In Focus: Photobooks by Fabio Barile, Yoshi Kametani, Kyler Zeleny, Abeer Aref, Ibi Ibrahim and Thana Faroq

The latest finds from our community artists’ photobooks

“In Focus” is a quarterly series of reviews in which we hunt down and peruse the worthy publications off the shelves of our community artists. Each month, Der Greif is selecting a set of photobooks from our talents’ pool. Compiled here are the most recent releases from our community artists Fabio Barile, Yoshi Kametani, Tyler Zeleny, and a group of contemporary photographers from Yemen, among which Ibi Ibrahim, Abeer Aref and Thana Faroq are numbered among Der Greif community of artists.

Yoshi Kametani’s “I’ll Be Late” published by VOID ponders the existential anxieties of life and death, as well as time and its relation to entropy. The book is filled with scenes of familiar domestic moments, people we assume to be friends are mixed in with images of dirty dishes piled up high, pizza crust left in the box or cigarettes burning to ash. Throughout the work there is a constant yet subtle reminder that time is relentlessly passing, harmony turns into chaos, and entropy deteriorates everything in its path, turning it into something new within its natural cycle. Kametani deconstructs the images to their bare bones and constructs them back together with four layers in the time-consuming screen-printing process. Printing the photographs in this way offers an opportunity to live with the work and see it materialize, and perhaps most importantly to better understand what the images mean to the author himself, whose core research lingers around the concept of entropy, a natural force lending itself to nihilism while embracing the inevitable cycle of rise and decay.

“Works for a Cosmic Feeling” is Italian artist Fabio Barile’s new photobooks published by Witty Books. Introduced by an essay by curator and writer Elisa Medde, the photo book is a delicate and conceptual research through images of humans and nature, living beings referencing each other and sharing a silent similarity yet multiplicity. Complexity loosens in the softness of the signature aesthetics of Barile’s images. His “Works for a Cosmic Feeling” smoothly intertwines the physical world and the intangible to reconsider the photographic medium ontology. “Barile’s images oscillate in a constant flux of conscience, a rigorous yet abstract system of reference that includes and connects, builds and constantly destroys. There are no certainties nor statements, rather associations, at times vertigo.” writes Medde, “Just like in a quantum system, the narratives included are drenched in probability and chance. Nature is what encompasses all things, whether dissected in its traces and remains or triumphant in its decadence and complexity.”

“Bury Me in the Back Forty” is the highly anticipated successor to the sold-out books "Out West" and "Crown Ditch" by Kyler Zeleny and the final chapter in his prairie trilogy. For a decade now, Zeleny has been documenting his hometown, a rural community on the Canadian Prairies with deep Ukrainian roots, consisting of 915 people. Based on the idea that the story of any place evolves over time, Zeleny has been using his own photographs, collected objects, community archives, and hidden histories, to revise the community’s history book from the year 1980. The result is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events in the community's past – a community album that contains not only the roses but also the numerous thorns attached to each stem. It encapsulates the collective virtues and vices found at the heart of any complex place on the verge of disappearing. More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, and reconfigured – a layered portrait of small town living that is both unique and universal. The result of which is the stoicism of place, a lived existence, which roars at times and suffers so quietly at others.

New York-based Makan Press presents “Photography from Yemen”, edited by Ibi Ibrahim and Lizzy Vartanian, with a foreword by Lina Ramadan. The photobook is a collective publication by fourteen contemporary photographic artists from Yemen, the first ever survey of contemporary Yemeni photography. Featuring artists working both inside Yemen and in diaspora, this book not only includes a presentation of each artist’s work, but also allows them to speak about their practice in their own words. The featured artists are: Abeer Aref, Afraa Ahmed, Ahmed Alabbadi, Amr Attamimi, Arif Alnomay, Asim Abdulaziz, Boushra Almutawakel, Hanan Ishaq, Ibi Ibrahim, Saber Wasel, Shaima Al-Tamimi, Somaya Samawi, Thana Faroq, Yumna Al-Arashi. They invite us on a compelling encounter with contemporary Yemeni narratives in images.