Durant’s book itself, twenty years in the making, bears the illumination of fanatical research and passionate empathy for—practically an inhabiting of—Deren’s inner world.

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In City of Incurable Women, photographer Laura Larson attempts an experiment of her own — one concerned with radical empathy. Equal parts research, prose, photographic intervention, and movement study, Larson intersperses poetic reflections and contemporary photography with found images and historic documents, in an attempt to bridge the lived experience of women, through time, within and without the institution.

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In her debut monograph, Souders plays with the elasticity of photography to conjure vibrant new energy in a medium often restrained by tradition.

At first glance, it’s not apparent how deeply personal Souders’ inimitable work is. But, her multivalent way of seeing is rooted in survival, self-actualisation and awakening. Rich histories imbue her images, many of which speak to her deepest memories and, over time, reflect an archive of existence.

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Mark Alice Durant’s compulsively readable biography of Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, with its many photos and film stills, including some of Deren’s own photographs, will certainly excite those people with knowledge of her films. But this book is also for the average reader with an interest in film and it is my hope that it will make new fans of her work, who will seek out her films and books.

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Larson introduces you to history of the French hospital, the doctors and their treatments, and the women’s biographies, case files, and their transcriptions. She seamlessly juxtaposes these with her own poetry and imagery. Grounded in Larson’s thesis is how both photography and the women’s bodies are connected.

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Photography is embedded in every aspect of our culture and, like a mirror, it reflects slices of ourselves and our histories back at us. . . I'm interested in the way that we interpret, organize, and make sense of these reflections. How we shape meaning and how we converse with the images in our lives and of our lives. The medium is full of truths and falsehoods, and it fascinates and frustrates me endlessly.

Brea Souders

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Mark Alice Durant excavates her (Deren’s) determined life with grace, elevating tidbits of common knowledge, while underscoring her singular accomplishments in the realm of art, theory, and film.

He begins his account, fittingly, with a generous sequence of images that are as spectacular as they are beguiling, showcasing, in grainy monochrome, iconic frames from Deren’s major works. Bodies writhe as though underwater; shadows warp from distorted perspectives; sculpted figures, coiled in serpentine pose, bear down their vertiginous gaze.

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From photographer Odette England, Dairy Character is her third photobook, beautifully published by Saint Lucy Books.

Dairy Character is a photobook that I will proudly display in my collection and one that I believe I will be pointing to other photographers as a prime example of many of the things that make such a book grand - narrative, sequencing, design, and the marriage of photographs and the written word. Brilliant.

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Photographs of bodies elevated in space, caught in free falls, floating or submerged, begs the viewer to ask how and why?

The reader finds insightful meaning, context, and discourse in essay and prose, adding breadth and depth to the book published by Saint Lucy Books.

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Written in short entries that flow chronologically, but also appear as a kind of index for the web of influential figures in Deren’s circles, Durant resists getting mired in analysis of Deren’s work, preferring to present a picture of her life and human struggles.

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Much of the book is concerned with England’s formative experiences: observing and participating in the work of a dairy farm; learning what being a woman on the farm could mean; and growing dissatisfied at the status quo of Australian farming.

Complicating these threads is also the pervasive feeling that England still loves her family and feels, in some ways, proud and nostalgic while also let down. This confusion is anchored in the photographic language, which reflects both the intimacy, distance and complexity of growing up loved but not in love with how you grew up.

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Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling offers innumerable discoveries. Rich in sensations and ideas, it uses unexpected juxtapositions of text and image to offer both antidotes to the mundane and passageways to the profound.

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Dairy Character combines text and illustrations from the confirmation assessment manual with England’s photographs of her daughter, plus written stories about her childhood, family snapshots, and images of female calves taken by her father for official documents. The images are reproduced in delicate tones; England also interlaces blush-colored papers in the book.

But the content is uncomfortable, centering on extreme close-ups which suggest a reductive way of seeing both cows and women. It is a subversive look at the literal and visual language of farming.

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Sometimes an unexpected book lands on my desk and it is so deliciously interesting and unique that it simply makes me happy. Such is the case with the new monograph, Friends, Enemies and Strangers by Oliver Wasow, published by Saint Lucy Books.

Using images he’s taken in his studio and found in flea markets and on the Internet, Wasow employs an array of post-production techniques to create a cast of characters that prompts us to reconsider not only the parameters of photographic portraiture but what we can know of human nature. The book includes an essay by Matthew Weinstein and a story by Rabih Alameddine.

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In the slim volume, Larson braids together her personal narrative of adopting her now nine-year-old daughter with a history of nineteenth-century photographs of “hidden mothers”: children propped up for the camera by their mothers, who are literally dislodged from the image through drapery, plate scratching, or other methods of erasure. The writing behaves at once as memoir, poetry, biography, and creative nonfiction, keeping company with the likes of Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Wayne Koestenbaum, and, of course, Roland Barthes. But its content, which moves through the tender and the uncertain to arrive somewhere in between, feels entirely its own.

Carmen Winant in her introduction

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In her latest book, Dairy Character, photographer Odette England delivers personal insight into the life of a woman growing up on a dairy farm in rural Australia. Including recent photographs, archival images, and family snapshots, England describes the gender-centered repression that females experience when living in a male-dominated community.

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Durant’s writing—his storytelling—is often thrilling, wrenching, beautiful, especially at the book’s beginning, as the author lingers over photographs that stir the nostalgic mists of childhood memory, and at its end, as he confronts in more essayistic texts larger cultural problems and some crucial artistic predecessors. (There is a great chapter on the late work of Chris Marker.) Writing is also one of the key lessons of the book, which might be read as proposing a non-expository, performed theory of the photograph and its ties to language.

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