italy), by David Butow
Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.
