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Observations Are Not Knowledge Photographs and writings by J. Shimon & J. Lindemann. Designed by J. Shimon & J. Lindemann Lulu ID: 393296 Paperback, Perfect-bound, $12.93 Lulu, North Carolina, September 2006, 56 pp., 28 b/w and color illustrations, 8.5x11" View camera portraits of "obscure midwestern denizens" interspersed with writings and documents. The photographs capture the flavor of the landscape and the quiet melancholy realties of American rural and small town life. Catalog for It Takes One to Know One exhibition at Sarah Bowen Gallery (September 2006). Available from Lulu or at Sarah Bowen Gallery. |
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Season's Gleamings The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree Photographs and essay by J. Shimon & J. Lindemann. Afterword by Tom Vanderbilt Designed by Helene Silverman ISBN: 0-9717935-3-0, Hardbound, Foil-stamped, $16.95 Melcher Media, New York, October 2004, 80 pp., 55 full color illustrations, 6.5x8" Get the scoop on the book and aluminum Christmas tree happenings by visiting seasonsgleamings.com! Millions of aluminum Christmas trees were made right here in Manitowoc in the space age sixties. By the earthy seventies they were passé and forgotten. That's why they were abundant and cheap at local rummage sales and thrift stores up until recently. In the early 1990s, we amassed about 40, and in snowy December installed a glistening kinetic forest in our store front gallery. The spectacle drew people in and we heard their stories. We met Richard Thomsen, retired engineer on the Evergleam tree project, Aluminum Specialty Company factory workers, and complete strangers who related vivid aluminum tree flash-backs from childhood. Thrift Score zine published our essay on the trees in 1997. As we were packing the trees away one January, we made studio portraits of them with our 8x10 view camera. These photographs appeared in Metropolis in December 1998. We watched aluminum Christmas tree love grow. This lavish little book is the culmination of more than a decade of thinking about the trees. This project let us indulge in making stacks of living color photographs that are a meditation on mid-century studio photography practices (time exposures, narrative props, seamless paper, etc.), holiday snapshots, and the manufactured tree form. Brooklyn-based writer Tom Vanderbilt illuminates the history and culture of the trees in the afterword. It was an honor to work closely with editor David Brown. Not only did he gently guide us through the publishing process; but, he found the beautiful "artificial tree" patent drawings and the profound vintage slide of a woman with her aluminum tree (courtesy Charles Phoenix Archive) reproduced in the book. Season's Gleamings makes the news: ABC World News Tonight Pop Goes the Culture National Public Radio San Francisco Chronicle New York Times USA Today Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The first edition sold out! The second edition in now available at Amazon.com or your local book store! Get the scoop on the book and aluminum Christmas tree happenings by visiting seasonsgleamings.com! |
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Wisconsin Then and Now The Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Rephotography Project By Nicolette Bromberg. Introductory essays by Steven D. Hoelscher and Thomas R. Vale ISBN: 0-299-17560-X, Hardbound, $34.95 University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, November 2001, 252 pp., 204 b/w illustrations, 12x9" The Wisconsin Rephotography project pairs one hundred historic photographs with one hundred recent photos by some of Wisconsin's finest present-day documentary photographers and photojournalists. When curator Nicolette Bromberg let us scour the Wisconsin Historical Society's incredible visual archives for images to "rephotograph", we gravitated toward the photographs made to promote or document home economics tasks, cow clipping, milking, and crop production. Using the commercial design convention of placing a tracing on mylar over the camera's ground glass, we set up our 8x10 view camera and matched the compositions of the archive photos as precisely as possible. Our subjects became our collaborators as we interpreted the poses, clothing and landscapes portrayed in the old photographs. There is a feeling of satire, not mocking or even humorous, but more like a surrealist pictorial experiment. Twelve of our "pairs" are featured in this book. Available from Amazon.com, University of Wisconsin Press or your local book store. |