Signs & Relics by Sylvia Plachy In the foreword of Sylvia Plachy's new book, Signs & Relics, Wim Wenders writes: "Whoever came up first with that saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' didn't understand the first thing about either one." He goes on to describe a personal revelation that it wasn't until seeing this book that he understood that photographs could do " all sorts of things" he never thought of. Wim Wenders has it right. Signs & Relics has the breath and depth of a book that is uncommon in our fast-forward culture, overwhelmed as it is with pretentious images. This is not simply because Sylvia Plachy touches all the bases of making good photographs consistently. In fact, it could be argued (successfully) that she is not interested at all in what we think of as good photography. Rather, she is that rare photographer whose work is soulful and honest, with a visual vocabulary so steeped in the poetic, that her images celebrate her subjects as well as the medium of photography she loves so much. All this, combined with the courage to share her humor, her sadness and her delight in seeing the world, creates a body of work which truly amplifies the definition of what good photography is. I cannot remember the last time I've felt so excited by a book of photographs. Indeed, Signs & Relics has become required viewing (and reading) in my classes. In a recent lecture about my own work, I surprised myself by holding this book up, assuring the audience that it contained everything anyone needed to know or understand about photography. And it does. My enthusiasm aside, after spending time with Signs & Relics, you will never look at a fork in the same way. Or a chair. Or trees, frogs and roads. And perhaps you too, will someday look at the smoke billowing out of a train and see it's connection to the moon on a cold winter night in an otherwise ominous setting. Best known for her work at the Village Voice, her first book, Unguided Tour, is a wonderful collection of photographs from her tenure as a staff photographer there. Her second book, Red Light, was published in 1996 and is a bold and daring look at the sex industry. But Signs & Relics is by far her best work. And though I am tempted to compare it to the proliferation of pretentious photographic books being printed by the pound these days, this personal agenda of mine would unfairly burden this treasure. Nubar Alexanian

Chaos by Josef Koudelka   Weighing in at just under 5 pounds, the physical characteristics of Chaos (Phaidon Press), Josef Koudelka's latest book, are by themselves worthy of comment. At 110 pages, the book is 12 by 17 inches long, filled with panorama images which, when spread individually across two pages, measure 29 inches long. Even more remarkable, there are 61 vertical images (remember, these are full panoramas) out of a total 108 photographs in this beautifully reproduced book. The combined effect of the size and weight of this book made my usual flipping from the back of a photography book toward the front impossible. And even if you have the strength to hold the book at arms length, the largest images are beyond any reasonable limits of what could be considered proper viewing distance. This, alone, forced me to put the book down and start at the beginning. Intentional or not, the design of this book itself, is a declarative statement. I had to begin with the finality of letting go of the way I usually look at a book of photographs. Panorama photographs have been around for a long time. In the last few years, this format has become very popular. However, the shape of the panoramic frame is so spectacular, I sometimes find it difficult to asses whether an image works or not.There are times when the relationship between form and content in these images is misleading, where a photograph appears to be strong simply because it looks so spectacular. This is not true in Koudelka's case. In fact, this body of work is so compelling, so purely seen, it almost neutralizes any emphasis on the frame. This is not to say that Koudelka does not delight in the panorama format. Quite the contrary. But Koudelka is Koudelka, and he has more important fish to fry. When I look at the images in Chaos, I hear the music of Miles Davis, of darkness and beauty. One could argue that the subject of this work is desolation and emptiness. And certainly these are part of almost every image. But the depth and breadth of this work comes from a kind of self-imposed challenge, one which wonders how dark an image can be and still maintain beauty. And how long can a photographer sustain this kind of imagery without being repetitive or technical? Jazz musicians face a similar problem when it's their turn to solo. With absolute certainty, Koudelka hits a dazzling low note with this work (in his case, think of an acoustic bass or cello, drawn with a long bow) and holds it with complete confidence right through the resolution of the note itself, which in this case is the entire length of the book. It's astonishing. Only Koudelka could discover a celestial sky living in what looks like a piece of shattered tin hanging in a desolate cityscape (p.41). Or a bombed out building, walls riddled with bullet holes which, in a more predictable image by any other photographer, would be a statement about the horrors of war. But for Koudelka, it is here that the past and eternity come together in the same moment. This relationship is not forced. It is there, wholly recognized and documented for us to witness (p. 17). There is, of course, the occasional image grounded in a reality that is more familiar to the rest of us. A large statue of Lenin is tied onto a huge barge floating in a waterway under a dreary, gray sky. There are no people, no indication of movement or direction. Where is Lenin going? Has he arrived at his resting place? This haunting image speaks not simply to the past, or a bygone era, but of unfinished business, or unfortunate things that will linger and may never die (p. 59). Unlike his previous work, there are only four photographs with people in them. And in each case, they are not only anonymous, but almost freakish, living strangely out of time. That is, out of any time we might be familiar with. Although I find this entire body of work compelling, there is one flaw in the book. With a visual vocabulary as extensive and poetic as Koudelka's, I am used to seeing his photographs displayed as individual images, without any direct referencing from one image to another. Exiles, his last book, is a perfect example of this done well, where he used one image per spread. In Chaos, because there are as many as three vertical images on a single page, it is virtually impossible for them not to inform each other. This creates a distraction as well as a disruption in the cadence and rhythm of the book. Are these groupings intentional or the result of compromises forced by the design and format of the panorama itself? Either way, I found myself covering the verticals with white paper so I could view them individually. This said, Chaos is a virtuoso performance by Koudelka, not simply because it shows us the full extent of his command and understanding of the medium of photography. But by exhibiting his unique ability to venture far from the melody (documentary photography) without losing sight of it, he continues to define what a documentary photograph can be: a reflection so full that it is at once deeply human, richly poetic, and modestly spiritual in the broadest sense. A Jungian analyst once told me that, though we all enjoy interpreting our dreams, what a dream really wants is another dream, and another and another. This is also true about photographs. And no one seems to understand this better than Koudelka himself. Nubar Alexanian

Migrations & The Children by Sebastião Salgado       Six years. Thirty five countries. Three hundred sixty three photographs in one book. Eighty three photographs in a companion book. One hundred thousand copies published each in six languages. Sixteen exhibitions. One photographer. At any given moment -right now for instance- there are any number of photographers risking everything from their financial health to their physical safety, to document circumstances around the world. None of these photographers are on assignment, nor is there any assurance that their work will be published. Anywhere. Truly motivated from inside out -called and wholly kept as they are by an unrestrained passion for their subjects- these photographers exemplify the highest practical standard and tradition of documentary photography, essentially fulfilling the highest promise of photography: the act of witness. (Witness and objective truth are not necessarily interchangeable here.) Sebastião Salgado has always been high on everyone's list of documentary photographers. But with Migrations and The Children (Aperture), his two recent books, Salgado has propelled himself into his own category with a body of work that could silence even his harshest critics. Telling the story of humanity on the move, Migrations documents refugees in Africa, Asia and Latin America, fleeing everything from war, poverty, repression & ethnic cleansing, to the promise of a better life. Given the premise of this work, that "the world has gone from majority rural to majority urban", Migrations is not simply a document but a photographic reference book that bears witness to one of the greatest population upheavals in modern times. And the work is beautiful. The very least of these photographs function narratively, telling the story within a story, something very few photographers do as well as Salgado (Eugene Richards comes to mind also.) A young girl is seated between parallel bars while she is being fitted with a prosthetic leg. A man of gentle confidence leans over her from behind, covering her eyes with one hand, tenderly holding her chin with the other. She is laughing. She is being loved (p.179). A Palestinian woman, clearly old enough to remember what happened in 1948, is living in a refugee camp in Southern Lebanon. She is looking into the camera. Does she still have the key to her home in Palestine like so many Palestinian refugees do? Is there hope for her? How long will she wait and toward what end? It is the simple honesty of images like this that make this book an extraordinary document. But Salgado goes further. Using a sophisticated visual vocabulary well, he is able to venture from the literal toward the poetic and metaphorical. Unlike someone like Koudelka, whose main thrust is esoteric (while maintaining strong ties to documentary photography), Salgado does this while trying to maintain full ties to the narrative. And this is where he gets in trouble with some people. Is he telling us how he feels about what he sees, or how we should feel about what he's photographing? Is this the act of a heavy hand or simply a personal truth fully reflected? Understandable as these questions may be, this body of work lays them to rest. And it is these photographs that will certainly endure the test of time and the ones I am most interested in. In a refugee camp in Tanzania (pp.184-185) people are tending to their everyday life, caught unaware under a threatening sky. There are make-shift cloth tents everywhere. It seems like just another day, except to the photographer. The gathering storm clouds are emphasized in part because they actually appear to be sharper than the camp below. Is this heaven and hell, beauty and sorrow, all in the same frame, seen in the same moment? Is hope alive in this camp? Or is it about to be washed away forever? It is this use of the poetic that I am attracted to in this work, and for which Salgado deserves unqualified praise. With Migrations he has refined his mastery of this kind of dramatic imagery. His first book, The Other Americas, was filled with a raw, less refined form of this kind of imagery and was very well received. Workers, his second book, contained some remarkable and memorable images, but was less effective as a book. First because it was poorly edited. And second because it was trying to be an epic at the turn of every page. But where Workers failed, Migrations succeeds. This is partly because the use of repetition, which was the failing of Workers, was used wisely in Migrations, letting us know that the same human misfortune is going on at the same time in different countries around the world. This alone raises the work to near epic proportions.   How many of us have travelled to Third World countries working on assignments or personal projects only to encounter groups of children, dogging us at every turn, wanting their photographs taken with no guarantee of leaving us to our work. Filled with feelings from guilt to annoyance, each of us has been forced to develop sensitive strategies to deal with this phenomenon. In Salgado's case, he made a deal with each group of kids: "I'm going to sit here. If you want me to take a picture of you, line up and I'll take a picture of you. Then you go away and play." The game worked until he moved into a new area. So he lined them up to be photographed again, and this continued over the life of the Migrations project. To his surprise, and mine, this is a group of portraits worthy of publication. The Children, which consists of 83 portraits, are all vertical, a format that does not appear regularly in most of his other work. Almost all of them are shot from the same, seemingly dismissive distance. Yet they are beautiful, compassionate portraits made by a photographer who is truly connected to them. These portraits, kind, honest, direct, and intense, live in the tradition of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. And though these images don't fully ring the same bell, portrait photographers would do well to reacquaint themselves with this abandoned approach. A strong portrait is not necessarily about what you can get others to do for your camera: where there's a life, there's a story. And simply having a subject look into the camera, especially if they feel connected for an instant to the person behind the camera, can produce compelling and effective results. Finally, it's not uncommon to ask questions about who benefits from a body of work, especially when that work consists of compelling, unfortunate circumstances happening to people around the world. In many cases, the honest answer is that the photographer benefits far more than any of his/her subjects could. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this (though I do have a problem with the pretense that this is not the case). Salgado overwhelms this issue by sheer effort. To his credit, he and his wife and staff have gone to great lengths to insure that this work is effective in the world. Understanding that his responsibility extends far beyond producing the images, The Children will be exhibited at the United Nations in the Fall, with fifteen additional exhibitions and a huge print run for both books in six languages. I can't think of anyone who works harder, is more passionate and wholly committed to getting the job done. Nubar Alexanian.